Working Papers

Research has shown that organizational culture can affect firm performance and that a leader’s personality can affect organizational culture. We examine how a leader’s level of narcissism affects two fundamental aspects of organizational culture…

We link future members of Congress to the de-anonymized 1940 census to offer a uniquely detailed analysis of how economically unrepresentative American politicians were in the 20th century, and why. Future members under the age of 18 in 1940 grew…

We investigate whether managers internalize the spillover effects of their disclosure on the stock price of related firms and strategically alter their disclosure decisions when doing so is beneficial. Using data on firm-initiated disclosures…

This paper studies the potential small and large scale effects of a policy designed to produce more informed consumers in the market for primary education. We develop and test a personalized information provision intervention that targets…

We examine Kreps’ (2019) conjecture that optimal expected utility in the classic Black–Scholes–Merton (BSM) economy is the limit of optimal expected utility for a sequence of discrete-time economies that “approach” the BSM economy in a…

Predicted stock issuers (PSIs) are firms with expected “high-investment and low-profit” (HILP) profiles that earn unusually low returns.  We carefully document important features of PSI firms to provide insights on the economic…

Seminal studies show that naïve lab participants accurately predict who wins real-world elections based solely on candidate photos. It is unclear what this implies for the health of democracy without knowing whether candidates who look more…

We study the classic sequential screening problem in the presence of ex-post participation constraints. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions that determine exhaustively when the optimal selling mechanism is either static or sequential…

We prove a fundamental result concerning the connection between discrete-time models of financial markets and the celebrated Black–Scholes–Merton continuous-time model in which “markets are complete.” Specifically, we prove that if (a) the…

Does decomposing cost of goods sold entail significant competitive costs? We examine this question using a relaxation of disaggregated manufacturing cost disclosure requirements in Korea. Our survey evidence indicates managers perceive these…

We study whether innovation box tax incentives, which reduce tax rates on innovation-related income, are associated with tax-motivated income shifting, investment, and employment in the countries that implement these regimes. Using a matched…

This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer’s utility is additive in the…

The failure to find fundamentals that co-move with exchange rates or forecasting models with even mild predictive power – facts broadly referred to as “exchange rate disconnect” – stands among the most disappointing, but robust, facts in all of…

Random forests are a powerful method for non-parametric regression, but are limited in their ability to fit smooth signals, and can show poor predictive performance in the presence of strong, smooth effects. Taking the perspective of random…

Mortgage brokers acting as expert advisors for households often receive commission payments from lenders. This paper empirically analyzes the effects on welfare and market structure of regulations restricting this form of broker compensation.…

Where the state is weak, traditional authorities often control the local provision of land, justice, and public goods. These authorities are criticized for ruling in an undemocratic and unaccountable fashion, and are typically quite…

This study examines how an increase in tick size affects algorithmic trading (AT), fundamental information acquisition (FIA), and the price discovery process around earnings announcements (EAs). Leveraging the SEC’s randomized “Tick Size Pilot”…

While polls show progressive economic policies are popular, progressive candidates typically lose elections in the U.S. One explanation for this progressive paradox is that the opponents of progressive candidates often win through “symbolic…

Submitted to Operations Research

Motivated by drug design, we consider the best-arm identification problem in generalized linear bandits. More specifically, we assume each arm has a vector of covariates, there is an unknown vector…