Given the increasing use of stock options in executive compensation, we examine how taxes influence the choice of compensation and document that income deferral is an important margin of adjustment in response to tax rate changes. To account for this option in the empirical analysis, we explore...

We develop a model of investment timing under uncertainty for a financially constrained firm. Facing external financing costs, the firm prefers to fund its investment through internal funds, so that the firm's optimal investment policy and value depend on both its earnings fundamentals and...

The human capital construct is deep in the bones of economics and finds reference by many classical economists, even if they did not use the phrase. The term "human capital," seldom mentioned in economics before the 1950s, increased starting in the 1960s and blossomed in the 1990s. The upsurge...

This paper examines argues that while two distinct perspectives characterize the foundations of the public funding of research - filling a selection gap and solving a disclosure problem - in fact both the selection choices of public funders and their criteria for disclosure and commercialization...

Discussions of school accountability focus on two issues: poor test administration and the expense of accountability. Up to this point, researchers have focused on test quality and simply assumed that the programs are expensive enough to crowd out other policies, such as class size reduction or...

This study constructs a large new dataset to investigate whether state policy led to ethnic Ukrainians experiencing higher mortality during the 1932-33 Soviet Great Famine. All else equal, famine (excess) mortality rates were positively associated with ethnic Ukrainian population share across...

This paper studies the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development. Between 1950 and 1957, the Soviet Union supported the "156 Projects" in China for the construction of technologically advanced, large-scale, capital-intensive industrial facilities. We...

In many countries of the world the co-residence of young adults aged 25-34 with their parents is not uncommon and in some countries the savings rates of these age groups exceed those of the middle-aged contrary to the standard model of life-cycle savings. In this paper we examine the role of...

A policy of deputization asks agents to monitor others without providing explicit incentives. It is often used to prevent dangerous activities. To calibrate whether and why it works, we study recent laws that deputized financial professionals to help fight elder financial abuse. We show...

Soviet growth over 1960-89 was the worst in the world after we control for investment and human capital; the relative performance worsens over time. The declining Soviet growth rate over 1950-87 is explained by the declining marginal product of capital; the rate of TFP growth is roughly constant...