We study theoretically and empirically the relationship between investor beliefs, ownership dispersion and stock returns. We find that high dispersion, measured by high breadth or low Herfindahl index, forecasts returns positively for large stocks, as in Chen, Hong and Stein (2002), but...

The rate of university patenting increased dramatically during the 1980s. To what extent did the knowledge flow patterns associated with public sector inventions change as university administrators and faculty seemingly became more commercially oriented? Using a Herfindahl-type measure of patent...

We estimate the effects of hospital competition on the level of and the variation in quality of care and hospital expenditures for elderly Medicare beneficiaries with heart attack. We compare competition's effects on more-severely ill patients, whom we assume value quality more highly, to the...

Mutual fund managers may decide to deviate from a well-diversified portfolio and concentrate their holdings in industries where they have informational advantages. In this paper, we study the relation between the industry concentration and the performance of actively managed U.S. mutual funds...

This paper proposes a network model of the economy in which conglomerate firms transmit idiosyncratic shocks from one industry to another. The strength of inter-industry connections is determined by the conglomerate's share of total industry sales and by the industry's share of the...

Using an aggregative games approach, we analyze horizontal mergers in a model of multiproduct-firm price competition with nested CES or nested logit demands. We show that the Herfindahl index provides an adequate measure of the welfare distortions introduced by market power, and that the induced...

National industrial concentration in the U.S. has risen sharply since the early 1980s, but there remains dispute over whether local geographic concentration has followed a similar trend. Using near population data from the Economic Censuses, we confirm and extend existing evidence on national...

Concentration is a single summary statistic driven by two opposing forces: the number of firms in a market and the evenness of their market shares. This paper introduces a generalized measure of concentration that allows researchers to vary the relative importance of each force. Using the...

Empirical research on the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) has found that consumption growth is excessively sensitive to predictable changes in income. This finding is interpreted as strong evidence against the PIH. We propose an explanation for apparent excess sensitivity that is based on a...

This paper uses propensity score methods to address the question: how well can an observational study estimate the treatment impact of a program? Using data from Lalonde's (1986) influential evaluation of non-experimental methods, we demonstrate that propensity score methods succeed in...