We develop a theory of bank board risk committees. With this theory, such committees are valuable even though there is no expectation that bank risk is lower if the bank has a well-functioning risk committee. As predicted by our theory (1) many large and complex banks voluntarily chose to have a...

Regulators often rely on self-reported data to determine compliance. Tolerance for missingness in self-monitoring data may create incentives for local agents to strategically decide when (not) to monitor regulated activities. This paper builds a framework to detect whether local governments skip...

Lawyers now serve as executives in 44% of corporations. Although endowed with gatekeeping responsibilities, executive lawyers face increasing pressure to use time on strategic efforts. In a lawyer fixed effects model, we quantify that lawyers are half as important as CEOs in explaining variances...

We study the effectiveness of firms' compliance programs by conducting a field experiment in which we disclose to a subset of Japanese firms that the firm is potentially engaging in illegal bid-rigging. We find that the information that we disclose affects the bidding behavior of the treated...

The role of data analysis in communication, persuasion, and decision-making is discussed. Some problems with current data-analysis practice are presented, including communication, complex models, large data bases, one-pass processing, rigid assumptions, resistance, validity, prior information,...

What prevents the spread of information among coworkers, and which management practices facilitate workplace knowledge flows? We conducted a field experiment in a sales company, addressing these questions with three active treatments. (1) Encouraging workers to talk about their sales techniques...

We investigate how communication within banks affects small business lending. Using travel time between a bank's headquarters and its branches to proxy for the costs of communicating soft information, we exploit shocks to these travel times to evaluate the impact of within bank communication...

This paper uses novel, firm-level measures derived from communications metadata before and after a CEO transition in 102 firms to study if CEO turnover impacts employees' communication flows. We find that CEO turnover leads to an initial decrease in intra-firm communication, followed by a...

A distinct feature of MNCs is a three-tier organizational structure: foreign managers (FMs) supervise domestic managers (DMs) who supervise production workers. Language barriers between FMs and DMs could impede transfers of management knowledge. We develop a model in which DMs learn general...

We report results from a field experiment in which a randomized subset of newly hired workers at a large financial institution received a flyer containing information about the employer's 401(k) plan and the value of contributions compounding over a career. Younger workers who received the flyer...