We present several empirical facts about trends in marketing investment in the US. We also present estimates of the private value of brands to firms and aggregate intangible brand capital stocks created by these investments. These investments include the creation and maintenance of a brand name...

With the rise of social media and streaming platforms, firms and brand-owners increasingly depend on influencers to attract consumers, who care about both common product quality and consumer-influencer interaction. Sellers thus compete in both influencer and product markets. As outreach and...

Third-party cookies and related 'offsite' tracking technologies are frequently used to share user data across applications in support of ad delivery. These data are viewed as highly valuable for online advertisers, but their usage faces increasing headwinds. In this paper, we quantify the...

How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...

This paper estimates consumer demand for firearms with the aim of predicting the likely impacts of firearm regulations on the number and types of guns in circulation. We first conduct a stated-choice-based conjoint analysis and estimate an individual-level demand model for firearms. We validate...

This paper documents and explains the existence of grade non-disclosure policies in Masters in Business Administration programs, why these policies are concentrated in highly-ranked programs, and why these policies are not prevalent in most other professional degree programs. Related policies,...

Early life experiences are likely to be important for the formation of preferences. Religiosity is a key dimension of preferences, affecting many economic outcomes. This paper examines the effect of college major on religiosity, and the converse effect of religiosity on college major, using...

We present a new methodology for ranking business schools. Unlike previous rankings based on subjective survey responses (from CEOs, business school deans, recruiters, or graduates), our approach uses data derived from the labor market for new MBAs. We adjust programs' salaries for the quality...

We study the medium-term impacts of the Skills for Effective Entrepreneurship Development (SEED) program, an innovative in-residence 3-week mini-MBA program for high school students modeled after western business school curricula and adapted to the Ugandan context. The program featured two...

Many basic economic theories with perfectly functioning markets do not predict the existence of the vast number of microenterprises readily observed across the world. We put forward a model that illuminates why financial and managerial capital constraints may impede experimentation, and thus...