Boards of directors face the twin task of disciplining and screening executives. To perform these tasks directors do not have detailed information about executives' behaviour, and only infrequently have information about the success or failure of initiated strategies, reorganizations, mergers...

We hypothesize that poor country-level governance, which makes public information less reliable, induces fund managers to increase their use of semi-public information. Utilizing data from international mutual funds and stocks over the 2000-2009 period, we find that semi-public...

Incentives based on esteem, honor and shame are increasingly popular and easy to use due to modern surveillance techniques. However, the use of shaming is controversial: critics argue that delegating punishment to a crowd can lead to mob justice and a loss of control over the size of the...

Speeding up the exchange does not necessarily improve liquidity. The price quotes of high-frequency market makers are more likely to meet speculative high-frequency "bandits", thus less likely to meet liquidity traders. The bid-ask spread is raised in response. The recursive dynamic model...

Previous research on firm performance does not adequately account for the interrelatedness of a firm's professional connections, political ties, and family business-group affiliation. Many widely-cited findings may therefore be subject to confounding bias. To address this problem, we adopt a...

This paper utilizes a very simple model to study the timing and determinants of speculationagainst a fixed exchange rate regime when investors are heterogeneous because of locationaldifferences. Location matters because resident players may incur smaller costs when takinga short-position, are...

In this paper, we document that households' consumption expenditures crucially depend on their expected earnings - even after controlling for realized earnings, wealth and time-invariant unobserved characteristics such as permanent income and over-confidence. To explain this evidence, we develop...

In this paper, we document that households' consumption expenditures depend on their expected earnings - even after controlling for realized earnings and wealth. To explain this evidence, we develop and structurally estimate a standard-incomplete markets model in which rational households...

Evolutionary arguments and incentive theory point to the importance of variety and rotation of editorial board members to stimulate innovative research. Using a unique dataset covering more than 100 economics journals over the period 1990-2011, we document trends in the incidence of multiple...

Numerous gift exchange experiments have found a positive relationship between employers' wage offers and workers' effort levels. In (almost) all these experiments the employer both owns and controls the firm. Yet in reality many firms are characterized by the separation of ownership and control....