This paper shows that top management structures in large US firms radically changed since the mid-1980s. While the number of managers reporting directly to the CEO doubled, the growth was driven primarily by functional managers rather than general managers. Using panel data on senior management...

A longstanding challenge in evaluating the impact of uncertainty on investment is obtaining measures of managers' subjective uncertainty. We address this challenge by using a detailed new survey measure of subjective uncertainty collected by the U.S. Census Bureau for approximately 25,000...

This paper analyzes how private decisions and public policies are shaped by personal and societal preferences ("values"), material or other explicit incentives ("laws") and social sanctions or rewards ("norms"). It first examines how honor, stigma and social norms arise from individuals'...

In this paper we use novel historical data on economics and social rights from the constitutions of 201 countries and an instrument variable strategy to answer two important questions. First, do economic and social rights provisions in constitutions reduce poverty? Second, does the strength of...

Entrepreneurship is usually identified as an important determinant of aggregate productivity and long-term growth. The determinants of entrepreneurship, nevertheless, are not entirely understood. A recent literature has linked entrepreneurship to the development of the justice system. This paper...

A large literature documents persistent impacts of formal historical institutions. However, very little is known about how these institutions interact with ancestral traditions to determine long-term economic and social outcomes. This paper addresses this question by studying the persistent...

This paper investigates, both theoretically and empirically, the implications that complementary assets needed for the formation of start-ups - proxied by the ease of access to financial resources - have on the innovative efforts of incumbent firms. In particular, we develop a theoretical model,...

We refine modelling of the radical innovation decision in this paper by extending real option theory to include non-marginal stochastic jump processes. From the model analytics we determine that the average magnitude and frequency of non-marginal stochastic jump processes are the most important...

The instability and informality that characterize hybrid political orders and its effects on entrepreneurs remains largely unexplored in the scholarly literatures. In this paper we provide initial findings from the case of entrepreneurs' access to electricity in Lebanon. Using quantitative and...

This paper addresses the apparent paradox between widespread support of cattle farming by agricultural policy interventions and negative returns to cattle as stressed in recent works. Using a representative panel dataset for Andhra Pradesh, a state in the south of India, we examine average and...