How important are local country conditions to firms' operations performance, as revealed in their inventory levels? Under a “flat world” hypothesis, differences in firms' inventory levels are explained more by differences among industries and firms themselves, rather than differences among...

The discipline of operations management is rarely studied with an eye on public policies. Yet, it is glaring to even the casual observer that public infrastructure is very different in different countries. How does public infrastructure affect private sector inventory levels? I develop as a...

How does operational competence translate into market value, when firms cannot credibly communicate their competence to the market? I consider the example of inventory and fill rates. When the market sees a high-inventory firm, it cannot tell whether the inventory is due to incompetence or a...

Sebastian de la Fuente is the sixth largest supermarket chain in the Basque region of Spain. It has a novel dataset of 108,605 observations on 3,745 SKUs, collected for almost 2 1/2 years. I find the bullwhip effect in the data: at least 80% of the SKUs have a bigger variance in supplies than...

We ask if corporate executives have fixed effects (quirks) that explain perational decisions made in firms, independent of firm effects. We replicate the approach in Bertrand et al. (2003), solving the empirical challenge of distinguishing firm and executive effects by constructing a dataset of...

We posit a theory that runs counter to how conventional wisdom thinks about analyst bias, that it is the result of distorted incentives by "the system" - especially upstream factors like the analysts' employers. We suggest that analysts are also heavily influenced by what investors believe, the...

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset...