What makes a good leader? A good leader is able to coordinate his followers around a credible mission statement, which communicates the future course of action of the organization. In practice, leaders learn about the best course of action for the organization over time. While learning helps...

This paper studies optimal policy in a business-cycle setting in which firms have a blurry understanding of the state of the economy due to informational or cognitive constraints. The latter are not only the source of nominal rigidity but also an impediment in the coordination of production. The...

We analyze a hand-collected sample of 166 prominent bribery cases, involving 107 publicly listed firms from 20 stock markets that have been reported to have bribed government officials in 52 countries worldwide during 1971-2007. We focus on the initial date of award of the contract for which the...

Using a unique 10-year panel that includes more than 13,300 expected stock market return probability distributions, we find that executives are severely miscalibrated, producing distributions that are too narrow: realized market returns are within the executives' 80% confidence intervals only...

Do not-for-profit hospitals provide better care than for-profit hospitals? We compare patient outcomes in for-profit and not-for-profit hospitals between 1984 and 1994 using a new method for estimating differences across hospitals that yields far more accurate estimates of hospital quality than...

Recent theoretical work predicts that an important margin of adjustment to deregulation or trade reforms is the reallocation of output within firms through changes in their product mix. Empirical work has accordingly shifted its focus towards multi-product firms and their product mix decisions....

We find that over the period 1950-1990, US states absorbed increases in the supply of schooling due to tighter compulsory schooling and child labor laws mostly through within-industry increases in the schooling intensity of production. Shifts in the industry composition towards more...

Financial economists have long been puzzled by investor demand for actively managed funds that generate, on average, negative after-fee, risk-adjusted returns. To shed new light on this puzzle, we exploit the fact that funds in different market segments compete for different types of retail...

We survey more than 1,000 CEOs and CFOs to understand how capital is allocated, and decision-making authority is delegated, within firms. We find that CEOs are least likely to share or delegate decision-making authority in mergers and acquisitions, relative to delegation of capital structure,...

We analyze the interaction of firm product quality and pricing decisions with financial distress and bankruptcy in the airline industry. We consider an airline's choices of quality and price as dynamic decisions that trade off current cash flows for future revenue. We examine how airline...