We study response behavior of New York City parking-ticket recipients by analyzing administrative data on 6.6 million tickets issued to 2 million individuals over two years. Exploiting variation (from a policy change and a field experiment) in letters sent to recipients, we find that forgetting...

A large and growing share of international trade is carried on airplanes. Air cargo is many times more expensive than maritime transport but arrives in destination markets much faster. We model firms' choice between exporting goods using fast but expensive air cargo and slow but cheap ocean...

We study the location and timing of annual shareholder meetings. When companies move their annual meetings a great distance from headquarters, they tend to announce disappointing earnings results and experience pronounced stock market underperformance in the months after the meeting. Companies...

An important element of the cost of distance is time taken in delivering final and intermediate goods. We argue that time costs are qualitatively different from direct monetary costs such as freight charges. The difference arises because of uncertainty. Unsynchronised deliveries can disrupt...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

In this essay I review Sylvia Nasar's long awaited new history of economics, Grand Pursuit. I describe how the book is really an economic history of the period from 1850-1950, with distinguished economists' stories inserted in appropriate places. Nasar's goal is to show how economists work, but...