This paper develops a theory of promotion based on evaluations by the already promoted. The already promoted show some favoritism toward candidates for promotion with similar beliefs, just as beetles are more prone to eat the eggs of other species. With such egg-eating bias, false beliefs may...

A common practice in the fields of education, mental health, and juvenile justice is to segregate problem youths in groups with deviant peers. Assignments of this sort, which concentrate deviant youths, may facilitate deviant peer influence and lead to perverse outcomes. This possibility adds to...

This paper describes a range of methods which have been proposed to study interactions in economic and social contexts. By interactions, we refer to interdependences between individual decisions which are not mediated by markets. These types of models have been employed to understand phenomena...

This paper uses a unique data set to measure peer effects among college age roommates. Freshman year roommates and dormmates are randomly assigned at Dartmouth College. I find that in this group, peer effects are very important in determining levels of academic effort and in decisions to join...

Nonlinearity is an important consideration in many problems of finance and economics, such as pricing securities, computing equilibrium, and conducting structural estimations. We extend the transform analysis in Duffie, Pan, and Singleton (2000) by providing analytical treatment of a general...

Are fluctuations in firms' profitability risk a major cause of regular business cycles? We study this question within the framework of a heterogeneous-firm dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with fixed capital adjustment costs. In such a model, surprise increases of risk lead to a...

Hedge fund managers are compensated via management fees on the assets under management (AUM) and incentive fees indexed to the high-water mark (HWM). We study the effects of managerial skills (alpha) and compensation on dynamic leverage choices and the valuation of fees and investors' payoffs....

International risk-sharing has far-reaching implications both for economic policy and for basic research in economics. When countries do not share risk, individuals in those countries experience fluctuations in their consumption levels that are undesirable and possibly unnecessary. This paper...

The paper tests three hypotheses concerning foreign equity investment in the presence of liquidity risk. First, the FDI-to-FPI price differential is negatively related to liquidity risk (the "Price Discount Hypothesis"). The idea is that market participants do not know whether the FDI investor...

This paper provides first and second-order approximation methods for the solution of non-linear dynamic stochastic models in which the exogenous state variables follow conditionally-linear stochastic processes displaying time-varying risk. The first-order approximation is consistent with a...