We conduct beauty contest experiments, using close to 2,000 subjects to study the facial traits of CEOs. In one experiment we use pairs of photographs and find that subjects rate CEO faces as appearing more "competent" and less "likable" than non-CEO faces. Another experiment matches CEOs from...

One measure of the health of the Social Security system is the difference between the market value of the trust fund and the present value of benefits accrued to date. How should present values be computed for this calculation in light of future uncertainties? We think it is important to use...

We develop a new framework for valuing health and longevity improvements that departs from conventional but unrealistic assumptions of full annuitization and deterministic health. Our framework can value the prevention of mortality and of illness, and it can quantify the effects of retirement...

A considerable amount of uncertainty surrounds life expectancy, the average length of life. The standard deviation in adult life span is about 15 years in the U.S., and theory and evidence suggest it is costly. I calibrate a utility-theoretic model of preferences over length of life and show...

Implicit government obligations represent the lion's share of government liabilities in the U.S. and many other countries. Yet these liabilities are rarely measured, let alone properly adjusted for their risk. This paper shows, by example, how modern asset pricing can be used to value implicit...

We study the impact of pollution on the migration of high human capital employees. We link data on the opening of toxic-emitting plants with the career paths of executives at S&P 1500 firms. We discover that toxic-emitting plant openings increase executive departures from neighboring firms with...

We study the timing-of-extraction problem facing a decentralized mine owner when extraction entails environmental damage. As expected, when the environmental damage from mining is known, the socially optimal timing will depend on the magnitude of the damage relative to these costs in the rest of...

Using novel US environmental spill data, we document a robust negative relationship between the number of spills a firm experiences in a given year and its contemporaneous and lagged (but not future) cash flow. In addition, studying two natural experiments, we find an increase (decrease) in...

Transaction costs in trading involve both risk and return. The return is associated with the cost of immediate execution and the risk is a result of price movements during a more gradual trading. The paper shows that the trade-off between risk and return in optimal execution should reflect the...

The principal-agent model of executive compensation is of central importance to the modern theory of the firm and corporate governance, yet the existing empirical evidence supporting it is quite weak. The key predication of the model is that the executive's pay-performance sensitivity is...