This paper uses a database covering the universe of French firms for the period 1990--2007 to provide a forensic account of the role of individual firms in generating aggregate fluctuations. We set up a simple multi-sector model of heterogeneous firms selling to multiple markets to motivate a...

Politicians and regulators rely on feedback from the public when setting policies. For-profit corporations and non-pro t entities are active in this process and are arguably expected to provide independent viewpoints. Policymakers (and the public at large), however, may be unaware of the...

This paper reviews the literature on corporate political strategy and identifies a number of open research questions and streams for potential investigation. The paper develops a framework to explain why, when, and how a firm will pursue multi-forum political action as part of its non-market and...

This paper uses data from NBER surveys of over 40,000 employees in hundreds of facilities in 14 firms and from employees on the 2002 and 2006 General Social Surveys to explore how shared compensation affects turnover, absenteeism, loyalty, worker effort, and other outcomes affecting workplace...

A frequently debated question is whether the use of intellectual property (IP) protection benefits the residents of low and middle income countries. We contribute to this debate with an analysis of the use of patents and trademarks by firms in Chile over the decade 1995-2005 as the then...

Substantial excitement currently exists in industry regarding the potential of using analytic tools to measure sentiment in social media messages to help predict individual reactions to a new product, including movies. However, the majority of models subsequently used for forecasting exercises...

Streaming music services have exploded in popularity in the past few years, variously raising optimism and concern about their impacts on recorded music revenue. On the one hand, streaming services allow sellers to engage in bundling with the promise of increasing revenues, profits, and consumer...

We develop real-time proxies of retail corporate sales from multiple sources, including ~50 million mobile devices. These measures contain information from both the earnings quarter (“within quarter”) and the period between that quarter's end and the earnings announcement date (“post...

We develop a framework to estimate willingness to pay (WTP) for clean air from defensive investment. Applying this framework to product-by-store level scanner data on air purifier sales in China, we provide among the first revealed preference estimates of WTP for clean air in developing...

The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which was experiencing disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regression discontinuity design, we show...