How does ESG (environmental, social, and governance) performance affect stock returns? Answering this question is difficult because existing measures of ESG perfor- mance -- ESG ratings -- are noisy and, therefore, standard regression estimates suffer from attenuation bias. To address the bias,...

What mental models do individuals use to approximate their tax schedule? Using an incentivized income-tax forecasting task, we estimate the prevalence of the "schmeduling" heuristics for constructing mental representations of nonlinear incentive schemes. We find evidence of widespread adoption...

Expansion of the use of student test score data to measure teacher performance has fueled recent policy interest in using those data to measure the effects of school administrators as well. However, little research has considered the capacity of student performance data to uncover principal...

Business leaders, government officials, and academics are focusing considerable attention on the concept of "corporate social responsibility" (CSR), particularly in the realm of environmental protection. Beyond complete compliance with environmental regulations, do firms have additional moral or...

We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, in 2010, regulators switched from using return on equity (ROE) to economic value added...

We examine the performance of the offshore hedge fund industry over the period 1989 through 1995 using a database that includes defunct as well as currently operating funds. The industry is characterized by high attrition rates of funds and little evidence of differential manager skill. We...

This paper introduces new nonparametric statistical methods to evaluate zero-cost investment strategies. We focus on directional trading strategies, risk-adjusted returns, and the investor's decisions under uncertainty as the core of our analysis. By relying on classification tools with a long...

Non-competitive conduct can be assessed by estimating the size of the markup or Lerner index achieved in a market. The markup implies a price elasticity of demand faced by the representative firm. For a given markup, non-competitive conduct is greater the more elastic is the market elasticity of...

When materials offshoring is measured by estimating imported intermediate inputs, a common assumption used is that an industry's imports of each input, relative to its total demand, is the same as the economy-wide imports relative to total demand: this is the so-called "import comparability" or...