How much are we influenced by an author's identity? If identity matters, is it because we have a ``taste for status" or because it offers a useful shortcut --- a signal that is correlated with the likely importance of their ideas? This paper presents evidence from a natural experiment that took...

Although many streams of literature have recognized that firms with broader scope often underperform those with greater focus, relatively little research has examined the mechanisms that might account for these diseconomies of scope. One potential mechanism is that uncertainty shocks -- events...