common explanation for why firms incur sunk costs is that technology considerations make them inescapable. This paper shows that sometimes firms may prefer to make early (less informed) investment decisions even when technology allows such decisions to be delayed. Sunk costs commit and clarify a...

Job rotation refers to the practice of routinely transferring employees between jobs. The explanations provided for job rotation are as varied as its uses.Some posit that complementarities and learning across tasks allow increased productive efficiency, while others speculate that employees'...

Though sunk costs impact future income calculations (via depreciation for example), accountants are reminded that their sunk nature makes them irrelevant for future decisions. An explanation for why firms routinely incur such costs is that technology considerations make them inescapable. This...

This paper considers the desirability of aggregate performance measures in light of the fact that many individuals' performance incentives are driven by a desire to shape external perceptions (and thus pay). In contrast to the case of explicit contracts, we find that when individuals' actions...

This paper examines the information embedded in both the stock and option markets prior to takeover announcements. During normal periods, buyer-seller initiated stock volume imbalances are significant predictors of next-day stock returns and option volume imbalances are uninformative. However,...

This paper parsimoniously characterizes how past returns affect the cross-section of expected returns. Using Fama-MacBeth regressions, it shows that the momentum and reversals associated with past returns over va

Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quality. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online...

This paper proposes a new approach of valuing portfolios that contain illiquid assets. The approach has three major advantages. First, the estimators are arithmetic averages of individual asset returns or their proxies, so they strictly correspond to actual portfolio returns. Second, the...

Our model assumes that creditors need to expend resources to collect on claims. Consequently, because diffuse creditors suffer from mutual free-riding (Holmstrom (1982)), they fare worse than concentrated creditors (e.g. a house bank). The model predicts that measures of debt concentration...

We use an iterative relocation algorithm to identify factors in common stock returns. The benefit of the approach is that factors are portfolios of assets with non-negative weights. As a result, they are readily interpretable in terms of the characteristics of the underlying securities. The...