What makes a good leader? A good leader is able to coordinate his followers around a credible mission statement, which communicates the future course of action of the organization. In practice, leaders learn about the best course of action for the organization over time. While learning helps...

What is the role of leaders in large organizations? We propose a model in which a leader helps to overcome a misalignment of followers' incentives that inhibits coordination, while adapting the organization to a changing environment. Good leadership requires vision and special personality traits...

A fruitful emerging literature reveals that shocks to uncertainty can explain asset returns, business cycles and financial crises. The literature equates uncertainty shocks with changes in the variance of an innovation whose distribution is common knowledge. But how do such shocks arise? This...

According to most theories of financial intermediation, intermediaries diversify risk, transform maturity or liquidity, and screen or monitor borrowers. In U.S. Treasury auctions, none of these rationales apply. Intermediaries submit their customer bids without transforming liquidity or...

When similar patterns of expansion and contraction are observed across sectors, we call this a business cycle. Yet explaining the similarity and synchronization of these cycles across industries remains a puzzle. Whereas output growth across industries is highly correlated, identifiable shocks,...

Many argue that home bias arises because home investors can predict home asset payoffs more accurately than foreigners can. But why doesn't global information access eliminate this asymmetry? We model investors, endowed with a small home information advantage, who choose what information to...

Mutual fund managers can outperform the market by picking stocks or timing the market successfully. Previous work has estimated picking and timing skill, assuming that each manager is endowed with a fixed amount of each and found some evidence of picking skills and little evidence of timing...

Theories based on information costs or frictions have become increasing popular in macroeconomics and macro-finance. The literature has used various types of information choices, such as rational inattention, inattentiveness, information markets and costly precision. Using a unified framework,...

A contentious debate in finance revolves around whether investment managers add any value for their clients. Presumably, households delegate the investment decision because these managers are able to process information and use it efficiently to generate additional return. The raises the...