type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>I document sources of value creation in mergers by analyzing novel data on the quality and price of goods sold by merging firms. When two competitors in a product market merge, their products converge in quality, and prices fall relative to the competition. These effects...</p>

How do private equity firms affect their portfolio companies? We document operational changes in restaurant chain buyouts between 2002 and 2012 using comprehensive health inspection records in Florida. Store-level operational practices improve after private equity buyout, as restaurants become...

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech given in 1985, Franco Modigliani drew attention to the "annuitization puzzle": that annuity contracts, other than pensions through group insurance, are extremely rare. Rational choice theory predicts that households will find annuities attractive at the onset...

I investigate the strong negative relation between recent stock returns and the annuitization of retirement savings using a novel data set with over 100,000 actual payout decisions. After controlling for several standard explanations (e.g., wealth effects), I present evidence supporting naïve...

Using unique data on Canadian households, we assess the impact of financial advisors on their clients' portfolios. We find that advisors induce their clients to take more risk, thereby raising expected returns. On the other hand, we find limited evidence of customization: advisors direct clients...