We investigate the impact of inter-firm connections on alliances. We find that both professional connections, borne out of current employment ties and board interlocks along with social connections, borne out of past employment ties and educational ties, increase the likelihood of alliance...

A considerable literature examines the optimal decumulation of financial wealth in retirement. We extend this line of research to incorporate housing, which comprises the majority of most households' non-pension wealth. We estimate the relationship between the returns on housing, stocks, and...

Compared with prime-age workers, older workers face an easier path out of the labor force if they lose their jobs during a recession. However, premature job exits or earnings losses in the years leading up to retirement may be particularly devastating to retirement savings. The authors analyze...

We study strategic capacity investment problems in joint ventures (JVs) with fixed-rate revenue sharing contracts. We distinguish two types of JVs, depending on how individual resources determine the effective capacity of a JV. Despite its popularity across many industries, JVs tend to suffer...

Although long-term care costs represent a substantial financial risk for retired households, few purchase insurance. Previous research shows that it would not be optimal for most single individuals to purchase coverage, due to crowd-out by the means-tested partial insurance provided by Medicaid....

Using a sample of apartment transactions during 2004-2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore, with the numbers 8 and 6 signifying good luck, and the number 4 bad...

Bundling is pervasive in many markets. Optimal bundle pricing requires learning the joint distribution of consumer valuations for items in the bundle, that is, consumers' willingness to pay for the items. However, retailers typically do not observe this quantity. In this work, we develop a...

Long-term care is one of the major expenses faced by many older Americans. Yet, we have only limited information about the risk of needing long-term care and the expected duration of care. The expectations of needing to receive home health care, live in an assisted living facility or live in a...

Fantasy Pitching V follows in the footsteps of four earlier fantasy pitching exercises: Faff, Ali, et al. (2016); Faff, Wallin et al. (2016); Faff, Carrick, et al (2017) & Faff, Baladi, et al (2017). Like all prior versions, the current paper challenges teams of novice researchers to use the...

The expectation of needing long-term care is an essential input into optimal saving and long-term care insurance decisions. Previous optimization models have used the Robinson (2002) transition probabilities, which have not been systematically updated and which underpredict the use of care while...