Deadly factory fires. Illegal pollution. Injured workers. Many brands have recently been tarnished by publicity of suppliers' labor and environmental violations. This paper provides guidance to buyers as to how they can motivate their suppliers to comply with labor and environmental standards....

In political organizations, the process of developing new policies often involves competing policy entrepreneurs who make productive investments to make their proposals more appealing to decisionmakers. We analyze how entrepreneurs' extremism and costs of crafting high-quality proposals affect...

We explore the effects of television advertising in the setting of the NFL's Super Bowl telecast. The Super Bowl is the largest advertising event of the year and is well suited for measurement. The event has the potential to create significant increases in "brand capital" because ratings average...

Applying a "co-search" algorithm to Internet traffic at the SEC's EDGAR website, we develop a novel method for identifying economically-related peer firms. Our results show that firms appearing in chronologically adjacent searches by the same individual (Search Based Peers or SBPs) are...

What determines risk-bearing capacity and the amount of leverage in financial markets? Using unique archival data on collateralized lending, we show that personal experience can affect individual risk-taking and aggregate leverage. When an investor syndicate speculating in Amsterdam in 1772 went...

We consider optimal incentive contracts when managers can, in addition to shirking or diverting funds, increase short term profits by putting the firm at risk of a low probability "disaster." To avoid such risk-taking, investors must cede additional rents to the manager. In a dynamic context,...

We propose a new form of hybrid capital for banks, Equity Recourse Notes (ERNs), which ameliorate booms and bust by creating counter-cyclical incentives for banks to raise capital, and so encourage bank lending in bad times. They avoid the flaws of existing contingent convertible bonds...

This paper reports on the development and implementation of a large-scale, marketing analytics framework for improving the segmentation, targeting and optimization of a consumer-facing firm's marketing activities. The framework leverages detailed transaction data of the type increasingly...