A mutual-fund manager is more likely to hold (or buy, or sell) a particular stock in any quarter if other managers in the same city are holding (or buying, or selling) that same stock. This pattern shows up even when controlling for the distance between the fund manager and the stock in...

Disability Insurance (DI), which provides income support to disabled workers, has been criticized for inducing a large fall in the labor force participation rate of older workers. We study the effects of one policy response designed to address this moral hazard problem: raising the rate at which...

Theory suggests that, in the presence of local bias, the price of a stock should be decreasing in the ratio of the aggregate book value of firms in its region to the aggregate risk tolerance of investors in its region. We test this proposition using data on U.S. Census regions and states, and...

We examine security analysts' career concerns by relating their earnings forecasts to job separations. Relatively accurate forecasters are more likely to experience favorable career outcomes like moving up to a high-status brokerage house. Controlling for accuracy, analysts who are optimistic...

Several theories of reputation and herd behavior (e.g., Scharfstein and Stein (1990) and Zweibel (1995)) suggest that herding among agents should vary with career concerns. Our goal is to document whether such a link exists in the labor market for security analysts. We find that inexperienced...

We estimate a model of damage to corporate earnings from COVID-19. A pandemic decreases earnings due to costly mitigation and lower growth rates. The arrival of a vaccine, modeled as a Poisson process, reverts earnings to normal. We fit our model to timely measures of expected damage given by...

The excesses of the historic US housing cycle of the 2000s were concentrated in the Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) of Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada. Even controlling for leading explanations of this housing cycle, these Sand State MSAs had more than double the mortgage...

We estimate the effect of ordering by value on revenues in sequential art auctions held by Sotheby's and Christie's. We exploit a pre-determined rotation of which of these two houses holds their auction first during auction week in New York City. When the house that goes first has relatively...

We investigate the effects of managerial outsourcing on the performance and incentives of mutual funds. Fund families outsource the management of a large fraction of their funds to advisory firms. These funds under-perform those ran internally by about 50 basis points per year. After...

We derive a parsimonious model of damage to corporate earnings from COVID-19. Using measures of expected damage from industry-level earnings forecast revisions, we estimate this model with nonlinear least squares and identifying restrictions related to forecast rationality. Forecasts in mid-May...