To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: It can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held, because the wider community is unable to tell whether the...

This paper proposes that social categorization is driven by an ecological dynamic that operates in two planes: feature space and category space. It develops a theoretical model that links positions in feature space to label assignments in category space. The first part of the model predicts that...

This paper examines the relationship between firm performance and the recommendations provided by Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS), the largest proxy advisory firm in the United States, regarding shareholder votes in stock option exchange programs. Using a comprehensive sample of stock...

We apply three axioms adapted from decision theory to refinements of the Nash equilibria of games with perfect recall that select connected closed sub- sets called solutions. No player uses a weakly dominated strategy in an equilibrium in a solution. Each solution contains a quasi-perfect...

Why do people give to others? One principal driver involves one's identity: who one is and how they view themselves. The degree to which identities are malleable, involve a readiness to act, and help make sense of the world have significant implications determining whether and how much people...

This paper studies information aggregation in dynamic markets with a finite number of partially informed strategic traders. It shows that for a broad class of securities, information in such markets always gets aggregated. Trading takes place in a bounded time interval, and in every equilibrium,...

Recent research argues that differences in the structure of top executive compensation plans and/or corporate culture explain cross-sectional variation in tax avoidance. However, this research does not link tax planning to the incentives of the specific executive managing the tax function in the...

We examine the question of how competition between governments within metropolitan areas affects economic growth outcomes. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we find that the number of county governments is significantly and positively correlated with the...

In the wake of the recent financial crisis, over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives have been blamed for increasing systemic risk. Although OTC derivatives were not a central cause of the crisis, the complexity and limited transparency of the market reinforced the potential for excessive risk-taking,...

For fossil fuel power plants to be built in the future, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer the potential for significant reductions in CO2 emissions. We examine the break-even value for CCS adoptions, that is, the critical value in the charge for CO2 emissions that would justify...