This work consists of three essays that investigate the effect of investor behavior on asset prices. In the first essay, titled “Transaction Costs and Investment Decisions of Individual Investors,” I study the liquidity decisions of 66,000 households from a large discount brokerage. My paper...

This dissertation examines global groups at work through an intensive study of cross-national student teams and case studies of exemplar companies that work across boundaries. We consider the role of transactive memory systems (TMS) as a way to create effective team processes. A TMS is a...

This dissertation examines how investments in information technology (IT) influence the value that firms derive from merging or collaborating with other firms. The dissertation is organized as follows. The first chapter, entitled Towards a Theoretical Framework of Information Technology in...

Actors often leave in pursuit of new ventures, even though entrepreneurial opportunities may exist inside the firm. While a bulk of work has focused on understanding the determinants of entrepreneurial transition (e.g., Aldrich and Ruef, 2006; Dobrev and Barnett, 2005; Robinson and Sexton, 1994; Sørensen,...

The first chapter demonstrates that although it is possible to design utility functions that behave like empirical well-being, the functional forms relying on income adaptation and social comparisons put forward in the happiness literature fail to receive empirical validation. Under the income...

In my first paper I examine the impact of short-term economic shocks on physician migration using a new panel dataset on physician migration from 31 African countries to the US and the UK. I estimate distributed-lag regressions of log migration on economic growth, I also instrument for growth...

Engineers and product designers have developed sophisticated models to predict the technical performance of their designs, yet they seldom quantify how performance affects the desirability of the resulting products to consumers. Without this information, managers have difficulty judging which...

In this study, we present novel statistics on the patenting in US manufacturing and new evidence on the question of what happens when firms patent. We do so by creating a comprehensive firm-patent matched dataset that links the NBER patent data (covering the universe of patents) to firm data...

We propose an industry-level index of capital liquidity -- defined as the share of used capital in aggregate industry capital expenditure -- that relates (inversely) to sunkenness of capital investment. We then test the effect of capital liquidity on the dispersion and mean of industry...

Firms in transition economies experienced a large exogenous shock in their external business environment in the late 1980s when these economies moved from a socialist-oriented economic environment to a more market-oriented economic environment. This paper examines the following research question...