We investigate the link between birth order and the career outcome of becoming Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of a company. CEOs are more likely to be the first-born, i.e., oldest, child of their family relative to what one would expect if birth order did not matter for career outcomes. Both male...

We examine the effect of personal, two-way communication on the behavior of borrowers, who have fallen behind on their consumer loan payments. While the lender has informed all borrowers about the delinquency through an automatically generated letter, some borrowers also receive a phone call...

Existing evidence suggests that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) may be beneficial to U.S. investors, but that foreign firms are perhaps less likely to list in the U.S. after SOX. This raises the question of whether foreign firms avoid listing in the U.S. after SOX because the Act imposes...

We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many countries, the level of segmentation remains significant in emerging markets. We characterize the factors that account for variation in market segmentation...

We propose an exogenous measure of a country's growth opportunities by interacting the country's local industry mix with global price to earnings (PE) ratios. We find that these exogenous growth opportunities predict future changes in real GDP and investment in a large panel of countries. This...

In this paper, we investigate the implications of non-separable preferences over durable and nondurable consumption for asset pricing tests when adjusting durable consumption is costly. In an economy without adjustment costs, in which a frictionless rental market exists for the durable good, the...

We empirically examines the financial portfolio choice of households as a function of their exposure to real estate risk as a possible background risk. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics data from 1984 to 2001, our estimation results control for sample selection and unobservable time-invariant...

We propose a new, valuation-based measure of world equity market segmentation. While we observe decreased levels of segmentation in many developing countries, the level of segmentation is still significant. In contrast to previous research, we characterize the factors that account for variation...

This paper investigates attitudes towards gender, ethnicity, weight, and age in the U.S. from peer-to-peer credit markets. With detailed data on both the lending decision and loan performance, we are substantially better able to distinguish between taste based discrimination consistent with...