Balance sheet recessions result from concentration of macroeconomic risks on the balance sheets of leveraged agents. In this paper, I argue that information dispersion about the future states of the economy combined with trading frictions in financial markets can explain why such concentration...

This paper documents and studies the gender gap in performance among associate lawyers in the United States. Unlike other high-skilled professions, the legal profession measures and rewards productivity with objective methods that are widely used and comparable across firms: the number of hours...

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor in large cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not choose equal taxes...

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a large-scale government initiative (NPEGEL/KGBV) that provided earmarked funds for addressing girls' special needs to public schools in rural India. Our empirical strategy exploits local variation in program eligibility around a threshold based on the...

Competition typically involves two main dimensions, a rivalry for resources and the ranking of relative performances. If socially recognized, the latter yields a ranking in terms of social status. The rivalry of resources resulting from interacting under a competitive incentive scheme has been...

If there are diseconomies of scale in asset management, any predictability in mutual fund performance will be arbitraged away by rational investors seeking funds with the highest expected performance (Berk and Green, 2004). In contrast, the performance of equity mutual funds persists through...

We build a model of mutual fund competition in which a fraction of investors ("unsophisticated") exhibit a preference for familiarity. Funds differ both in their quality and their visibility: While unsophisticated investors have varying degrees of familiarity with respect to more visible funds,...

Egalitarianism and meritocracy are competing principles to distribute the joint benefits of cooperation. We examine the consequences of letting members of society vote between those two principles, in a context where individuals must joint with others into coalitions of a certain size to become...

Regulations that constrain firms’ externalities in one dimension can distort incentives and worsen externalities in other dimensions. In Peru’s industrial fishing sector, the world’s largest, fishing boats catch anchovy that plants along the coast convert into fishmeal. Matching...

We systematically analyze how variations in board independence and ownership concentration and type affect corporate social performance (CSP). Drawing from the agency and stakeholder perspectives, we argue that recognizing differences in the distribution of costs and benefits to shareholders and...