This paper explores the impact of target CEOs' retirement preferences on the incidence, the pricing, and the outcomes of takeover bids. Mergers frequently force target CEOs to retire early, and CEOs' private merger costs are the forgone benefits of staying employed until the planned retirement...

This paper illustrates a practical framework for understanding and predicting political economy risk for project managers operating in a variety of developing country settings, including non-democracies, ethnically diverse environments and societies undergoing political transition. In doing so,...

Can combat experience foster organizational skills that engender political collective action? We use the arbitrary assignment of troops to frontline combat in World War II to identify the effect of combat experience on two channels that change local ethnic composition and future political...

When do people feel as if they are rich in time? Not often, research and daily experience suggest. However, three experiments showed that participants who felt awe, relative to other emotions, felt they had more time available (Experiments 1, 3) and were less impatient (Experiment 2)....

The failure to align the incentives of self-interested groups in favor of beneficial reform is often considered a major cause of persistent underdevelopment around the world. However, much less is known about strategies that have been successful at overcoming such political economy challenges....

Consumers want to be happy, and marketers are increasingly trying to appeal to consumers' pursuit of happiness. However, the results of six studies reveal that what happiness means varies, and consumers' choices reflect those differences. In some cases happiness is defined as feeling excited,...

I present a theory of optimal multilateral trade agreements with public political shocks. I first show that "forbearance"-- where one country withholds retaliation when its trading partner receives a shock-- is a feature of an optimal agreement. This provides a rationale for countries not acting...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking. The misallocation effect alone is enough to ensure that consumer surplus is always reduced by a price control in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand; or when demand is...

A general finding in economic and organizational sociology states that producers and products that span categories lose appeal to audiences. This paper argues that to assess the consequences of category spanning researchers need to take account of the relations among the categories spanned. We...

Why do organizations generally lose their competitive edge as they get older? Recent theory and research on the dynamics of audiences and categories in markets sheds some new light on issues of organizational obsolescence.