We show that the intensity of "keeping up with the Joneses" behavior is largely determined by the extent to which a community is socially connected. Using a unique dataset on car purchases in Southern California, we find that social influence intensifies in suburban communities in which...

Crowdfunding markets enable entrepreneurs to communicate material information even when it is nonstandard or more difficult to quantify or verify. Using a large crowdsourced survey that asks participants to rate live Kickstarter campaigns, we show that human raters outperform machines in...

We investigate the asset pricing and macroeconomic implications of the ratio of new orders (NO) to shipments (S) of durable goods. NO/S measures investment commitments by firms, and high values of NO/S are associated with a business cycle peak. We find that NO/S proxies for a short-horizon...

We investigate the asset pricing and macroeconomic implications of the ratio of new orders (NO) to shipments (S) of durable goods. NO/S measures investment commitments by firms, and high values of NO/S are associated with a business cycle peak. We find that NO/S proxies for a short-horizon...

We examine the relation between inventory investment and the cost of capital in the time series and the cross section. We find consistent evidence that risk premiums, rather than real interest rates, are strongly negatively related to future inventory growth at the aggregate, industry, and firm...

of a higher depreciation rate, which makes inventory riskier than fixed capital. In support of this result, our empirical work documents that risk premia, rather than real interest rates, are negatively related to future inventory growth. This relation is highly significant and robust to a...

This paper discusses linear regression of strongly correlated data that arises, for example, in magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium reconstructions. We have proved that, generically, the covariance matrix of the estimated regression parameters for fixed sample size goes to zero as the correlations...

Most affine models of the term structure with stochastic volatility (SV) predict that the variance of the short rate is simultaneously a linear combination of yields and the quadratic variation of the spot rate. However, we find empirically that the A1(3) SV model generates a time series for the...