Social progress through improved treatment of minority groups (the embrace of anti-racist and anti-sexist norms, for example) may or may not spread to corporate cultures through competition. Sometimes the market fails to adapt on its own and government must pass legislation to secure changes in...

Markets and firms offer contrasting methods to arrange production. In markets, contracts govern the purchase of parts and services that compose production. In firms, the shared values, customs, and norms coming from a corporate culture govern employees' joint development of those parts and...

Corporate culture is an omnibus term that includes many elements like norms, values, knowledge, and customs that are relevant to a firm. Economists have made great progress recently in devising methods of measuring different aspects of corporate culture. These empirical measures of culture have...

Corporate culture is an omnibus term that includes many elements that are relevant to a firm, like norms, values, knowledge, and customs. Economists have made great progress recently in devising methods of measuring different aspects of corporate culture. These empirical measures of culture have...

We study a segmented-markets setting in which self-fulfilling volatility can arise. The only requirements are (i) asset price movements redistribute wealth across markets (e.g., equities rise as bonds fall) and (ii) some stabilizing force keeps valuation ratios stationary (e.g., cash flow growth...

We assess the capacity of gerrymandering to undermine the will of the people in a representative democracy. Citizens have political positions represented on a spectrum, and electoral maps separate people into districts. We show that unrestrained gerrymandering can severely distort the...

Low-income and Black households are less likely to own bank accounts and visit bank branches than high-income and White households. We assess whether unequal bank access can explain why. We propose a novel measure of bank access based on the locations of bank branches and consumer trips to those...

Leveraging an established exercise in negotiation education, we build a novel dataset for studying how the use of language shapes bilateral bargaining. Our dataset extends existing work in two ways: 1) we recruit participants via behavioral labs instead of crowdsourcing platforms and allow...

We study a multi-location model with financial market segmentation that permits self-fulfilling fluctuations. Such fluctuations are necessarily idiosyncratic, but their volatility varies systematically with an aggregate latent factor. We thus provide a coordination-based microfoundation for...

An outside stakeholder’s commitment to bail out a levered investment fund mightencourage the fund manager to take extreme risks. But what if the bailout were harsh?The loan would have a penalty rate and the manager would have to sacrifice partequity interest in the fund. I show that as the...