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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In economies with incomplete information, laissez-faire price competition is not, in general, constrained Pareto efficient. But which market structures are? We consider an environment in which firms have private information about costs and consumers make discrete choices over goods. Surveying an...