Publications

Research Summary

Conceptualizing and measuring environmental sustainability

By: Michael W. Toffel

This research involves developing clarity around the murky construct of environmental sustainability, and improving techniques to measure corporate environmental performance. My prior research in this domain includes View Details

May 2017
Article

Distracted Shareholders and Corporate Actions

By: Elisabeth Kempf, Alberto Manconi and Oliver Spalt

Investor attention matters for corporate actions. Our new identification approach constructs firm-level shareholder "distraction" measures, by exploiting exogenous shocks to unrelated parts of institutional shareholders' portfolios. Firms with "distracted" shareholders... View Details

Keywords: Investors; Business and Shareholder Relations; Executive Compensation; Stocks; Mergers and Acquisitions

2021
Article

Leisure Beliefs and the Subjective Well-being of Nations

By: Lucia Macchia and A.V. Whillans

Here, we construct a data set of 79 countries (N = 220,000) and explore whether differences in the prioritization of time (leisure) vs. money (work) explain cross-country differences in happiness. Consistent with our predictions, countries whose citizens value leisure... View Details

Keywords: Leisure; Work; Subjective Well-being; Public Policy; Employment; Happiness; Governance; Policy

2012
Article

Organizational Identity as an Anchor for Adaptation: An Emerging Market Perspective

By: Andres Hatum, Luciana Silvestri, Roberto Vassolo and Andrew Pettigrew

There is little doubt that organizational identity—that which is central, distinctive, and enduring about an organization—mediates in adaptive processes. Exactly how this mediation takes place, and whether it is favorable or unfavorable to adaptation, must still be... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Identity; Emerging Economies; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture

2013
Working Paper

Redrawing the Lines: Did Political Incumbents Influence Electoral Redistricting in the World's Largest Democracy?

By: Lakshmi Iyer and Maya Reddy

In 2008, the boundaries of national and state electoral constituencies in India were redrawn for the first time in three decades. We use detailed demographic and electoral data to construct measures of the extent of redistricting in a given constituency. We find the... View Details

Keywords: Political Elections; India

October 2011
Article

Government Advertising and Media Coverage of Corruption Scandals

By: Rafael Di Tella and Ignacio Franceschelli

We construct measures of the extent to which the four main newspapers in Argentina report government corruption in their front page during the period 1998-2007 and correlate them with government advertising. The correlation is negative. The size is considerable: a one... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Advertising; Government and Politics; Newspapers; Media; Argentina

June 2010
Article

What Causes Industry Agglomeration? Evidence from Coagglomeration Patterns

By: Glenn Ellison, Edward Glaeser and William R. Kerr

Why do firms cluster near one another? We test Marshall's theories of industrial agglomeration by examining which industries locate near one another, or coagglomerate. We construct pairwise coagglomeration indices for US manufacturing industries from the Economic... View Details

Keywords: Production; Economics; Industry Clusters; Analytics and Data Science; Labor; Theory; Goods and Commodities; United States; United Kingdom

01 Jul 2015
News

From Waze for crowds to Uber for street food

Taking Innovation to the Streets: Microgeography, Physical Structure, and Innovation

In this paper, I analyze how the physical layout of cities affects innovation by influencing the organization of knowledge exchange. I exploit a novel data set covering all census block groups in the contiguous United States with information on innovation outcomes,... View Details

07 Jul 2020
Blog Post

The JD/MBA Seminar: The Perfect Practice Ground

about, all while taking in constructive questions and criticisms as they vehemently defended their innovative ideas. In fact, the seminar has been a longstanding tradition because it encapsulates what it means to approach ideas from two... View Details

18 Aug 2016
Working Paper Summaries

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

Keywords: by Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

August 2024 (Revised November 2024)
Case

Commonwealth Fusion Systems: Born at Scale

By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Jim Matheson, Kyle Myers, Gunnar Trumbull and Richard Vietor

This case study chronicles the journey of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) on its ambitious mission to commercialize fusion energy and become the world’s leading provider of fusion power plants. Emerging from a “special arrangement” with MIT's Plasma Science and... View Details

Keywords: Nuclear Energy; Innovation; Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurial Finance; Energy Generation; Commercialization; Science-Based Business; Technological Innovation; Market Entry and Exit; Energy Industry

Educators

January 2020
Article

The Job Rating Game: Revolving Doors and Analyst Incentives

By: Elisabeth Kempf

Investment banks frequently hire analysts from rating agencies. While many argue that this "revolving door" creates captured analysts, it can also create incentives to improve accuracy. To study this issue, I construct an original dataset, linking analysts to their... View Details

Keywords: Credit Rating Agencies; Investment Banking; Recruitment; Performance Evaluation; Financial Services Industry

Article

Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina's Inflation

By: Alberto Cavallo

Prices collected from online retailers can be used to construct daily price indexes that complement official statistics. This paper studies their ability to match official inflation estimates in five Latin American countries, with a focus on Argentina, where official... View Details

Keywords: Inflation; Online Price Index; Economics; Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; Price; Latin America; Argentina

May 2018
Article

Using Online Prices for Measuring Real Consumption Across Countries

By: Alberto Cavallo, Erwin Diewert, Robert C. Feenstra, Robert Inklaar and Marcel P. Timmer

We show that online prices can be used to construct quarterly purchasing power parities (PPPs) with a closely matched set of goods and identical methodologies in a variety of developed and developing countries. Our results are close to those reported by the... View Details

Keywords: Purchasing Power Parity; International Economy; Online Prices; Billion Prices Project; Economics; Macroeconomics; Price; Internet and the Web; Spending; Economy; Global Range; Measurement and Metrics

2010
Working Paper

Investment Taxation and Portfolio Performance

By: Daniel B. Bergstresser and Jeffrey Pontiff

Taxes have a first-order impact on portfolio returns. Most research mistakenly assumes that portfolios command similar tax burdens, or that tax burdens are proportional to dividend yields. Portfolio strategies differ in the pace of capital gains realization. We use the... View Details

Keywords: Financial Strategy; Investment Return; Investment Portfolio; Taxation; Performance Evaluation

October 2001 (Revised March 2002)
Background Note

Implicit Predictors of Consumer Behavior

By: Gerald Zaltman, Nancy Puccinelli, Kathryn A. Braun and Fred W Mast PHD

An important distinction is drawn in psychology between explicit and implicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge refers to consciously held beliefs about an individual or object that often draws on the remembering of experiences in the past. In contrast, implicit knowledge... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Values and Beliefs; Knowledge Sharing; Consumer Behavior; Opportunities; Cognition and Thinking

Educators

March 2005
Article

Sovereign Debt As a Contingent Claim: A Quantitative Approach

By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk

We construct a dynamic equilibrium model with contingent service and adverse selection to quantitatively study sovereign debt. In the model, benefits of defaulting are tempered by higher future interest rates. For a wide set of parameters, the only equilibrium is one... View Details

Keywords: Sovereign Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Interest Rates; Balance and Stability; Risk and Uncertainty; Risk Management; Mathematical Methods; Management Style; Segmentation; Debt Securities; Banking Industry