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- Faculty Publications (82)
Friction
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- June 2019
- Article
Brokers vs. Retail Investors: Conflicting Interests and Dominated Products
By: Mark Egan
I study how brokers distort household investment decisions. Using a novel convertible bond dataset, I find that consumers often purchase dominated bonds—cheap and expensive versions of otherwise identical bonds coexist in the market. The empirical evidence suggests... View Details
- June 2019
- Article
Social Risk, Fiscal Risk, and the Portfolio of Government Programs
We develop a model of government portfolio choice in which a benevolent government chooses the scale of risky projects in the presence of market failures and tax distortions. These two frictions generate motives to manage social risk and fiscal risk. Social risk... View Details
- April 2019
- Article
Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis
By: Laura Alfaro, Pol Antràs, Davin Chor and Paola Conconi
In recent decades, advances in information and communication technology and falling trade barriers have led firms to retain within their boundaries and in their domestic economies only a subset of their production stages. A key decision facing firms worldwide is the... View Details
- 2019
- Working Paper
The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Donald Ngwe, Kris J. Ferreira and Thales Teixeira
Many online stores are designed such that shoppers can easily access any available discounted products. We propose that deliberately increasing search frictions by placing small obstacles to locating discounted items can improve online retailers’ margins and even... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
OTC Intermediaries
By: Andrea L. Eisfeldt, Bernard Herskovic, Sriram Rajan and Emil Siriwardane
Over-the-counter (OTC) markets for financial assets are dominated by a relatively small number of core intermediaries and a large number of peripheral customers. In this paper, we develop a model of trade in a core-periphery network and estimate its key structural... View Details
- Fall 2018
- Article
The Value of Fit Information in Online Retail: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment
By: Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
Online channels generate frictions when selling products with nondigital attributes, such as apparel. Customers may be reluctant to purchase products they have not been able to try on, and those customers who do purchase may return products when they do not fit as... View Details
- 2017
- Article
Frictions or Mental Gaps: What's Behind the Information We (Don't) Use and When Do We Care?
By: Benjamin Handel and Joshua Schwartzstein
Consumers suffer significant losses from not acting on available information. These losses stem from frictions such as search costs, switching costs, and rational inattention, as well as what we call mental gaps resulting from wrong priors/worldviews, or relevant... View Details
- January 2018 (Revised September 2021)
- Case
Saudi Arabia: Vision 2030
By: Richard H.K. Vietor and Haviland Sheldahl-Thomason
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman faces several challenges, both domestic and foreign. Domestically, he needs to build the country’s economy to accommodate a "youth bulge" while balancing between liberals and conservatives. And he needs to diversify the economy away from its... View Details
- 2018
- Chapter
Transportation Cost and the Geography of Foreign Investment
By: Laura Alfaro and Maggie Chen
Falling transportation costs and rapid technological progress in recent decades have precipitated an explosion of cross-border flows in goods, services, investments, and ideas led by multinational firms. Extensive research has sought to understand the geographic... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
Inflation Expectations, Learning, and Supermarket Prices: Evidence from Survey Experiments
By: Alberto Cavallo, Guillermo Cruces and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
Information frictions play a central role in the formation of household inflation expectations, but there is no consensus about their origins. We address this question with novel evidence from survey experiments. We document two main findings. First, individuals in... View Details
- November 2015
- Article
Cannibalization and Option Value Effects of Secondary Markets: Evidence from the U.S. Concert Industry
By: Victor Manuel Bennett, Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu
We examine how reducing search frictions in secondary markets affects the value appropriated by firms in primary markets. We characterize two effects on primary market firms caused by intermediaries entering secondary markets: the "cannibalization" and "option value"... View Details
- 2015
- Article
International Trade, Multinational Activity, and Corporate Finance
By: C. Fritz Foley and Kalina Manova
An emerging new literature brings unique ideas from corporate finance to the study of international trade and investment. Insights about differences in the development of financial institutions across countries, the role of financial constraints, and the use of... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
Internalizing Global Value Chains: A Firm-Level Analysis
By: Laura Alfaro, Pol Antràs, Davin Chor and Paola Conconi
In recent decades, advances in information and communication technology and falling trade barriers have led firms to retain within their boundaries and in their domestic economies only a subset of their production stages. A key decision facing firms worldwide is the... View Details
- Fall 2014
- Article
How to Win in an Omnichannel World
By: David R. Bell, Santiago Gallino and Antonio Moreno
The omnichannel environment presents new challenges and opportunities for both information and product fulfillment. While all retailers need to effectively and efficiently manage fulfillment and information provision, there are important nuances to how this happens,... View Details
- August 2014
- Article
The New Empirical Economics of Management
By: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and John Van Reenen
Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review... View Details
- June 2014
- Article
Frictions in Shadow Banking: Evidence from the Lending Behavior of Money Market Funds
By: Sergey Chernenko and Adi Sunderam
We document the consequences of money market fund risk taking during the European sovereign debt crisis. Using a novel data set of security-level holdings of prime money market funds, we show that funds with large exposures to risky Eurozone banks suffered significant... View Details
- Article
The Effect of Institutional Factors on the Value of Corporate Diversification
By: Venkat Kuppuswamy, George Serafeim and Belen Villalonga
Using a large sample of diversified firms from 38 countries we investigate the influence of several national-level institutional factors or 'institutional voids' on the value of corporate diversification. Specifically, we explore whether the presence of frictions in a... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The New Empirical Economics of Management
By: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and John Van Reenen
Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The New Empirical Economics of Management
By: Nicholas Bloom, Renata Lemos, Raffaella Sadun, Daniela Scur and John Van Reenen
Over the last decade the World Management Survey (WMS) has collected firm-level management practices data across multiple sectors and countries. We developed the survey to try to explain the large and persistent TFP differences across firms and countries. This review... View Details
- January 2013 (Revised August 2013)
- Case
Vietnam: Sustaining the Growth of an Asian Tiger
By: Michael E. Porter and Christian H.M. Ketels
The case tracks Vietnam's economic policy choices and performance from the end of the Vietnam war to the Doi Moi economic reforms and the economic transformation that followed. Throughout this period, the country had become a darling of the international aid community.... View Details