Publications

Forthcoming
Article

Second Chance: Life with Less Student Debt

By: Marco Di Maggio, Ankit Kalda and Vincent Yao

This paper examines the effect of student debt relief on individual credit and labor market outcomes. We exploit an episode of plausibly random debt discharge due to the loss of paperwork for thousands of borrowers to examine the effects of private student debt relief... View Details

Keywords: Student Debt; Private Student Loans; Legal Settlement; Mobility; Debt Collection; Debt Relief; Personal Finance; Borrowing and Debt; Outcome or Result

SSRN

December 2022
Article

Kindness in Short Supply: Evidence for Inadequate Prosocial Input

By: Jennifer E. Abel, Preeti Vani, Nicole Abi-Esber, Hayley Blunden and Juliana Schroeder

In everyday life, people often have opportunities to improve others’ lives, whether offering well-intentioned advice or complimenting someone on a job well done. These are opportunities to provide “prosocial input” (information intended to benefit others), including... View Details

Keywords: Prosocial Input; Gratitude; Feedback; Advice; Behavior; Interpersonal Communication

Purchase

2015
Working Paper

Expertise vs. Bias in Evaluation: Evidence from the NIH

By: Danielle Li

Evaluators with expertise in a particular field may have an informational advantage in separating good projects from bad. At the same time, they may also have personal preferences that impact their objectivity. This paper develops a framework for separately identifying... View Details

Keywords: Prejudice and Bias; Performance Evaluation; Experience and Expertise

May 2012
Article

Correlation in the Multiplayer Electronic Mail Game

By: Peter A. Coles and Ran Shorrer

In variants of the Electronic Mail Game (Rubinstein, 1989) where two or more players communicate via multiple channels, the multiple channels can facilitate collective action via redundancy, the sending of the same message along multiple paths or else repeatedly along... View Details

Keywords: Electronic Mail Game; Stag Hunt; Coordination; Signaling; Networks; Behavior; Communication; Trust; Game Theory

October 2010
Article

Culture Clash: The Costs and Benefits of Homogeneity

By: Eric Van den Steen

This paper develops an economic theory of the costs and benefits of corporate culture-in the sense of shared beliefs and values in order to study the effects of "culture clash" in mergers and acquisitions. I first use a simple analytical framework to show that shared... View Details

Keywords: Cost vs Benefits; Organizational Culture; Economics; Information Management; Forecasting and Prediction; Values and Beliefs; Mergers and Acquisitions; Framework; Satisfaction; Motivation and Incentives; Power and Influence; Communication

Purchase

May 2009
Article

Lobbies and Technology Diffusion

By: Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn

This paper explores whether lobbies slow down technology diffusion. To answer this question, we exploit the differential effect of various institutional attributes that should affect the costs of erecting barriers when the new technology has a technologically close... View Details

Keywords: Technology Adoption; Cost; Problems and Challenges; Knowledge Dissemination; Competition

2008
Article

Governance and Merger Accounting: Evidence from Stock Price Reactions to Purchase versus Pooling

By: Francisco de Asis Martinez-Jerez

This paper examines the effect of corporate governance on investor reactions to accounting choice in the context of accounting for business combinations. Using a sample of 324 recent stock swap acquisitions I find that, contrary to practitioners' belief that capital... View Details

Keywords: Financial Reporting; Financial Statements; Mergers and Acquisitions; Capital Markets; Stocks; Price; Corporate Governance

SSRN

July/August 2004
Article

Stakeholders and Environmental Management Practices: An Institutional Framework

By: Magali Delmas and Michael W. Toffel

Despite burgeoning research on companies' environmental strategies and environmental management practices, it remains unclear why some firms adopt environmental management practices beyond regulatory compliance. This paper leverages institutional theory by proposing... View Details

Keywords: Strategy; Management Practices and Processes; Environmental Management; Adoption; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Organizational Structure; Factories, Labs, and Plants; Competition; Framework; Governance Compliance; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms

December 1988
Article

Strategic Responses to Automobile Emissions Control: A Game-Theoretic Analysis

By: Dennis Yao

This paper examines the dynamics of standard-setting regulation under technological uncertainty and asymmetric information about technological capability. A two-period model which allows fully strategic action is developed and applied to the regulation of automobile... View Details

Keywords: Transportation; Pollutants; Standards; Governance Controls; Technological Innovation; Research and Development; Mathematical Methods

Rising student debt is considered one of the creeping threats of our time. This paper examines the effect of student debt relief on individual credit and labor View Details

January 2023
Article

Racial Diversity and Racial Policy Preferences: The Great Migration and Civil Rights

By: Alvaro Calderon, Vasiliki Fouka and Marco Tabellini

Between 1940 and 1970, more than 4 million African Americans moved from the South to the North of the United States, during the Second Great Migration. This same period witnessed the struggle and eventual success of the civil rights movement in ending institutionalized... View Details

Keywords: Civil Rights; Great Migration; History; Race; Rights; Prejudice and Bias; Government Legislation