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- July 2025
- Article
On the Economic Origins of Concerns Over Women’s Chastity
By: Anke Becker
This paper studies the origins and function of customs and norms that intend to keep women from being promiscuous. Using large-scale survey data from more than 100 countries, I test the anthropological theory that a particular form of preindustrial... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
The Extent and Drivers of Internal Agglomeration of U.S. Multi-Unit Firms
By: Juan Alcácer and Jasmina Chauvin
This paper examines the extent and determinants of internal agglomeration—the spatial clustering of establishments within firms. It introduces a novel methodology that benchmarks a firm’s spatial footprint against that of comparable stand-alone firms, yielding a... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Productivity Beliefs and Efficiency in Science
By: Fabio Bertolotti, Kyle R. Myers and Wei Yang Tham
We develop a method to estimate producers’ productivity beliefs in settings where output quantities and input prices are unobservable, and we use it to evaluate allocative efficiency in the market for science. Our model of researchers’ labor supply shows that their... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Public Displays of Alignment: Firm Speech in Autocratic Regimes
By: Joris Mueller, Jaya Y. Wen and Cheryl Wu
Political speech by firms is increasingly common around the world. This paper
examines the government as an important, yet understudied, audience for
such speech, focusing on how Chinese firms rhetorically align with the state.
We introduce novel, general, and... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Cash Flow Volatility, Return Predictability and Stock Price Decompositions: Why You Should Scale Prices by Trend Cash Flows
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
We address two inconvenient facts in asset pricing: (i) valuation ratios are often more related to future cash flows than to returns, and (ii) they mostly fail to predict returns. We show that these issues arise because stock prices are scaled by cash flows that... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Street Earnings: Implications for Asset Pricing
By: Sebastian Hillenbrand and Odhrain McCarthy
To address the excess volatility puzzle – the excessive movements in stock prices – researchers often study movements in valuation ratios. However, we demonstrate that movements in valuation ratios based on fundamental measures with high transitory volatility, such as... View Details
- June 2025
- Article
Gender Diversity Performance and Voluntary Disclosure: Mind the (Gender Pay) Gap
By: June Huang and Shirley Lu
We study whether voluntary gender diversity disclosure is predictive of gender diversity performance. Exploiting a mandate in the United Kingdom that requires firms to disclose 2017 gender pay gap ("GPG") data for the first time, we find that providing voluntary gender... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Trade Within Multinational Boundaries
By: Laura Alfaro, Paola Conconi, Fariha Kamal and Zachary Kroff
We leverage newly linked data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to study transactions within U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs). We show that using administrative data on intrafirm trade allows us to correct for measurement error... View Details
- May 2025
- Case
'Net Zero in Action': Impact Investing at the McKnight Foundation
By: Lauren Cohen, Christina R. Wing and Sophia Pan
Elizabeth McGeveran, Vice President of Investments at the McKnight Foundation, reflected on how to effectively advance the organization’s net-zero strategy. The foundation had committed 10% of its endowment to building a portfolio of impact investments and was among... View Details
Keywords: Investment Fund; Philanthropy; Charitable Donations; Sustainability; Foundation; Impact Investing; ESG; Family Business; Forecasting and Prediction; Private Sector; Renewable Energy; Social Entrepreneurship; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; Green Technology; Financial Strategy; Investment Funds; Investment Portfolio; Institutional Investing; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Private Ownership; Philanthropy and Charitable Giving; Social Issues; Sustainable Cities; Financial Services Industry; Minnesota; United States
- 2024
- Case
EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite
By: Jacob M. Cook
In EPCorp: Convincing the C-Suite, Shivani Bahl is attempting to sell EPCorp's CEO, Debbie Sullivan, on her ideas for not only a new website upgrade but also a more expansive vision on how data and Generative AI can be used to grow the company. Debbie is understandably... View Details
- May 2025
- Article
Imagining the Future: Memory, Simulation and Beliefs
By: Pedro Bordalo, Giovanni Burro, Katherine B. Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli and Andrei Shleifer
How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? Motivated by survey data on beliefs about Covid we collected in 2020, we build a model based on the psychology of selective memory. When a person thinks about an event,... View Details
- May–June 2025
- Article
Slowly Varying Regression Under Sparsity
By: Dimitris Bertsimas, Vassilis Digalakis Jr, Michael Lingzhi Li and Omar Skali Lami
We consider the problem of parameter estimation in slowly varying regression models with sparsity constraints. We formulate the problem as a mixed integer optimization problem and demonstrate that it can be reformulated exactly as a binary convex optimization problem... View Details
- April 2025
- Case
Thrivent: From Insurance Agents to Financial Advisors
By: Hubert Joly, Leonard A. Schlesinger and Tom Quinn
Thrivent, a midwestern financial services company with a centuries-long history rooted in Lutheranism, had reached $10 billion in revenue mostly by selling life insurance. In the 2020s, however, CEO Terry Rasmussen began a transformation process centered around the... View Details
Keywords: Change Management; Transformation; Talent and Talent Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Forecasting and Prediction; Employee Relationship Management; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Job Design and Levels; Human Capital; Leading Change; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Insurance Industry; Financial Services Industry; United States; Minneapolis
- April 2025
- Background Note
Climate Change Adaptation with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
By: Michael W. Toffel and Nabig Chaudhry
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have emerged as powerful tools to address climate change. This note summarizes a wide range of the uses of AI/ML to drive climate change adaptation and resilience, the measures organizations and governments are... View Details
- April 2025 (Revised May 2025)
- Background Note
Customer Acquisition and the Cash Flow Trap
By: E. Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller
Startups as well as existing firms recognize the need to invest in order to acquire customers for their new ventures. And as each customer is expected at some point to have generated sufficient gross margins to cover their CAC, management expects that, soon enough, the... View Details
- April 2025
- Article
Buying (Quality) Time Predicts Relationship Satisfaction
By: A.V. Whillans, Jessie Pow and Joe J. Gladstone
Seven studies examine the association between time-saving purchases (e.g., housecleaning and meal delivery services) and relationship satisfaction. Study 1 uses an eleven-year longitudinal panel survey to show that increases in time-saving purchases predict long-term... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
The Changing Climate on Wall Street
By: Clayton S. Rose, Maxim Pike Harrell and Michael Norris
Increasing and conflicting regulatory requirements and political pressures regarding climate change tested the leaders of U.S. financial institutions, as they struggled to determine how best to comply while managing their business and its risks.
In October 2024,... View Details
In October 2024,... View Details
Keywords: Competency and Skills; Decision Making; Cost vs Benefits; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Leadership; Management; Risk Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Organizational Culture; Civil Society or Community; Social Issues; Adaptation; Risk and Uncertainty; Insurance; Climate Change; Change Management; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Insurance Industry; United States; Europe
- 2025
- Working Paper
Incentive-Compatible Recovery from Manipulated Signals, with Applications to Decentralized Physical Infrastructure
By: Jason Milionis, Jens Ernstberger, Joseph Bonneau, Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden
We introduce the first formal model capturing the elicitation of unverifiable information from a party (the "source") with implicit signals derived by other players (the "observers"). Our model is motivated in part by applications in decentralized physical... View Details
- March 2025
- Article
Does Communicating Measurable Diversity Goals Attract or Repel Historically Marginalized Job Applicants? Evidence from the Lab and Field
By: Erika L. Kirgios, Ike Silver and Edward H. Chang
Many organizations struggle to attract a demographically diverse workforce. How does adding a measurable goal to a public diversity commitment—for example, “We care about diversity” versus “We care about diversity and plan to hire at least one woman or racial minority... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Unwinding Loan Prospecting Pressure Through Renegotiation: The Role of Loan Officer Changes in Debt Contracting
By: Jung Koo Kang, Regina Wittenberg Moerman and Jessie Cheong
We examine the impact of loan officer changes on debt contract design. Loan officers play a critical role in initiating and maintaining lending relationships but also face pressure to originate more loans, incentivizing them to offer loan terms more favorable than... View Details