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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Retail Habitat
By: Toomas Laarits and Marco Sammon
Retail investors trade hard-to-value stocks. Controlling for size, stocks with a high share of retail-initiated trades are composed of more intangible capital, have longer duration cash-flows and a higher likelihood of being mispriced. Consistent with retail-heavy...
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Keywords:
Retail;
Retail Trade;
Intangible Capital;
Mispricing;
Investment;
Valuation;
Business Earnings
- September 2022
- Article
Find and Replace: R&D Investment Following the Erosion of Existing Products
By: Joshua L. Krieger, Xuelin Li and Richard T. Thakor
How do innovative firms react when existing products experience negative shocks? We explore this question with detailed project-level data from drug development firms. Using FDA Public Health Advisories as idiosyncratic negative shocks to approved drugs, we first...
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- September 2022
- Article
The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Kaiser Permanente
By: Alyce S. Adams, Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
Most hospitals have financial assistance programs for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design based on an income threshold...
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- Winter 2022
- Article
Determinants of Small Business Reopening Decisions After COVID Restrictions Were Lifted
The COVID-19 pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, including government-imposed restrictions that temporarily shuttered millions of American businesses. We use a nation-wide survey of thousands of small business owners to establish three main facts about...
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- 2022
- Article
How to Choose a Default
By: John Beshears, Richard T. Mason and Shlomo Benartzi
We have developed a model for setting a default when a population is choosing among ordered choices—that is, ones listed in ascending or descending order. A company, for instance, might want to set a default contribution rate that will increase employees’ average...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of Minority Representation at Mortgage Lenders
By: W. Scott Frame, Ruidi Huang, Erik J. Mayer and Adi Sunderam
We study links between the labor market for loan officers and access to mortgage credit. Using novel data matching the (near) universe of mortgage applications to loan officers, we find that minorities are significantly underrepresented among loan officers. Minority...
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- Article
Present Bias Causes and Then Dissipates Auto-enrollment Savings Effects
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Peter Maxted
Present bias causes procrastination, which leads households to stick with auto-enrollment defaults. However, present bias also engenders overconsumption. Separation from each employer generates a rollover of 401(k) balances to an individual retirement account (IRA)...
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- Article
Undisclosed Debt Sustainability
By: Laura Alfaro and Fabio Kanczuk
Over the past decade, non-Paris Club creditors, notably China, have become an important source of financing for low- and middle-income countries. In contrast with typical sovereign debt, these lending arrangements are not public, and other creditors have no information...
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- Article
Scandal, Social Movement, and Change: Evidence from #MeToo in Hollywood
By: Hong Luo and Laurina Zhang
Social movements have the potential to effect change in firm decision-making. In this paper, we examine whether the #MeToo movement, spurred by the Harvey Weinstein scandal, led to changes in the likelihood of Hollywood producers working with female writers on new...
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- January 10, 2022
- Article
The Link Between Income, Income Inequality, and Prosocial Behavior Around the World: A Multiverse Approach
By: Lucia Macchia and Ashley V. Whillans
The questions of whether high-income individuals are more prosocial than low-income individuals and whether income inequality moderates this effect have received extensive attention. We shed new light on this topic by analyzing a large-scale dataset with a...
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- February 2022
- Article
Client Concerns about Information Spillovers from Sharing Audit Partners
By: Jung Koo Kang, Clive Lennox and Vivek Pandey
We hypothesize that companies in the same product market avoid sharing the same audit partner when they are concerned about possible information spillovers. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that product market rivals are less likely to share the same partner...
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- January 2022
- Article
Why Is Corporate Virtue in the Eye of the Beholder? The Case of ESG Ratings
By: Dane Christensen, George Serafeim and Anywhere Sikochi
Despite the rising use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings, there is substantial disagreement across rating agencies regarding what rating to give to individual firms. As what drives this disagreement is unclear, we examine whether a firm’s ESG...
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- December 2021
- Article
The Evolutionary Nature of Breakthrough Innovation: An Empirical Investigation of Firm Search Strategies
By: Dominika Kinga Randle and Gary P. Pisano
Breakthrough innovation has been an important topic of study for generations of scholars. Previous research in this domain has focused on exploring the way breakthroughs emerge from cumulative combination and recombination of prior technologies and knowledge components...
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- Article
No Team is an Island: How Leaders Shape Networked Ecosystems for Team Success
By: Inga Carboni, Robert Cross and Amy C. Edmondson
Today’s organizations rely on networks of dynamic systems of “agile” teams to get work done. Teams are distributed, transient, and loosely bounded in service of responsiveness and innovation. The key to this new way of doing work is managing the networked ecosystem in...
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- November 2021
- Article
Ratings, Reviews, and the Marketing of New Products
By: Itay P. Fainmesser, Dominique Olié Lauga and Elie Ofek
We study how user-generated content (UGC) about new products impacts a firm's advertising and pricing decisions and the effect on profits and market dynamics. We construct a two-period model where consumers value quality and are heterogeneous in their taste for the new...
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- November 2021
- Article
Strict ID Laws Don't Stop Voters: Evidence from a U.S. Nationwide Panel, 2008–2018
By: Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons
U.S. states increasingly require identification to vote—an ostensive attempt to deter fraud that prompts complaints of selective disenfranchisement. Using a difference-in-differences design on a 1.6-billion-observations panel dataset, 2008–2018, we find that the laws...
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- April 2021
- Article
The Effects of Retirement on Sense of Purpose in Life: Crisis or Opportunity?
By: Ayse Yemiscigil, Nattavudh Powdthavee and Ashley V. Whillans
Does retirement lead to an existential crisis or present an opportunity to experience a renewed sense of purpose in life? Prior research has documented a negative association between retirement and sense of purpose in life, suggesting that retirement could lead people...
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- Article
Using Fresh Starts to Nudge Increased Retirement Savings
By: John Beshears, Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman and Shlomo Benartzi
We conducted a field experiment to study the effect of framing future moments in time as new beginnings (or “fresh starts”). University employees (N=6,082) received mailings with an opportunity to choose between increasing their contributions to a savings plan...
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- 2022
- Working Paper
Transitory and Permanent Cash Flow Shocks in Debt Contract Design
By: Le Ma, Anywhere Sikochi and Yajun Xiao
We examine how lenders design contracts when borrowers are exposed to volatile transitory or permanent cash flow shocks. We find that volatile transitory shocks are associated with fewer liquidity covenants, indicating financial flexibility that can enable firms to...
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- October 2021
- Article
Fintech Borrowers: Lax Screening or Cream-Skimming?
By: Marco Di Maggio and Vincent Yao
Personal credit is the fastest-growing segment of the consumer credit market, mainly driven by fintech lenders' staggering expansion. We study this market using a unique individual-level data, which covers most of the top fintech and traditional lenders, and provides...
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