Motivated by challenges faced by firms entering an unknown market, we study a strategic investment problem in a duopoly setting. The favorableness of the market is unknown to both firms, but firms have prior information about it. A leader invests first by choosing its investment size. Then, in a continuous-time Bayesian setting, a competitive follower dynamically learns about whether the market is favorable or not by observing the leader’s earnings, and chooses its investment size and timing. In this setting, we characterize equilibrium strategies of firms.
The selection of novel ideas is vital to the development of truly innovative products. Firms often turn to idea crowdsourcing challenges, in which both ideators and the seeker firms participate in the idea selection process. Yet prior research cautions that ideators and seeker firms may not select novel ideas. To address the links between idea novelty and selection, this study proposes a bi-faceted notion of idea novelty and probes the role of task structure.
We study how an improvement in contracting institutions due to the 1999 U.S.-China bilateral agreement affects U.S. firms’ innovation. We show that U.S. firms operating in China decrease their process innovations—innovations that improve firms’ own production methods—following the agreement.
We empirically study the spatiotemporal location problem motivated by an online retailer that uses the Buy-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store fulfillment method. Customers pick up their orders from trucks parked at specific locations on specific days, and the retailer’s problem is to determine where and when these pickups occur. Customer demand is influenced by the convenience of pickup locations and days.
We study dynamic decision-making under uncertainty when, at each period, a decision-maker implements a solution to a combinatorial optimization problem. The objective coefficient vectors of said problem, which are unobserved prior to implementation, vary from period to period.
To enhance our understanding of emerging markets, we study a data set from the Casablanca stock exchange containing all the transaction records over a long span. The exchange was included in 1996 in the International Finance Corporation (IFC) data base roughly 3 years after important market reforms.
This study examines the relation between audit personnel salaries and office-level audit quality. We measure audit personnel salaries at the associate, senior, and manager ranks for Big 4 audit offices from 2004 to 2013, using unique individual-auditor-level data obtained from the U.S. Department of Labor.
This study provides evidence on whether investors value tax gross-up provisions for executives, and how the elimination of these provisions changes executive compensation. We examine the market response to tax gross-up eliminations and find investors react favorably to the removal of these provisions, suggesting that on average, investors perceived these agreements as a bad compensation practice that destroyed firm value.
We study differences in the effects of prices, non-price promotions, and brand line length on brand shares at different retail formats. Our conceptual framework rests on the presence of trip level fixed and category level variable utility components and shows how the trade-off between these components results in (i) different formats visited on different types of shopping trips; and (ii) differential marginal sensitivities of brand shares to changes in marketing mix variables across trip types.
This study examines the effects of mandatory IFRS adoption on accounting-based prediction models for CDS spreads for a sample of 357 firms in 16 IFRS-adopting countries. We do this by estimating accounting-based prediction models for CDS spreads separately for financial and non-financial firms before and after mandatory IFRS adoption. We find that mean and median absolute percentage prediction errors are larger for both financial and non-financial firms after mandatory IFRS adoption. We also estimate accounting-based prediction models for CDS spreads separately for financial and non-financial US firms before and after mandatory IFRS adoption to obtain prediction errors serve that as a benchmark.
This study finds that greater asymmetric timeliness of earnings in reflecting good and bad news is associated with slower resolution of investor disagreement and uncertainty at earnings announcements. These findings indicate that a potential cost of asymmetric timeliness is added complexity from requiring investors to disaggregate earnings into good and bad news components to assess the implications of the earnings announcement for their investment decisions.
This paper provides the first study of compensation and pay-for-performance for top executives at non-profit endowments. Using a detailed breakdown of compensation from IRS filings over the 2009-2017 period, we find that pay packages of Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) depend more heavily on bonuses than do those for other non-profit executives.
We study multi-period sales-force incentive contracting where salespeople can engage in effort gaming, a phenomenon that has extensive empirical support. Focusing on a repeated moral hazard scenario with two independent periods and a risk-neutral agent with limited liability, we conduct a theoretical investigation to understand which effort profiles the firm can expect under the optimal contract. We show that various effort profiles that may give the appearance of being sub-optimal, such as postponing effort exertion (“hockey stick”) and not exerting effort after a bad or a good initial demand outcome (“giving up” and “resting on laurels,” respectively) may indeed be induced optimally by the firm.
We study complexity in the market for securitized products, a market at the heart of the financial crisis of 2007–9. The complexity of these products rose substantially in the years preceding the financial crisis. We find that securities in more complex deals default more and have lower realized returns.
We study the effect of senior manager oversight on inventors’ productivity. We use changes in travel times between inventors and their employer’s headquarters caused by flight time changes as sources of plausibly exogenous variation in manager oversight of inventors.
We study commitments to reduce emissions by firms subject to the European Union Emission Trading System (EU ETS), the world's largest cap-and-trade program. Commitments are associated with a drop in the number of carbon allowances surrendered, consistent with firms taking actions to reduce their emissions. However, firms subsequently increase their sales of allowances on the secondary market, transferring the right to pollute to others and potentially leaving aggregate emissions unchanged.
We study the problem of dynamically assigning jobs to workers with two key aspects: (i) workers gain or lose familiarity with jobs over time based on whether they are assigned or unassigned to the jobs, and (ii) the availability of workers and jobs is stochastic. This problem is motivated by applications in operating room management, where a fundamental challenge is maintaining familiarity across the workforce over time by accounting for heterogeneous worker learning rates and stochastic availability.
The case study "Electronic Financial-Advisor for Tech Savvy" (EFforTS, or Efforts) examines a Robo-Advisor start-up based in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded by tech-industry entrepreneurs. Efforts developed an algorithm-based online investment platform tailored for technology professionals, gaining attention through successful social media marketing.
We study the impact of widespread adoption of work-at-home technology using an equilibrium model where people choose where to live, how to allocate their time between working at home and at the office, and how much space to use in production. A key parameter is the elasticity of substitution between working at home and in the office that we estimate using cross-sectional time-use data.
Using a comprehensive and proprietary dataset on international private equity activity, we study the determinants of buyout investments across 61 countries and 19 industries over the period of 1990-2017. We find evidence that macroeconomic conditions, development of stock and credit markets, and the regulatory environment in a country are important drivers of international buyout capital flows.