Working Papers

CEO compensation is a highly controversial subject. While most company directors believe that CEO pay is not a problem, the majority of the American public believes that it is. The difficulties that boards face in...

We present a rational theory of reform fatigue. At each instant a politician chooses to divide effort between reforms and the status quo, and this choice is modeled as a two-armed bandit problem. Reforms are...

This paper examines the approaches accounting researchers use to draw causal inferences using observational (or non-experimental) data. The vast majority of accounting research papers draw causal inferences notwithstanding the well-known difficulties in doing so. While...

We consider a problem where an uninformed principal makes a timing decision interacting with an informed but biased agent. Because time is irreversible, the direction of the bias crucially affects the agent’s ability to credibly...

This paper conceptualizes HP’s history of becoming between 1939 and 2015 in terms of an integral process overview encompassing seven distinct epochs and associated corporate transformations, and discusses the differential contributions of successive CEOs to...

This paper examines expected return information obtained by studying how security analysts allocate their limited attention and resources. Specifically, we decompose analyst coverage into abnormal and expected components using a simple characteristic based model and...

This paper investigates the consequences of liquidation and reorganization on the allocation and subsequent utilization of assets in bankruptcy. We identify 129,000 bankrupt establishments and construct a novel dataset that tracks the occupancy, employment and...

This paper explores the dynamics of corporate leverage when funding decisions are made in the interests of shareholders. In the absence of prior commitments or regulations, shareholder-creditor conflicts give rise to a leverage ratchet effect,...

We present a laboratory experiment to study the formation of dynamic coalitions in a bargaining setting where the current status quo policy is determined by the policy implemented in the previous period. Our main experimental...