Knowledge that Transforms

Using an innovative survey measure of management practices on over 15,000 firms, we find private equity firms are better managed than government, family, and privately owned firms, and have similar management to publicly listed firms. This is true both in developed and developing countries. Looking at management practices in detail we find that private equity owned firms have strong people management practices (hiring, firing, pay, and promotions), but even stronger monitoring management practices (lean manufacturing, continuous improvement, and monitoring). Plant managers working in private equity owned firms also report greater autonomy from headquarters over sales, marketing, and new product introduction.

We analyze strategic speculators’ incentives to trade on information in a model where firm value is endogenous to trading, due to feedback from the financial market to corporate decisions. Trading reveals private information to managers and improves their real decisions, enhancing fundamental value. This feedback effect has an asymmetric effect on trading behavior: it increases (reduces) the profitability of buying (selling) on good (bad) news. This gives rise to an endogenous limit to arbitrage, whereby investors may refrain from trading on negative information. Thus, bad news is incorporated more slowly into prices than good news, potentially leading to overinvestment.

Organizations depend on members' “loyalty” for their success. Studying a cooperative's attempt to increase deliveries by members, we show that the threat of sanctions leads to highly heterogeneous response among members. Despite the cooperative not actually enforcing the threatened sanctions, positive effects for some members persist for several months. Other members “exit,” stopping delivering altogether. Among non-compliant members we document substantial heterogeneity in beliefs about the legitimacy of the sanctions. This lack of common understanding highlights the role played by managers in organizations and provides a candidate explanation for lack of sanctions enforcement documented by Ostrom (1990) and other studies.

Four explanations for secular stagnation are distinguished: a rise in global saving, slow population growth that makes investment less attractive, adverse trends in technology and productivity growth, and a decline in the relative price of investment goods. A long view from economic history is most supportive of the last of these four views.

Using historical data on the size of state-specific Mexican birth cohorts and geographic migration networks between Mexican states and US metropolitan areas, I construct an instrumental variable that predicts decadal migration from Mexico to the United States. The intuition behind this identification strategy is that larger historical birth cohorts in Mexico yield more potential migrants once each birth cohort reaches prime migration age. I report evidence that Mexican immigration is associated with a decline in property crimes and an increase in aggravated assaults. The available evidence suggests that this is not an artifact of reduced crime reporting among immigrants.

The well-known double marginalization problem understates the inefficiencies arising from vertical relations in consumer search markets where consumers are uninformed about the wholesale prices charged by manufacturers to retailers. Consumer search provides a monopoly manufacturer with an additional incentive to increase its price, worsening the double marginalization problem and lowering the manufacturer's profits. Nevertheless, manufacturers in more competitive wholesale markets may not have an incentive to reveal their prices to consumers. We show that retail prices decrease in search cost, and so both industry profits and consumer surplus increase in search cost.

This paper considers the effect of different dimensions of the FOMC's forward guidance on ex ante investor expectations about future changes in US Treasury yields. Options and Futures data for 2- and 10-year Treasuries is used to extract State-Price Densities of investor beliefs, and the corresponding standard deviation, skewness, and excess kurtosis of these densities are computed. Announcements about extension of the zero-lower bound in 2012-13 are found to reduce the expectations about crash risk, but increase the uncertainty about future yields for the 10-year. Policies about long-security purchases lead investors to place greater weight on no change in future yields.

We address the role of “psychological frictions” in the incomplete take-up of EITC benefits with an IRS field experiment. We specifically assess the influence of program confusion, informational complexity, and stigma by evaluating response to experimental mailings distributed to 35,050 tax filers who failed to claim $26 million despite an initial notice. While the mere receipt of the mailing, simplification, and the heightened salience of benefits led to substantial additional claiming, attempts to reduce perceived costs of stigma, application, and audits did not. The study, and accompanying surveys, suggests that low program awareness/understanding and informational complexity contribute to the puzzle of low take-up.

We provide a life-cycle framework for comparing insurance and disincentive effects of disability benefits. The risks that individuals face and the parameters of the Disability Insurance (DI ) program are estimated from consumption, health, disability insurance, and wage data. We characterize the effects of disability insurance and study how policy reforms impact behavior and welfare. DI features high rejection rates of disabled applicants and some acceptance of healthy applicants. Despite worse incentives, welfare increases as programs become less strict or generosity increases. Disability insurance interacts with welfare programs: making unconditional means-tested programs more generous improves disability insurance targeting and increases welfare.

We consider a multi-battle team contest in which players from two rival teams form pairwise matches to fight in distinct component battles, which are carried out sequentially or (partially) simultaneously. A team wins if and only if its players win a majority of battles. Each player benefits from his team's win, while he can also receive a private reward for winning his own battle. We find that the outcomes of past battles do not distort the outcomes of future battles. Neither the total expected effort nor the overall outcome of the contest depends on the contest's temporal structure or its feedback policy.