Knowledge that Transforms

This paper is a survey of the literature on boards of directors, with an emphasis on research done subsequent to the Benjamin E. Hermalin and Michael S. Weisbach (2003) survey. The two questions most asked about boards are what determines their makeup and what determines their actions? These questions are fundamentally intertwined, which complicates the study of boards because makeup and actions are jointly endogenous. A focus of this survey is how the literature, theoretical as well as empirical, deals—or on occasions fails to deal—with this complication. We suggest that many studies of boards can best be interpreted as joint statements about both the director-selection process and the effect of board composition on board actions and firm performance.

We document a positive correlation between stock market capitalization and price levels (wages) within the group of countries with poorly developed stock markets and a negative correlation between these two variables within the group of countries with more developed stock markets. This paper argues that there is a causal relationship behind these correlations. Stock markets initially stimulate growth, pushing the demand for nontradables and increasing prices and wages. Stock markets also promote a shift toward more capital-intensive technologies in the tradable sector, increasing the migration of workers to services and eventually putting downward pressure on wages and prices.

Universities are engaged in many activities, primarily research and teaching. Many states have instituted performance measures that focus on evaluating a university's success in teaching. We suggest that multitasking may be important in this context, and we consider research outcomes after adoption. We find striking results that depend on university status. Research activity is higher at flagship institutions after the adoption of performance measures. Most of this increase in activity is with respect to the level of research funding and the number of articles produced. In contrast, research funding and the number of publications is dramatically lower at nonflagship institutions. There is some evidence that citations per publication at nonflagship institutions are higher after the adoption of performance standards. The evidence suggests that universities have become more specialized since the introduction of these programs.

In a natural experiment among former colonies between 1970 and 1999, weak institutions reflected in high settler mortality and French legal origin often increase the likelihood and intensity of local currency and real crises (i.e., those resulting in a drop in real output) amid six global crises. The effects of institutions on crises are often mediated through macroeconomic policies, but they are often not primary channels. Persistent institutions (i.e., those reflected in the legal origins and settler mortality) predict the occurrence and intensity of crises better than time-varying institutions do.

Recent evidence from Bound, Brown, and Mathiowetz (2001) and Black, Sanders, and Taylor (2003) suggests that reporting errors in survey data routinely violate all of the classical measurement error assumptions. The econometrics literature has not considered the consequences of fully arbitrary measurement error for identification of regression coefficients. This paper highlights the severity of the identification problem given the presence of even infrequent arbitrary errors in a binary regressor. In the empirical component, health insurance misclassification rates of less than 1.3% generate double-digit percentage point ranges of uncertainty about the variable's true marginal effect on the use of health services.

Why do people frequently cooperate in defiance of their immediate incentives? One explanation is that individuals are conditionally cooperative. As an explanation of behavior in one-shot settings, such preferences require individuals to be able to discern their opponents' preferences. Using data from a television game show, we provide evidence about how individuals implement conditionally cooperative preferences. We show that contestants forgo large sums of money to be cooperative; they cooperate at heightened levels when their opponents are predictably cooperative; and they fare worse when their observable characteristics predict less cooperation because opponents avoid cooperating with them.

Consumption commitments—goods like housing for which adjustment is costly—change the relationship between risk and consumption. Commitment provides a motive to reduce consumption when possible future losses are too small to warrant adjustment but not when losses are large enough that adjustment would be worthwhile. This implies conditions under which mean-preserving increases in risk can increase housing consumption. Our empirical evidence exploits the interaction of these conditions with a novel proxy for unemployment risk: couples sharing an occupation. Consistent with our model, same-occupation couples consume more housing only when adjustment costs are high and potential losses are sufficiently large.

We use data on vote outcomes from a universal voucher initiative to examine whether white households with children in public schools will use vouchers to leave predominantly nonwhite schools, thereby contributing to more racially and ethnically segregated schools. We find that white households are more likely to support vouchers when their children attend schools with larger concentrations of nonwhite schoolchildren, an effect that is absent for nonwhite households and households without children. This result may be driven less by race or ethnicity and more by other characteristics, such as student performance, that are correlated with race or ethnicity.

Marriage allows couples to diversify labor income risks and dynamically coordinate labor supply decisions in response to shocks. This paper argues that these risk-sharing benefits of marriage are countercyclical; husbands' and wives' income changes are more positively correlated when the economy is growing rapidly. As a result, while individuals face more idiosyncratic income risk in bad times than in good, households do not. I exploit variation in the cross-sectional covariance of husbands' and wives' incomes to infer the covariance of past income changes. Couples with marriages spanning periods of greater economic expansion have more positively correlated incomes in the cross-section.