Providing information about contributions to public goods is known to generate further contributions. However, it is often impossible to provide verifiable information on contributions. Through a large-scale field experiment and a series of laboratory experiments, I show that nonbinding announcements of support for a public good encourage others to contribute, even when actual contributions might not or cannot be made. Providing a way to easily announce support for a charity increases donations by $865 per workplace fundraising campaign (or 16 percent of average giving). I discuss implications for understanding prosocial behavior and for organizations aiming to increase contributions to public goods. (JEL C93, D64, D83, H41, L31)

This study evaluates the relation between hostile takeovers and 17 takeover laws from 1965 to 2014. Using a data set of largely exogenous legal changes, we find that certain takeover laws, such as poison pill and business combination laws, have no discernible impact on hostile activity, while others such as fair price laws have reduced hostile takeovers. We construct a Takeover Index from the laws and find that higher takeover protection is associated with lower firm value, consistent with entrenchment and agency costs. However, conditional on a bid, firms with more protection achieve higher premiums, consistent with increased bargaining power.

The paper examines whether international regulatory harmonization increases cross-border labor migration. To study this question, we analyze European Union initiatives that harmonized accounting and auditing standards. Regulatory harmonization should reduce economic mobility barriers, essentially making it easier for accounting professionals to move across countries. Our research design compares the cross-border migration of accounting professionals relative to tightly matched other professionals before and after regulatory harmonization. We find that international labor migration in the accounting profession increases significantly relative to other professions. We provide evidence that this effect is due to harmonization, rather than increases in the demand for accounting services during the implementation of the rule changes. The findings illustrate that diversity in rules constitutes an economic barrier to cross-border labor mobility and, more specifically, that accounting harmonization can have a meaningful effect on cross-border migration.

Although economists have made substantial progress toward formulating theories of collusion in industrial cartels that account for a variety of fact patterns, important puzzles remain. Standard models of repeated interaction formalize the observation that cartels keep participants in line through the threat of punishment, but they fail to explain two important factual observations: first, apparently deliberate cheating actually occurs; second, it frequently goes unpunished even when it is detected. We propose a theory of equilibrium price cutting and business stealing in cartels to bridge this gap between theory and observation. (JEL D43, L12, L13)

Many organizations have budgets that expire at the end of the fiscal year and may face incentives to rush to spend resources on low-quality projects at year's end. We test these predictions using data on procurement spending by the US federal government. Spending in the last week of the year is 4.9 times higher than the rest-of-the-year weekly average, and year-end information technology projects have substantially lower quality ratings. We also analyze the gains from allowing agencies to roll over unused funds into the next fiscal year. (JEL H57, H61)

We examine the financial conditions of dealers that participated in two of the Federal Reserve's lender-of-last-resort (LOLR) facilities—the Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) and the Primary Dealer Credit Facility (PDCF)—that provided liquidity against a range of assets during 2008–2009. Dealers with lower equity returns and greater leverage prior to borrowing from the facilities were more likely to participate in the programs, borrow more, and, in the case of the TSLF, at higher bidding rates. Dealers with less liquid collateral on their balance sheets before the facilities were introduced also tended to borrow more. The results suggest that both financial performance and balance sheet liquidity play a role in LOLR utilization.

We document that rotation group bias—the tendency for the unemployment rate to vary systematically by month in sample—in the Current Population Survey (CPS) has worsened over time. Estimated unemployment rates for earlier rotation groups have grown sharply relative to later rotation groups; both should be nationally representative samples. This bias increased discretely after the 1994 CPS redesign, and rising nonresponse rates are likely a significant contributor. Survey nonresponse increased after the redesign, mirroring the evolution of rotation group bias. Consistent with this explanation, rotation group bias for households that responded in all eight interviews remained stable over time.

To estimate treatment heterogeneity in two randomized controlled trials of a youth summer jobs program, we implement Wager and Athey's (2015) causal forest algorithm. We provide a step-by-step explanation targeted at applied researchers of how the algorithm predicts treatment effects based on observables. We then explore how useful the predicted heterogeneity is in practice by testing whether youth with larger predicted treatment effects actually respond more in a hold-out sample. Our application highlights some limitations of the causal forest, but it also suggests that the method can identify treatment heterogeneity for some outcomes that more standard interaction approaches would have missed.