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"2001-2012"
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All the ways we kill and die : an elegy for a fallen comrade, and the hunt for his killer
\"When Brian Castner, an Iraq War vet, learns that his friend and EOD brother Matt has been killed by an IED in Afghanistan, he goes to console Matt's widow, but he also begins a personal investigation. Is the bomb maker who killed Matt the same man American forces have been hunting since Iraq, known as the Engineer? In this nonfiction thriller Castner takes us inside the manhunt for this elusive figure, meeting maimed survivors, interviewing the forensics teams who gather post-blast evidence, the wonks who collect intelligence, the drone pilots and contractors tasked to kill\"--Dust jacket flap.
Book
IS THE TIME ALLOCATED TO REVIEW PATENT APPLICATIONS INDUCING EXAMINERS TO GRANT INVALID PATENTS? EVIDENCE FROM MICROLEVEL APPLICATION DATA
We explore how examiner behavior is altered by the time allocated for reviewing patent applications. Insufficient examination time may hamper examiner search and rejection efforts, leaving examiners more inclined to grant invalid applications. To test this prediction, we use application-level data to trace the behavior of individual examiners over the course of a series of promotions that carry with them reductions in examination time allocations. We find evidence demonstrating that such promotions are associated with reductions in examination scrutiny and increases in granting tendencies, as well as evidence that those additional patents being issued on the margin are of below-average quality.
Journal Article
Procyclical Leverage and Value-at-Risk
The availability of credit varies over the business cycle through shifts in the leverage of financial intermediaries. Empirically, we find that intermediary leverage is negatively aligned with the banks' Value-at-Risk (VaR). Motivated by the evidence, we explore a contracting model that captures the observed features. Under general conditions on the outcome distribution given by extreme value theory (EVT), intermediaries maintain a constant probability of default to shifts in the outcome distribution, implying substantial deleveraging during downturns. For some parameter values, we can solve the model explicitly, thereby endogenizing the VaR threshold probability from the contracting problem.
Journal Article
Air Pollution and Criminal Activity
A growing literature documents that air pollution adversely impacts health, productivity, and cognition. This paper provides the first evidence of a causal link between air pollution and aggressive behavior, as documented by violent crime. Using the geolocation of crimes in Chicago from 2001–2012, we compare crime upwind and downwind of major highways on days when wind blows orthogonally to the road. Consistent with research linking pollution to aggression, we find that air pollution increases violent crime on the downwind sides of interstates. Our results suggest that pollution may reduce welfare and affect behavior through a wider set of channels than previously considered.
Journal Article
Board Ancestral Diversity and Firm-Performance Volatility
We proxy for board members' opinions and values using directors' ancestral origins and show that diversity has costs and benefits, leading to high performance volatility. Consistent with the idea that diverse groups experiment more, firms with ancestrally diverse boards have more numerous and more cited patents. In addition, their strategies conform less to those of the industry peers. However, firms with greater ancestral diversity also have more board meetings and make less predictable decisions. These findings suggest that diversity may lead to inefficiencies in the decision-making process and conflicts in the boardroom.
Journal Article
Hostile Resistance to Hedge Fund Activism
When facing hedge fund activists, target firms often fight back. Targets with agency problems and those confronting the threat of investor coordination frequently engage in hostile resistance by implementing governance changes associated with managerial entrenchment. The market negatively responds to hostile resistance, and unless hedge funds counterresist, these campaigns have worse operating performance, faster activist exit, and fewer mergers than do campaigns without hostile target resistance. By contrast, when hedge funds counterresist with proxy fights, lawsuits, or unsolicited tender offers, the impact of hostile target resistance is reversed, and these campaigns have similar outcomes to campaigns without hostile target resistance.
Journal Article
DISCRIMINATION AS A SELF-FULFILLING PROPHECY
Examining the performance of cashiers in a French grocery store chain, we find that manager bias negatively affects minority job performance. In the stores studied, cashiers work with different managers on different days and their schedules are determined quasi-randomly. When minority cashiers, but not majority cashiers, are scheduled to work with managers who are biased (as determined by an implicit association test), they are absent more often, spend less time at work, scan items more slowly, and take more time between customers. This appears to be because biased managers interact less with minorities, leading minorities to exert less effort. Manager bias has consequences for the average performance of minority workers: while on average minority and majority workers perform equivalently, on days where managers are unbiased, minorities perform significantly better than do majority workers. The findings are consistent with statistical discrimination in hiring whereby because minorities underperform when assigned to biased managers, the firm sets a higher hiring standard for minorities to get similar average performance from minority and nonminority workers.
Journal Article
Do Walmart Supercenters Improve Food Security?
This paper examines the effect that Walmart Supercenters, which lower food prices and expand food availability, have on food insecurity. Data come from the 2001–2012 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplements matched to Walmart Supercenter entry dates and locations. Using instrumental variables models that leverage Walmart’s predictable expansion pattern outward from corporate headquarters, we find that closer proximity to a Walmart Supercenter improves household and child food security, as measured by affirmative responses to a food insecurity questionnaire and an indicator for food insecurity. The effects are largest among lowincome households and children but are also sizeable for middle-income children.
Journal Article
ECB Monetary Policy Surprises: Identification Through Cojumps in Interest Rates
This paper proposes a new econometric approach to disentangle two distinct response patterns of the yield curve to monetary policy announcements. Based on cojumps in intraday tick data of short- and long-term interest rate futures, we develop a day-wise test that detects the occurrence of a significant policy surprise and identifies the market perceived source of the surprise. The new test is applied to 133 policy announcements of the European Central Bank (ECB) in the period from 2001 to 2012. Our main findings indicate a good predictability of ECB policy decisions and remarkably stable perceptions about the ECB’s policy preferences.
Journal Article