Publications

Healthcare is one of the largest global industries, encompassing a wide range of occupations, organizational designs, and advanced technologies within different types of systems and forms of ownership (public, for-profit, non-profit). The complexity, range, scale, and importance of the work conducted in the healthcare sector render it an ideal context for scholars engaged in management and organizational research to develop novel, generalizable, and useful theories aligned with the mission of Administrative Science Quarterly.

We are thrilled to feature seven insightful and impactful papers that showcase healthcare as an important context to advance the study of organizations and management.

This context was long the purview of scholars in other disciplines writing solely for healthcare audiences, but management scholars recently have given increased attention to studying healthcare organizations and their management. We were ecstatic to discover that the publication rate of ASQ articles featuring research conducted in healthcare contexts has increased in the last decade relative to prior decades.

We present a new database of banking-crisis interventions from the Roman Empire
to the present, covering 1,946 interventions in 20 categories across 143 countries.
We demonstrate that crisis-intervention patterns are significantly related to income
and fiscal variables and to measures of the political system and currency regime.
GDP losses following crises are economically significant and are larger for
wealthier countries, with some evidence that these losses are mitigated by
democratic political systems and liberal currency regimes. Finally, intervention
frequencies reached an apex during the post-Bretton Woods era, continuing a
secular increase since at least the late 17th century.

People have a more-nuanced view of misinformation than the binary distinction between “fake news” and “real news” implies. We distinguish between the truth of a statement's verbatim details (i.e., the specific, literal information) and its gist (i.e., the general, overarching meaning), and suggest that people tolerate and intentionally spread misinformation in part because they believe its gist. That is, even when they recognize a claim as literally false, they may judge it as morally acceptable to spread because they believe it is true “in spirit.” Prior knowledge, partisanship, and imagination increase belief in the gist. We argue that partisan conflict about the morality of spreading misinformation hinges on disagreements not only about facts but also about gists.

The fact that Amazon was allowed to acquire hundreds of companies as it rose to become the fourth most valuable U.S. company in terms of market capitalization and a leader in three lines of business has been viewed by some as damning evidence of underenforcement by the United States antitrust authorities. In this article we ask the obvious question: If the 2023 Guidelines had been in place instead of prior guidelines, what effects would they have had on Amazon’s development? To provide an answer, we identify relevant changes in the guidelines and then select for review a subset of Amazon’s 280 acquisitions over the period 1998 to 2022. In our counterfactual, we analyze five horizontal acquisitions, four vertical acquisitions, and two sets of serial acquisitions. We find that the 2023 Guidelines would have broadened the bases for potential challenges and thereby would have increased the likelihood that Amazon would have faced greater resistance from antitrust authorities. The lack of safe harbors, the plasticity of individual Guidelines, and the optionality to challenge mergers under alternative theories would have exposed most of Amazon’s acquisitions to challenge. The lack of meaningful guidance about which individual transactions would have been challenged suggests that going forward enforcer discretion will play a yet larger role. Regarding Amazon’s serial acquisitions of nearly one hundred technology firms, we find that the 2023 Guidelines would have provided multiple rationales for intervention. Therein lies a weakness in the Guidelines and in antitrust policy: the lack of a framework for assessing both the anticompetitive and procompetitive effects of such acquisitions in high-tech industries.

Governments use their countries’ economic strength from financial and trade relationships to achieve geopolitical and economic goals. We provide a model of the sources of geoeconomic power and how it is wielded. The source of this power is the ability of a hegemonic country to coordinate threats across disparate eco- nomic relationships as a mean of enforcement on foreign entities. The hegemon wields this power to demand costly actions out of the targeted entities, including mark-ups, import restrictions, tariffs, and political concessions. The hegemon uses its power to change targeted entities’ activities to manipulate the global equilib- rium in its favor and increase its power. A sector is strategic either in helping the hegemon form threats or in manipulating the world equilibrium via input-output amplification. The hegemon acts a global enforcer, thus adding value to the world economy, but destroys value by distorting the equilibrium in its favor.

Global powers, like the United States and China, exert influence on other countries by threatening the suspension or alteration of financial and trade relationships. We show that the mechanisms that generate gains from integration and specialization, such as external economies of scale, also increase these countries’ power to exert economic influence because in equilibrium they make other relationships poor substitutes for those with a global hegemon. We study how smaller countries can insulate themselves from geoeconomic pressure from the great powers by pursuing anti-coercion policy. We show that while an individual country can make itself better off, uncoordinated attempts by multiple countries to limit their dependency on the hegemon lead to unwinding the global gains from integration and fragmenting the global financial and trade system. Countries resort to inefficient home alternatives the more so hegemons are expected to want to exert their influence in disruptive ways. An integrated liberal world order emerges as an equilibrium when the hegemon’s incentives are well aligned with the world economy, politically and economically. Generically, the world economy fragments along political and economic alignments. We study a leading application focusing on financial services and payment systems as both a tool of coercion by the hegemon and an industry with strong strategic complementarities at the global level.

Fundraising campaigns draw support from a wide pool of contributors. Some contributors are interested in private rewards offered in exchange for contributions (buyers), whereas others are publicly-minded and value success (donors). Buyers face a coordination problem because of the positive externalities of campaign success. A leadership donor who strategically times contributions can promote coordination by dynamically signaling his valuation. The ability to signal increases the probability of success and benefits all participants relative to the donor valuation being known. We validate our modeling assumptions and theoretical predictions using Kickstarter data.

Economics Job Market Rumors (EJMR) is an online forum and clearing house for infor-
mation about the academic job market for economists. It also includes content that is
abusive, defamatory, racist, misogynistic, or otherwise “toxic.” Almost all of this content
is created anonymously by contributors who receive a four-character username when post-
ing on EJMR. Using only publicly available data we show that the statistical properties of
the scheme by which these usernames were generated allows the IP addresses from which
most posts were made to be determined with high probability.1 We recover 47,630 distinct
IP addresses of EJMR posters and attribute them to 66.1% of the roughly 7 million posts
made over the past 12 years. We geolocate posts and describe aggregated cross-sectional
variation—particularly regarding toxic, misogynistic, and hate speech—across sub-forums,
geographies, institutions, and IP addresses. Our analysis suggests that content on EJMR
comes from all echelons of the economics profession, including, but not limited to, its elite
institutions.

An influential emerging literature documents strong correlations between carbon emissions and stock returns. We re-examine those data and conclude that these associations are driven by two factors. First, stock returns are correlated only with unscaled emissions estimated by the data vendor, but not with unscaled emissions actually disclosed by firms. Vendor-estimated emissions systematically differ from firm-disclosed emissions and are highly correlated with financial fundamentals, suggesting that prior findings primarily capture the association between such fundamentals and returns. Second, unscaled emissions, the variable typically used in academic literature, is correlated with stock returns but emissions intensity (emissions scaled by firm size), an equally important measure used in practice, is not. While unscaled emissions represent an important metric for society, we argue that, for individual firms, emissions intensity is an appropriate measurement choice to assess carbon performance. The associations between emissions and returns disappear after accounting for either of the issues above.

We develop a tractable dynamic contracting framework to study bank bail-in regimes. In the presence of a repeated monitoring problem, the optimal bank capital structure combines standard debt, which induces liquidation and provides strong incentives, and bail-in debt, which restores solvency but provides weaker incentives. When there are fire sales, optimal policy entails joint regulation: a bail-in regime reduces standard debt while leverage regulation reduces total debt. Bail-ins replace bailouts as a recapitalization tool.

I study the long-term effects of landing a first job at a large firm versus a small one using Spanish administrative data. Size could be a relevant employer attribute for inexperienced workers since large firms are associated with greater productivity, wages, and training. The key empirical challenge is selection into first jobs based on unobserved worker characteristics. I develop an instrumental variable approach that, keeping business cycle conditions fixed, leverages variation in the composition of labor demand that labor market entrants face. Initially matching with a larger firm persistently improves long-term outcomes, even through subsequent jobs. Mechanisms suggest better skill development at large firms.

When consumers encounter unfamiliar products, they often face difficulty in understanding
which attributes are crucial, leading to challenges in product comparison and potential di-
minished interest in the category. This study examines how firms strategically communicate
the importance of product attributes in a competitive environment. Despite consumer aware-
ness of attributes and their levels, ambiguity regarding their relative importance remains.
We analyze a situation where two firms each receive a noisy signal about the true attribute
importance and convey this information to consumers through cheap-talk messages. Follow-
ing these communications, consumers decide whether to incur a cost to further explore the
category by visiting stores. Our findings reveal a truthful equilibrium where firms honestly
report their received signals. In this equilibrium, when both firms’ messages align, their
collective messages can credibly convey information about the more important attribute,
thereby encouraging store visits and purchase. Interestingly, firms may still find it advan-
tageous to truthfully highlight an attribute, even if it doesn’t align with their competitive
advantage. Moreover, we show that without competition (i.e., a single firm communicating),
this truthful equilibrium does not exist. Thus, the presence of the competition enables the
credible communication of information about attribute importance, benefiting both firms
by enhancing consumer engagement with the product category

The emergence of the AI-driven digital economy has raised concerns among economists and policymakers regarding the market power of firms that sell data. The unique characteristics of data, such as its large fixed cost and ability to be replicated at zero marginal cost, suggest the potential for natural monopolies in data markets. However, little is known about how data markets function and how data is priced. This paper documents characteristics of data markets, explores the potential market power of data monopolists through theoretical analysis and uses modeling and data together to explore how consumers fare under different data pricing models. The authors develop a dynamic model of a monopolist data seller with two crucial features: Data that many other buyers also have loses value, and data sellers cannot commit not to sell the same data to more buyers in the future. In such circumstances, even data monopolists have limited power to extract profits. Customers who anticipate more future sales of the data they buy will discount the value of the data. Customers’ willingness to pay for something that many others will know tomorrow is low. Thus, the concern shifts from excessive profits to potential under-provision of data.

Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpaid domestic work have been affected by the pandemic, with individuals seeing mothers’ relative to fathers’ share of housework and child care as even larger. Moderation analyses revealed that the effect of the pandemic on descriptive norms about child care decreased with countries’ increasing levels of gender equality; countries with stronger gender inequality showed a larger difference between pre- and post-pandemic. This study documents a shift in descriptive norms and discusses implications for gender equality—emphasizing the importance of addressing the additional challenges that mothers face during health-related crises.

This paper examines the effect of state-level monitoring on municipal governance, focusing on outcomes in financial reporting quality, local corruption, political entrenchment, and municipal financial soundness. I exploit the staggered adoption of fiscal monitoring policies that entail a regular review of municipal financial reports for signs of fiscal distress. I find that introducing these monitoring policies is associated with an increase in the proxies for reporting quality, a decrease in the number of corruption convictions, and a reduction in re-election likelihood for incumbent politicians. Consistent with the purpose of the policies, my evidence shows that fiscal health ratios of municipalities improve after initiating state monitoring. Collectively, my results are consistent with state fiscal monitoring improving several important aspects of municipal governance.

We introduce a model of dynamic pricing in perishable goods markets with competition and provide conditions for equilibrium uniqueness. Pricing dynamics are rich because both own and competitor scarcity affect future profits. We identify new competitive forces that can lead to misallocation due to selling units too quickly: the Bertrand scarcity trap. We empirically estimate our model using daily prices and bookings for competing U.S. airlines. We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes to those where firms use pricing heuristics based on observed internal pricing rules at a large airline. We find that pricing heuristics increase revenues (4-5%) and consumer surplus (3%).

Violence against civilians has killed nearly one million people worldwide and displaced
millions more over the past three decades. This paper examines the economic forces driving
civilian persecution in Myanmar. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that
violence against civilians increases in rice-suitable townships when rice prices rise, the op-
posite pattern of that documented in the literature on two-sided conflicts. We argue that
large power asymmetries inherent in civilian persecution explain this difference. Higher re-
turns from expropriating rice harvests and rice-growing inputs during these periods drive
the pattern we observe in Myanmar, which we corroborate with an original survey of Ro-
hingya refugees forcibly displaced to Bangladesh. Our work demonstrates how to generate
systematic and representative evidence on civilian persecution in politically sensitive and
data-poor contexts.

The DMA raises tantalising opportunities for app stores innovation, making it the most exciting area of digital regulation.

We demonstrate how to obtain the distribution of consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for digital subscription products, where consumers pay a fixed price each period for potentially unlimited usage, for example, music streaming like Spotify. Typically, in such applications, usage data are observed and is critically valuable for the method here. We demonstrate how variation in usage and subscription choice together can identify the WTP distribution in the absence of price variation. Our framework accommodates and builds upon a range of utility specifications for usage, which is related to subscription decisions. We provide the conditions required on exogenous variation impacting usage, and prove how these lead to identification of the WTP distribution. We also investigate the conditions under which usage variation is not equivalent to price variation. We apply our method to an empirical application using the data from a music streaming service. Using the estimated WTP distribution, we obtain the revenue maximizing prices for different consumer segments.