Publications

Public health and medical experts have clamored for increased coronavirus testing to control the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic,1 but how to implement such testing has not been carefully described. We detail a plan for aggressive community screening with the goal of controlling, if not eradicating, local severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) transmission. For at least 2 months, access to reagents, swabs, and tests have been a bottleneck. We believe this bottleneck is abating, as evidenced by recent dramatic increases in testing. The limiting factor, then, is a matter of operations and logistics. In the absence of an effective vaccine, separating persons who are unknowingly infected from individuals with susceptibility is the best way to block transmission. Ongoing community transmission demands an aggressive approach to achieve this goal.

In order to make comparisons of competitive
balance across sports leagues, we need to take into account
how different season lengths influence observed measures
of balance. We develop the first measures of competitive
balance that are invariant to season length. The most
commonly used measure, the ASD/ISD or Noll-Scully ratio,
is biased. It artificially inflates the imbalance for leagues
with long seasons (e.g., MLB) compared to those with short
seasons (e.g., NFL). We provide a general model of
competition that leads to unbiased variance estimates. The
result is a new ordering across leagues: the NFL goes from
having the most balance to being tied for the least, while
MLB becomes the sport with the most balance. Our model
also provides insight into competitive balance at the game
level. We shift attention from team-level to game-level
measures as these are more directly related to the pre-
dictability of a representative contest. Finally, we measure
competitive balance at the season level. We do so by
looking at the predictability of the final rankings as seen
from the start of the season. Here the NBA stands out for
having the most predictable results and hence the lowest
full-season competitive balance.

Commodity taxation often involves uniform tax rates. We use alcohol laws that tax differentiated spirits with a comprehensive uniform markup to evaluate redistribution generated by such simple tax policy. We document preference heterogeneity among consumers, variation in product demand elasticities, and market power among producers with heterogeneous product portfolios. Relative to more flexible product-level markups recognizing demand heterogeneity and strategic price responses of firms, we find that the uniform markup underprices less elastic spirits, implicitly subsidizing low-income and less educated residents. The uniform markup grants additional market power to small specialized firms whose product positioning benefits from the policy.

Organizational identification refers to the extent to which employees define themselves in terms of their organizational memberships. Research has shown that employees who identify with their organizations tend to make stronger contributions and exert greater effort at work. But what exactly is organizational identification, and when does it occur? Do certain factors in the workplace promote organizational identification, and what types of consequences does it have for employees and their employers? Is identification an exclusively positive phenomenon in organizations? Finally, if organizational identification is, on the whole, beneficial for organizations, what steps can managers take to foster identification among employees? This chapter seeks to address these questions and more by reviewing the literature on organizational identification.

Who is expected to donate to charity, and how much should they give? Intuitively, the less financially constrained someone is the more they should give. How then do people evaluate who is constrained and who has money to spare? We argue that perceptions of spare money are reference-dependent with respect to one’s current self: those who earn more than oneself are perceived as having an abundance of spare money and thus as ethically obligated to donate. However, those higher earners themselves report having little to spare, and thus apply lower donation standards to themselves. Moreover, a meta-analysis of our file-drawer reveals an asymmetry: individuals overestimate the spare money of higher earners but estimate the scant spare money of lower earners more accurately. Across all incomes assessed, people “pass the buck” to wealthier others (or to their future wealthier selves), who in turn, “pass the buck” to even wealthier others.

We investigate a potential source of profit to convertible bond arbitrageurs that is new to the literature: anticipatory hedging in advance of convertible bond issues. When the reference stock price in a bond contract is determined after a new issue is announced, anticipatory short selling in the underlying stock can result in “profitable price impact” (PPI). Downward stock price pressure prior to bond pricing creates an abnormally cheap embedded call option. Consistent with PPI, we document issuer stock price declines on bond pricing days that are more concentrated during the last hour of trading and are followed by partial adjustments.