This paper presents new evidence on the critical role of lower-level organizational leaders. Unlike top managers, frontline leaders are essential for implementing organizational strategies by maintaining team cohesion when shirking is profitable for workers. We study this in the context of the...

Governments often place restrictions on the transferability of property rights to protect property owners from making “mistakes” such as selling their property under value. However, these restrictions entail costs: they reduce the property’s value as collateral in credit markets, limit...

Governments sometimes place restrictions on the transferability of property rights to prevent the property's owners from making "mistakes" such as selling their property under value. Such restrictions have often been applied to poor and indigenous communities around the world. The potentially...

This paper studies the biggest fiscal challenge currently facing many U.S. cities, namely public-sector pension obligations. Employing a regression discontinuity design (RDD), it tests whether the mayor's party impacts a city's public-sector pensions. Pension benefits are shown to grow faster...

This paper provides causal evidence of the effect of private prisons on criminal sentencing. Our identification strategy uses state-level changes in private-prison capacity and compares changes in sentencing across trial court pairs that straddle state borders. We find that a doubling of private...

Existing empirical evidence suggests a pervasive pattern of electoral cycles in criminal sentencing in the U.S.: judges appear to pass more punitive sentences when they are up for re-election, consistent with models of signaling where voters have more punitive preferences than judges. However,...

Using a newly constructed complete monthly panel of private and public state prisons, we ask whether private prisons impact judges' sentencing decisions in their state. We employ two identification strategies, a difference-in-difference strategy comparing court-pairs that straddle state-borders,...