This paper investigates the factors that make teams successful in competitive environments. In collaboration with a medium-sized Latin-American bank, we designed a series of contests among the branches of the bank, in which we varied the prize structure of the tournaments (in some tournaments,...

This paper studies differential employee responses to the public disclosure of individual performance information throughout an organization. We argue that, to the extent that employees care about their colleagues’ perceptions of their productivity, public disclosure will increase motivation....

This paper presents the results from a field experiment that examines the effects of non-financial performance feedback on the behavior of professionals working for an insurance repair company. We vary the frequency (weekly and monthly) and the level of detail of the feedback that the 800...

This paper analyzes the effects of forward-looking metrics on employee decision-making. We use data from a bank that started providing branch managers with the customer lifetime value (CLV) — an estimate of the future value of the customer relationship — of mortgage applicants. The data...

After a contract is signed, contracting partners may engage in opportunistic behavior that circumvents the original intention of the agreement governing their business relationship (i.e. complying with the letter but not the spirit of the contract). We use an incomplete contracts approach to...

We analyze geographic patterns of trade using transactions data from eBay and MercadoLibre, two large online auction sites. We find that distance continues to be an important deterrent to trade between geographically separated buyers and sellers, though at a lesser extent than has been observed...

This paper presents the results from a field experiment that examines the effects of nonfinancial performance feedback on the behavior of professionals working for an insurance repair company. We vary the frequency (weekly and monthly) and the level of detail of the feedback that the 800...

This paper investigates the relationship between monitoring, decision-making, and learning among lower level employees. We exploit a field-research setting in which business units vary in the ”tightness” with which they monitor employee decisions. We find that tighter monitoring gives rise...

This paper examines the effect of corporate governance on investor reactions to accounting choice in the context of accounting for business combinations. Using a sample of 324 recent stock swap acquisitions I find that, contrary to practitioners' belief that capital markets penalize purchase...

Banks closed over 30 million debit/checking consumer accounts involuntarily in 2001-2005 for excessive overdrafts, with these former bank customers having limited or no subsequent access to the formal banking system. Using a new county-level database, we analyze the determinants of these...