We examine the relationship between source-destination country cultural differences and international migration flows using data for three immigrant destination countries (i.e., Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands) and a cohort of 66 heterogeneous immigrant source countries during the years...

We examine whether political corruption impedes innovation. Using a comprehensive sample of US firms, we find that corruption has a substantial, negative relation with the quantity and quality of innovation. These results are robust to using various fixed effects, proxies for corruption and...

Political corruption imposes substantial costs on shareholders in the U.S. Yet, we understand little about the basic factors that constrain or exacerbate the negative consequences of political corruption. Using federal corruption convictions data, we find that firm-level economic rents and...

We examine the influence of mobile communication on local information flow and local investor activity using the enforcement of state-wide distracted driving restrictions, which are exogenous events that constrain mobile communication while driving. By restricting mobile communication across a...

We study the New York City taxi market to examine whether an excise tax hike on cigarettes corresponds to smoker taxi drivers more frequently cheating their customers. Increased cheating could be motivated by both financial pressures and as a reaction to unfair treatment (as surveyed smokers...

Does the onset of violent turmoil in an immigrant’s country of origin affect their honesty in economic exchange? We test this question using Egyptian cab drivers in NYC. Native country turmoil could increase demand for remittances or spur anger or anxiety, which could boost cheating, as both...

Prior research proposes that a monopolist with private information inflates their reported costs under rate regulation to extract an informational rent. Using a sample of U.S. electric utilities from 1990-2011, we first confirm an unexpected increase in operating expense during rate review...

I examine the ability of the U.S. investor protection regime to limit insider trading returns, absent Section 16(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the short-swing rule). I find that, in this setting, U.S. insiders execute short-swing trades that (i) beat the market by about 15 basis...

Motivated by survey evidence, we examine the relation between worker substance abuse and workplace fraud. In our sample of medical doctors, nearly 10% of all frauds occur in the 0.01% of worker-years when the doctor receives a professional sanction for substance abuse. Doctors receiving such...

Mobile internet devices reduce trading frictions and information search costs for investors, but also introduce attention-competing activities,such as social networking. We use exogenous nationwide and city-level outages of the Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) to investigate the effect of...