Terrorist attacks influence economic growth and individual psychology. However, identifying the direct effect of terrorism on economics and psychology is difficult because institutions also change in response to terrorist attacks. This paper controls for institutional responses to terrorist...

Compared to the federal government, the average citizen in the U.S. has far greater interaction with city governments, including policing, health services, zoning laws, utilities, schooling, and transportation. At the regional level, it is city governments that provide the infrastructure and...

This paper proposes a network model of the economy in which conglomerate firms transmit idiosyncratic shocks from one industry to another. The strength of inter-industry connections is determined by the conglomerate's share of total industry sales and by the industry's share of the...

We use the price effects caused by the passage of rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota in 2021, to study the transfer of wealth across income groups. First, we find that rent control caused property values to fall by 6-7%, for an aggregate loss of $1.6 billion. A calibrated model of house prices...

This paper exploits a novel hand-collected dataset to provide a comprehensive analysis of the social relationships that underlie illegal insider trading networks. I find that inside information flows through strong social ties based on family, friends, and geographic proximity. On average,...

The media has an incentive to publish sensational news. We study how this incentive affects the accuracy of media coverage in the context of merger rumors. Using a novel dataset, we find that accuracy is predicted by a journalist's experience, specialized education, and industry expertise....

We find strong evidence that three key dimensions of national culture (trust, hierarchy, and individualism) affect merger volume and synergy gains. The volume of cross-border mergers is lower when countries are more culturally distant. In addition, greater cultural distance in trust and...

This paper exploits hand-collected data on illegal insider trades to test whether standard illiquidity measures can detect informed trading. Controlling for unobserved cross-sectional and time-series variation, sampling bias, and strategic timing of insider trades, I find that only absolute...