The independence of editorial content from advertisers' influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. We test whether this independence is observed in practice. We find that mutual fund recommendations are correlated with past advertising in three personal finance publications but not in...

Although mutual funds exhibit little ability to persistently outperform their peers, money flows into funds with the highest past returns. Berk and Green (2004) rationalize these patterns by arguing that more-skilled managers manage more assets but, because of diseconomies of scale, generate the...

Household demand for actuarially unfair insurance against small risks has long puzzled economists. One way to potentially rationalize this demand is to recognize that (non-life) insurance is an incentive-compatible means of engaging an expert buyer. To quantify the benefits of expert buying, we...

I review the academic literature on defined contribution retirement plan design and participant behavior. While adoption of automatic enrollment has significantly increased participation rates, recent studies find the long-run effects on savings are smaller than the short-run effects, with some...

"Transparency is usually thought to reduce favoritism and corruption by facilitating monitoring by outsiders, but there is concern it can have the perverse effect of facilitating collusion by insiders. In response to vote trading scandals in the 1998 and 2002 Olympics, the International Skating...

This paper examines the problem of a college affected by both a legal ban on affirmative action in admissions and pressure to raise enrollment of underrepresented minorities (URMs), as exemplified by UCLA, which adopted a holistic admissions process in 2006 in response to protests over low URM...

Oregon's Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) is a rich setting in which to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement-timing decisions. PERS pays retirees the maximum benefit calculated using three formulas that can be characterized as defined benefit...