Within the last five years, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand have joined the ranks of the United Kingdom and other countries in issuing government bonds that are indexed to inflation. Some observers of the experience in these countries have argued that the United States should follow suit. This...

Do returns in private equity (PE) rise or fall with fund scale? This question is increasingly urgent amid larger funds and new focus on the retail market. Since better managers can raise larger funds, the causal effect is difficult to identify. We develop an instrument based on gifts to...

We show that the standard equation-by-equation OLS used in performance evaluation ignores information in the alpha population and leads to severely biased estimates for the alpha population. We propose a new framework that treats fund alphas as random effects. Our framework allows us to make...

We study the joint determination of fund managers' contracts and equilibrium asset prices. Because of agency frictions, investors make managers' fees more sensitive to performance and benchmark performance against a market index. This makes managers unwilling to deviate from the index and...

We estimate price regressions for surgical procedures used to treat colon cancer, a leading cause of cancer mortality. Using a claims database for self-insured employers, we focus on transaction prices, rather than more commonly available billing data that do not reflect actual payments made....

The literature has not unambiguously established that a positive alpha, as traditionally measured, means that an investor would want to buy a fund. However, when alpha is defined using the client's marginal utility function, a client faced with a positive alpha would generally want to buy. When...

Education officials often use one assessment system both to create measures of student achievement and to create performance metrics for educators. However, modern standardized testing systems are not designed to produce performance metrics for teachers or principals. They are designed to...

This paper calculates the effect that introducing risk-sharing during either retirement or the working life would have on public sector pension liabilities. We begin by considering the introduction of a variable annuity for the retirement phase, modeled on the Wisconsin Retirement System, in...

We investigate the effect of corporate sustainability on organizational processes and performance. Using a matched sample of 180 US companies, we find that corporations that voluntarily adopted sustainability policies by 1993 - termed as High Sustainability companies - exhibit by 2009 distinct...

The role of good management practices in organizations has recently been emphasized. Do the same principles also apply in government organizations, even the most bureaucratic and hierarchical of them? And can skilled, motivated managers identify how to improve these practices, or is there a role...