The generally weak correlation between board independence and firm performance is a major empirical puzzle. One possible explanation is that director independence alone is not enough. To explore this possibility, we examine the full employment histories of independent directors at S&P 1500...

In this paper we examine the empirical relationship between price discrimination and competition in television advertising. While most empirical papers on the topic document a positive relationship, we find that price discrimination is negatively related to competition (as measured by the number...

I exploit a unique historical event to explore the causal relationship between individual wealth and posterior political power. Shortly after the foundation of Buenos Aires, plots of land in the outskirts of the city were randomly assigned to all heads of household that participated in the...

We exploit a series of natural experiments that use real crime data to investigate the effect of a violation of expectancies on violent crime. We study two types of violation of expectancies that generate the emotions of frustration and euphoria. Our empirical designs exploit differential...

This article analyzes the relative performance of recently privatized Latin American electricity distribution utilities. Empirical results show that privatized firms are more efficient in their use of labor and have higher labor productivity growth rates than public or cooperative companies....

This paper provides a decomposition of labor productivity growth into contributions associated with technical change, efficiency change, returns to scale, and environmental variables. The decomposition is based on parametric estimation of labor requirement functions. This approach is applied to...