This paper analyzes the choice of deductible in insurance contracts that insure against a risk that, as is common, might materialize more than once during the life of the policy. As was established by Arrow (1963), from the perspective of risk-bearing costs, the optimal contract is one that uses...

The well-established negative correlation between staggered boards (SBs) and firm value could be due to SBs leading to lower value or a reflection of low-value firms' greater propensity to maintain SBs. We analyze the causal question using a natural experiment involving two Delaware court...

This paper uses a unique panel data set of an insurer's transactions with repeat customers. Consistent with the asymmetric learning hypothesis that repeated contracting enables sellers to obtain an informational advantage over their rivals, I find that the insurer makes higher profits in...

In spite of the apparent success of affirmative action (AA) in the past, many oppose such policies. Opponents argue that the cost of attaining proportional representation by preferential policies is too high, reducing the quality of selected groups and stigmatizing members of the protected...

Golden parachutes (GPs) have attracted substantial attention from investors and public officials for more than two decades. We find that GPs are associated with higher expected acquisition premiums and that this association is at least partly due to the effect of GPs on executive incentives....

Using panel data on over 300,000 Israeli women from 1999 to 2005, we exploit variation in Israel's child subsidy to identify the impact of changes in the price of a marginal child on fertility. We find a positive, statistically significant, and economically meaningful price effect on overall...

This paper investigates how fertility responds to changes in the price of a marginal child and in household income. We construct a large, individual-level panel data set of married Israeli women during the period 1999-2005 that contains fertility histories and detailed controls. We exploit...

We use a large data set of deductible choices in auto insurance contracts to estimate the distribution of risk preferences in our sample. To do so, we develop a structural econometric model, which accounts for adverse selection by allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in both risk (probability...

This paper studies a unique panel dataset of transactions with repeat customers of an insurer operating in a market in which insurers are not required by law or contract to share information about their customers' records. I use this dataset to test the asymmetric learning hypothesis that...

In the ongoing debate on state competition over corporate charters, supporters of state competition have long claimed that the empirical evidence clearly supports their view. This paper suggests that the body of empirical evidence on which supporters of state competition have relied does not...