Using unique hand-collected data on startups that were seed-funded by individual angel investors, I show that social connections between angels and entrepreneurs, obtained via schools, past employment and ethnicity, positively influence investment decisions of angels, and the subsequent...

The competitiveness of the IPO underwriting market suffers from the concentration of restricted mandates in the hands of a limited number of underwriters with good reputations. Academic research has focused extensively on the relationship between underpricing and the influence of an individual...

We provide direct evidence on how firms prioritize the Corporate Environment Responsibility (CER) budget as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in India. We argue that polluting firms share higher responsibility towards the environment and hence they should spend more on CER,...

We conduct a series of field experiments to evaluate two competing views of the role of financial intermediaries in providing product recommendations to potentially uninformed consumers. The first argues that financial intermediaries may provide valuable product education, helping consumers...

We examine how the presentation of investment results affects risk taking using an experiment in which participants view results either asset by asset or aggregated into a portfolio result. Our experiment examines the investment choices of a nationwide sample of 249 participants in a simulation...

Real estate values are often under-reported to avoid transaction and property taxes, and to hide wealth built from tax-evaded income. We develop a new method to extract estimates of under-reporting, and employ this measure in the Mumbai real estate market. This approach compares the bunching of...

We study the performance of the bunching-based elasticity estimator when income adjustments are lumpy. In our parsimonious model, taxpayers choose their preferred income from random opportunity sets. The model features the standard elasticity of taxable income and a single additional...