We assess the importance of industry peers for a firm's own decision making strategy, using a rich sample of data covering 47 countries and 87 different industries between 1990 and 2011. Following the instrumental variable approach suggested by Leary and Roberts (2014), we find that, similar to...

In a model where investors disagree about the fundamentals of two stocks, the state price density depends on investor disagreements for both stocks, especially the larger stock. This implies that disagreement among investors in a large firm has a spillover effect on the pricing of other stocks...

This paper provides first evidence of negative peer disclosure (NPD), an emerging corporate strategy to publicize adverse news about industry peers on social media. Consistent with NPDs being implicit positive self-disclosures, disclosing firms experience a two-day abnormal return of 1.6-1.7%...

There has been a considerable amount of interest in the empirical investigation of social influence in the marketing and economics literature in the last decade or so. Among the many different empirical models applied for such investigations, the most common class of model is the linear-in-means...

We study the nature of peer effects in the market for new cell phones. Our analysis builds on de-identified data from Facebook that combine information on social networks with information on users' cell phone models. To identify peer effects, we use variation in friends' new phone acquisitions...

We study the effect of ethno-linguistic classroom composition in college on educational performance, educational choices and post-graduation migration in a setting of quasi-random assignment to undergraduate seminars at a British university. We focus on two core variables: the share of...

This paper sheds light on workplace peer effects by analyzing an experiment at a tea estate in Malawi. We randomly allocated tea-harvesting workers to fields and find strong evidence of positive effects from working near higher-ability peers. Our analy­sis shows that increasing the average of...

This paper studies workplace peer effects by randomly varying work assignments at a tea estate in Malawi. We find that increasing mean peer ability by 10 percent raises productivity by 0.3 percent. This effect is driven by the responses of women. Neither production nor compensation...

This paper examines peer effects among graduate students in a Chinese university. We implement a quasi-experiment empirical strategy and find that a student's master GPA is positively associated with his roommates' college GPA. Our results exclude the possibilities that the peer effects are...

The European higher education landscape has become increasingly integrated causing competition among universities that is no longer bound to national borders. In view of this development, the present paper investigates the relative efficiency of 450 European universities between 2011 and 2014....