Using daily lunch transaction data from NYC public schools, I determine which students frequently stand next to one another in the lunch line. I use this `revealed' friendship network to estimate academic peer effects in elementary school classrooms, improving on previous work by defining not...

We examine geographical peer effects on firms’ corporate payout decisions. We hypothesize that the geographical interconnections between firms, as well as the characteristics of the local dividend markets in which they operate, influence their dividend decisions. Using data on US public firms,...

Using a large sample of 17,747 firms from 44 countries, we find significant positive peer effects on corporate investment. Specifically, a firm increases its investments by 2% to 6% in response to a one standard deviation increase in peer firms' investments. Further analyses show significant...

We consider a dynamic model featuring two firms that test a regulator’s enforcement propensity through their misconduct and a regulator that disciplines them to build a reputation for strict enforcement. We show that when the regulator has full discretion over the enforcement criterion, peer...

We identify and estimate the effects of student-level social spillovers on standardized test performance in New York City (NYC) elementary schools. We leverage student demographic data to construct within-classroom social networks based on shared student characteristics, such as a gender or...

We explore how within classroom ordinal height or income rank of elementary school students affect their future academic performance. Using a Korean panel dataset covering multiple classrooms of each school in the data, we exploit the feature that two students with identical height or family...

How to design audit mechanisms that harness the benefits of self-reporting for achieving compliance with regulatory targets while limiting misreporting is a pressing questionin many regulatory contexts, from climate policies to public health. We theoretically and experimentally study the...

This paper studies economic determinants of semantic similarity in executive compensation disclosures and its implications for compensation peer selection. We employ a novel measure based on a natural language processing algorithm with machine learning---document embeddings---to capture nuanced...

As children reach adolescence, peer interactions become increasingly central to their development, whereas the direct influence of parents wanes. Nevertheless, parents may continue to exert leverage by shaping their children's peer groups. We study interactions of parenting style and peer...