I study how political parties affect representation in the U.S. House. To do so, I account for party pressure on the votes of members in an otherwise standard spatial model that uses roll call voting patterns to identify member ideologies. I simultaneously estimate voter ideologies from survey...

Rational agents must perform backwards induction by thinking contingently about future states and actions, but failures of backwards induction and contingent reasoning are ubiquitous. How do boundedly-rational agents make decisions when they fail to correctly forecast actions in the future? We...

We show theoretically that the weak transmission of beliefs to actions induces a strong bias in basic asset pricing tests. In particular, expected returns can appear to decline in risk when investors weakly transmit their payoff expectations into willingness to pay. We experimentally test this...

I show that firms headquartered geographically close to a top-university engage in more research and development and produce more valuable patents. To address the endogeneity of university and firm location, I use 19th century as-good-as-random allocation of land-grant colleges. I find that...

I show that the constraints of human memory can distort prices in financial markets. To estimate which firms are associated in aggregate investor memory, I exploit firms’ rigid earnings announcement schedules. If two firms happened to announce earnings on the same day in the past, they share...

We show that peer firms play an important role in shaping corporate earnings management decisions. To overcome identification issues in isolating peer effects, we use an instrumental variables strategy based on two plausibly exogenous events: fund flow-induced selling pressure by passive...