In this dissertation, we explore problems in two areas of Supply Chain Management. The first relates to strategic supplier management. The second focuses on tactical decisions on inventory and pricing during inter-generational product transition. In many industries, manufacturing firms use...

This dissertation raises two questions: How do customers come to understand and use a technology? What is the influence of customers using a technology on industry evolution and competition? I use two historical cases to answer these questions. The first considers how insurance firms came to...

Bertrand and Mullainathan (2003) find that managers shielded from the threat of takeovers exert less effort to maximize firm value, consistent with a 'quiet life' hypothesis. I study whether the governance role of financial reporting can mitigate adverse effects arising from managerial...

Shared capitalism is a diverse set of compensation practices through which worker pay, or wealth, depends on the performance of the firm or work group; compensation practices include employee ownership, stock options, and profit sharing. Empirical studies on whether employee ownership improves...

This thesis consists of one empirical essay on contagion (co-authored with Joao Manoel Pinho de Mello¹ and Marcelo de Paiva Abreu²). We document a novel type of international financial contagion whose driving force is shared financial intermediation. In the London peripheral sovereign debt...

The world-wide consolidation in the electronic trading industry has provided evidence that small exchanges and trading portals need to deliver more than sophisticated technology, streaming quotes and market data. In order to deliver value and survive, they need to provide liquidity. Noteworthy...

Beginning in the early 1980's, average tuition and fees for higher education institutions in the United States experienced two decades of unprecedented growth. Over the 10-year period ending in 2003-2004, average tuition and fees rose 47 percent at public four-year colleges and universities and...

This thesis consists of three essays on various topics in Financial Economics. Underwriter analysts issue recommendations that are on average more favorable than recommendations of other analysts. In Chapter 1, I investigate whether this bias matters for returns, and whether it matters for...

Ticks, the second-to-second trades and quotes of a market, might be considered the atoms of finance. They represent the basic, defining transactions that represent an asset in the market. Almost all financial concepts, such as returns or risk, are essentially abstractions from tick data. Like...

This thesis consists of three empirical essays on corporate bonds, examining the role of both credit risk and liquidity. In the first chapter, I test the ability of structural models of default to price corporate bonds in the cross-section. I find that the Black-Cox model can explain 45% of the...