Search Results
Working Paper
Dotcom Extreme Underpricing
We conjecture that the Dotcom abnormal underpricing resulted from the emergence a large cohort of firms racing for market leadership/survivorship. Fundamentals pricing at the IPO was part of their strategy. Consistent with our conjecture, firms? strategic goals and characteristics fully explain the abnormal underpricing. Contrary to alternatives explanations, underpricing was not associated with top underwriting; there was no deterioration of issuers? quality; and top underwriters and analysts became more selective.
Working Paper
Organizations, Skills, and Wage Inequality
We extend an on-the-job search framework in order to allow firms to hire workers with different skills and skills to interact with firms? total factor productivity (TFP). Our model implies that more productive firms are larger, pay higher wages, and hire more workers at all skill levels and proportionately more at higher skill types, matching key stylized facts. We calibrate the model using five educational attainment levels as proxies for skills and estimate nonparametrically firm-skill output from the wage distributions for different educational levels. We consider two periods in time (1985 ...
Working Paper
The Dotcom Bubble and Underpricing: Conjectures and Evidence
We provide conjectures for what caused the price spiral and the high underpricing of the dotcom bubble of 1999?2000. We raise two conjectures for the price spiral. First, given the uncertainty about the growth opportunities generated by the new technologies and their spillover effects across technology industries, investors saw the inflow of a large number of high-growth firms as a sign of high growth rates for the market as a whole. Second, investors interpreted the wave of highly underpriced IPOs as an opportunity to obtain gains by investing in newly public companies. The underpricing ...
Journal Article
The Evolution of the Labor Share across Developed Countries
In most developed countries, the share of output accruing to labor has declined over the last 20 years. However, the underlying reasons for the decrease may have differed in the United States and other developed countries. In this Commentary, we examine some of the explanations economists have proposed for the decline in the labor share and discuss how well these explanations account for the decline across developed countries.
Working Paper
A Spanner in the Works: Restricting Labor Mobility and the Inevitable Capital-Labor Substitution
We model an environment with overlapping generations of labor to show that policies restricting labor mobility increase a firm's monopsony power and labor turnover costs. Subsequently, firms increase capital expenditure, altering their optimal capital-labor ratio. We confirm this by exploiting the statewide adoption of the inevitable disclosure doctrine (IDD), a law intended to protect trade secrets by restricting labor mobility. Following an IDD adoption, local firms increase capital expenditure (capital-labor ratio) by 3.5 percent (5.5 percent). This result is magnified for firms with ...
Working Paper
Information Production, Misconduct Effort, and the Duration of Financial Misrepresentation
We examine the link between information produced by auditors and analysts and fraud duration. Using a hazard model, we analyze misstatement periods related to SEC accounting and auditing enforcement releases (AAERs) between 1982 and 2012. Results suggest that misconduct is more likely to end just after firms announce an auditor switch or issue audited financial statements, particularly when the audit report contains explanatory language. Analyst following increases the fraud termination hazard. However, increases (decreases) in analyst coverage have a negative (positive) marginal impact on ...
Working Paper
Collusion in Repeated Auctions with Costless Communication
In this paper, we present a model of repeated first-price private value auctions in which the bidders have access to a cheap talk communication mechanism. In this framework, messages allow bidders to transmit their preference rankings over the goods to be auctioned, similar to Pesendorfer (2000). We show that collusion through this static mechanism not only dominates the static bid rotation mechanism presented by McAfee and McMillan (1992), but it is also not strictly dominated by the dynamic bid rotation mechanism presented by Aoyagi (2003). However, we show that asymptotic efficiency of ...
Working Paper
Rival Growth Prospects and Equity Prices: Evidence from Mass Layoff Announcements
We investigate the impact of mass layoff announcements on the equity value of industry rivals. When a layoff announcement conveys good (bad) news for the announcer, rivals on average witness a 0.44 percent increase (0.60 percent decrease) in cumulative abnormal stock returns. This effect is concentrated on rivals with high growth opportunities. Consistent with this finding, we also show that our results are strongest in technology industries, where growth opportunities matter the most. Our results suggest that investors perceive layoff announcements as news about industry prospects rather ...
Journal Article
The 1918 Flu and COVID-19 Pandemics: Different Patients, Different Economy
Many observers seeking historical precedent for COVID-19 draw on the 1918 influenza pandemic. In this Commentary, we highlight the differences between the 1918 flu and COVID-19 pandemics in terms of the most significantly affected populations. We also show key differences in the US economy in the late 1910s and now. Not only did the 1918 influenza virus primarily affect significantly younger cohorts, but the US economy’s industry and geographic distributions were notably different at the time compared to today’s. Consequently, caution is needed when using the 1918 influenza pandemic as a ...
Journal Article
How Sure Can We Be about a COVID-19 Test Result if the Tests Are Not Perfectly Accurate?
In this Commentary, we show how the interpretation of test results is affected by a test’s reliability rate. Moreover, we discuss how test fallibility may affect the use of tests as a tool to curb the spread of a disease. In particular, we show how administering inexpensive and less precise tests that can be conducted multiple times may be a more efficient way of curbing the pandemic than administering expensive more precise tests once.