Leadership & Organizational Behavior

In the modern fast-paced workplace, employees are required to be creative under various levels of stress. In understanding the relationship between stress and creativity, organizational scholars and practitioners have largely focused on how stress affects cognition, while overlooking the role that physiological responses to stress might play in creative performance.

We establish several facts about the aggregate idiosyncratic variances of equity markets in 23 countries. First, we document strong global commonality in aggregate idiosyncratic variances of returns and cash flows across countries. Second, the global and country level common factors of the idiosyncratic return and cash flow variances are mostly but not always countercyclical. Third, the time series variation of these common factors in idiosyncratic variances of returns and cash flows are highly correlated.

Organizations often empower employees at all levels to propose innovation ideas that rely on their first-hand knowledge of their standard task (i.e. employee-initiated innovation). Many, however, struggle with motivating employees to develop innovative ideas that may benefit the firm, especially when the standard tasks for which employees are hired, measured and incentivized do not explicitly include innovation.

Shadow bank market share in residential mortgage origination nearly doubled from 2007 to 2015, with particularly dramatic growth among online "fintech" lenders. We study how two forces, regulatory differences and technological advantages, contributed to this growth.

We study the intertemporal properties of accounting conservatism with a focus on managerial incentives. In our main model, conservatism results in smaller expected payouts to the manager (agent) in early periods and larger expected payouts in later periods. Conservatism shifts (ambiguous) evidence that might be used to recognize good performance in early periods to later periods. In later periods, good performance is less informative, since good news might mean good current period performance and might also mean good prior period performance whose recognition was delayed.

We use a very accurate panel of all individual spending, income, balances, and credit limits from a financial aggregation app and document significant payday responses of spending to the arrival of both regular and irregular income. These payday responses are clean, robust, and homogeneous for all income and spending categories throughout the income distribution. Spending responses to income are typically explained by households' capital structures: households that hold little or no liquid wealth have to consume hand-to-mouth.

Sumner Redstone was one of the most important figures in the evolution of the media industry during the twentieth century. He saw opportunities and seized them, exponentially growing his father's drive-in theater business to become one of the world's largest media conglomerates, with two publicly traded companies -- CBS and Viacom -- at its core. His larger-than-life personality and trials and tribulations kept the tabloid press more than busy. But Sumner's story was never his alone.

We examine the Cochrane and Piazzesi (2005, 2008) model in several out-of-sample analyzes. The model's one-factor forecasting structure characterizes the term structures of additional currencies in samples ending in 2003. In post-2003 data one-factor structures again characterize each currency's term structure, but we reject equality of the coefficients across the two samples. We derive some implications of the model for the predictability of cross-currency investments, but we find little support for these predictions in either pre-2004 or post-2003 data.

People can be surprisingly insensitive to quantities in valuation judgments—a phenomenon called scope insensitivity, which is generally attributed to the operation of affective processes in judgment. Building on research showing that affect is inherently a decision-making system of the present, we propose that scope insensitivity is more likely to be observed in decisions that are psychologically proximate to the immediate self.