Organizations & Markets

This article considers the social and psychological functions that norm-based thinking and behavior provide for the individual and the collectivity. We differentiate between two types of reference groups that provide norms: peer groups versus aspirational groups. We integrate functionalist accounts by distinguishing the functions served by the norms of different reference groups, different degrees of norm moralization, and different directions of responses to norm activation.

This article studies the causes of China’s Great Famine, during which 16.5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas. We document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability; that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions; and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food production, a surprising pattern that is unique to the famine years.

We estimate the elasticity of exports to credit using matched customs and firm-level bank credit data from Peru. To account for non-credit determinants of exports, we compare changes in exports of the same product and to the same destination byfirms borrowing from banks differentially affected by capital-flow reversals during the 2008 financial crisis. We find that credit shocks affect the intensive margin of exports, but have no significant impact on entry or exit of firms to new product and destination markets.

Little is known about how discrimination manifests before individuals formally apply to organizations or how it varies within and between organizations. We address this knowledge gap through an audit study in academia of over 6,500 professors at top U.S. universities drawn from 89 disciplines and 259 institutions. In our experiment, professors were contacted by fictional prospective students seeking to discuss research opportunities prior to applying to a doctoral program.

We review limitations of the traditional paradigm for cultural research and propose an alternative framework, polyculturalism. Polyculturalism assumes that individuals' relationships to cultures are not categorical but rather are partial and plural; it also assumes that cultural traditions are not independent, sui generis lineages but rather are interacting systems. Individuals take influences from multiple cultures and thereby become conduits through which cultures can affect each other.

Researchers typically invoke theoretical assumptions to estimate mark-ups. Instead, we directly obtain mark-ups by surveying Pakistani soccer-ball producers.

Past research indicates that foreign experience helps problem solving because the experience of adapting ones lifestyle imparts cognitive flexibility. We propose that an independent process involves studying cultural traditions and systems, which imparts foreign concepts that enable unconventional solutions. If so, advantages on unconventionality problems should be associated with experiences studying of another culture, such as typically occurs in study-abroad programs.

We estimate a short term reversal process for daily US equity returns. Over our primary sample period of 1972-2014, and for our sample of the 100 largest traded firms, on average approximately 90% of idiosyncratic price shocks are permanent. The remaining 10% is temporary, and decays exponentially toward zero, with a half life of about 2.5 days. While the rate of decay (the half life) is relatively constant over time, the magnitude decay varies considerably over the sample. Our findings are consistent with the slow movement of capital (Duffie 2010).

Can subsidies promote Pareto-optimum coordination? We found that partially subsidizing the cooperative actions for two out of six players in a laboratory coordination game usually produced better coordination and higher total social welfare with both deterministic and stochastic payoffs. Not only were the subsidized players more likely to cooperate (choose the Pareto-optimum action), but the unsubsidized players increased their expectations on how likely others would cooperate, and they cooperated more frequently themselves.