Strategy

In many service industries, companies compete with each other on the basis of the waiting time their customers experience, along with other strategic instruments such as the price they charge for their service. The objective of this paper is to conduct an empirical study of an important industry to measure to what extent waiting time performance impacts different firms' market shares and price decisions.

Will Rogers, commenting on the Depression, famously quipped: "If stupidity got us into this mess, why can't it get us out?" Rogers's rhetorical question has an obvious answer: persistent stupidity fails to recognize prior errors and, therefore, does not correct them. For three decades, many financial economists have been arguing that there are deep flaws in the financial policies of the U.S.

In the wake of the crisis of 2008 and onwards, it has become fashionable to return to the work of Hyman Minsky and Charles Kindleberger, and cite them as showing the ubiquity of crises, how they are an inevitable result of human nature, and how they have therefore to be carefully and thoroughly regulated against. Charles Calomiris considers this view, first clearly distinguishing between financial crises and banking crises.

This paper shows that Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) meaningfully affect firm performance. Using variation in CEO exposure resulting from the numer of days a CEO is hospitalized, we provide estimates of the effect of CEOs on firm policies, holding firm and CEO matches constant. We have four main findings. First, CEOs have an economically and statistically significant effect on profitability, revenue, and investment outcomes. Firms whose CEOs are hospitalized underperform when their chief executives are sick but otherwise exhibit similar performance relative to other firms.

It is important to understand the factors that influence a country’s transition from the production of low-quality to high-quality products since the production of high-quality goods is often viewed as a pre-condition for export success and, ultimately, for economic development. In this paper, we provide the first evidence that countries’ import tariffs affect the rate at which they upgrade the quality of their products. We analyze the effect of import competition on quality upgrading using highly disaggregated export data to the U.S.

This paper describes the motives that gave rise to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, summarizes the history of Fed monetary policy from its origins in 1914 through the Treasury-Fed Accord of 1951, and reviews several of the principal controversies that surround that history. The persistence of conceptual errors in Fed monetary policy — particularly adherence to the "real bills doctrine" — is a central puzzle in monetary history, particularly in light of the enormous costs of Fed failures during the Great Depression.