Strategy

We propose a new three-pronged plan to address the recent harmful flood of foreclosures. Our plan would address the major barriers that inhibit the ability of third-party servicers to modify mortgages the way portfolio lenders are now doing with greater success. The plan provides greater compensation for servicers to perform their duties, removes legal constraints that inhibit modification, and addresses critical second liens that often get in the way of effective mortgage modifications.

Paper presenting the relationship between economic theory and the financial results of marketing activities.  Included empirical findings based on company data.

We investigate determinants of slave family discounts in the New Orleans slave market. We find large price discounts for families unrelated to scale effects, childcare costs, legal restrictions, or transport costs. We posit that because family members voluntarily cared for each other, sellers sometimes found it advantageous to keep families together (when families included needy or dependent members). Evidence from ship manifests carrying slaves for sale in New Orleans provides direct evidence for selectivity bias in explaining slave family discounts.

This paper provides an optimal filtering methodology in discretely observed continuous-time jump-diffusion models. Although the filtering problem has received little attention, it is useful for estimating latent states, forecasting volatility and returns, computing model diagnostics such as likelihood ratios, and parameter estimation. Our approach combines time-discretization schemes with Monte Carlo methods. It is quite general, applying in nonlinear and multivariate jump-diffusion models and models with nonanalytic observation equations.

In many industries, firms consider the option of outsourcing an important service process associated with the goods or services they bring to the market. Often, competing firms outsource this service process to one or more common service suppliers. When they outsource to a common service provider, this gives rise to a service supply chain.

Venture capitalists add value to portfolio firms by obtaining and transferring information about senior managers across firms over time. Information transfer occurs on a significant scale and takes place both among a single venture capitalist's portfolio firms and between different venture capitalists' firms via a network of venture capitalists, which venture capitalists use to locate and relocate managers. Cross-sectional differences are associated with differences in the intensity with which venture capitalists network.