Columbia Business School Research

Whether in everyday disagreements, bargaining episodes, or high-stakes disputes, people typically see a spectrum of possible responses to dealing with differences with others, ranging from avoidance and accommodation to competition and aggression. We believe people judge their own and others' behaviors along this dimension, which we call interpersonal assertiveness, reflecting the degree to which someone stands up and speaks out for their own positions when they are faced with someone else who does not want the same outcomes.

Using data from North Carolina, Jesse Rothstein (2017) presents a comprehensive replication of Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff's [CFR] (2014a,b) results on teachers' impacts. In addition, Rothstein presents new evidence that he argues raises concerns about three aspects of CFR's methods and identication assumptions: their treatment of missing data, the validity of their quasi-experimental design, and their method of controlling for observables when estimating teachers' long-term effects.

This tutorial provides evidence that character misrepresentation in survey screeners by Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers ("Turkers") can substantially and significantly distort research findings. Using five studies, we demonstrate that a large proportion of respondents in paid MTurk studies claim a false identity, ownership, or activity in order to qualify for a study. The extent of misrepresentation can be unacceptably high, and the responses to subsequent questions can have little correspondence to responses from appropriately identified participants.

We evaluate the effects of the 2009 Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) that provided intermediaries with sizeable financial incentives to renegotiate mortgages. HAMP increased intensity of renegotiations and prevented substantial number of foreclosures but reached just one-third of its targeted indebted households. This shortfall was in large part due to low renegotiation intensity of a few large intermediaries and was driven by intermediary-specific factors.

Previous research investigating the impact of pharmaceutical innovation in Turkey has shown that the use of newer drugs increased mean age at death by approximately 3 years during the period 1999-2008 and reduced the number of hospital days by approximately 1% per year during the period 2007-2010.

Mortgage decisions have important consequences for consumers, lenders, and the state of the economy more generally. Mortgage decisions are also prototypical of consumer financial choices that involve a stream of expenditures and consumption occurring across time. The authors use heterogeneity in time preferences for both immediate (present bias) and long-term outcomes to explain a sequence of mortgage decisions, including mortgage choice and the decision to abandon a mortgage.

Uncertainty is an unavoidable part of human life. How do states of uncertainty influence the way people make decisions? We advance the proposition that states of uncertainty increase the reliance on affective inputs in judgments and decisions. In accord with this proposition, results from six studies show that the priming of uncertainty (vs. certainty) consistently increases the effects of a variety of affective inputs on consumers' judgments and decisions.

To align employees' interests with the firm's goals, employers often use performance-based pay, but designing such a compensation plan is challenging because performance is typically multifaceted. For example, a sales employee should be incentivized to sell the company's product, but a focus on current sales without rewarding the salespeople according to the quality of the product and/or customer service may result in fewer future sales.

A crucial element of navigating group conflict is how group members manage stigma imposed on them by other groups. Across three experiments, we propose that group identification is a cause and consequence of self-labeling with stigmatizing group labels, a practice known to reduce stigma. Experiment 1 found that group identification increased self-labeling with a stigmatizing group label.

What are the sources of the returns to education? We study the allocation of higher education graduates from public institutions in Ohio across firms. We present three results. First, we confirm findings in the earlier literature of large pay differences across degrees. Second, we show that up to one quarter of pay premiums for higher degrees are explained by between-firm pay differences. Third, higher education degrees are associated with greater representation at the best-paying firms.

We use industry valuation differentials across European countries to study the impact of membership in the European Union as well as the Eurozone on economic and financial integration. In integrated markets, discount rates and expected growth opportunities should be similar within one industry, irrespective of the country, implying narrowing valuation differentials as countries become more integrated. Our analysis of the 1990 to 2007 period shows that membership in the EU significantly lowers discount rate and expected earnings growth differentials across countries.

This study incorporates a recent preference specification of expectations-based loss aversion, which has been applied broadly in microeconomics, into a classic macro model to offer a unified explanation for three empirical observations about life-cycle consumption. First, loss aversion explains excess smoothness and sensitivity — that is, the empirical observation that consumption responds to income shocks with a lag. Intuitively, such lagged responses allow the agent to delay painful losses in consumption until his expectations have adjusted.

This paper proposes an institutional solution that can help unlock the flow of low yielding long-term savings towards high-return infrastructure investments. The solution is to transform public–private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure as well as the classic model of multilateral development banks. Instead of thinking of PPPs as bilateral contracts between a private concession operator and a government agency, we argue that they should be conceived as partnerships that also involve a development bank and long-term institutional investors as partners.

Principals often operate on misspecified models of their agents' preferences. When preferences are such that non-local incentive constraints may bind in the optimum, even slight misspecification of the preferences can lead to large and non-vanishing losses. Instead, we propose a two-step scheme whereby the principal: (1) identifies the model-optimal menu; and (2) modifies prices by offering to share with the agent a fixed proportion of the profit she would receive if an item were sold at the model-optimal price.

We examine the international equity allocations of over 3 million individuals in 296 401(k) plans over the 2006-2011 period. These allocations show enormous cross-individual variation, ranging between zero and over 75%, as well as an upward trend that is only partially accounted for by the slight decrease in importance of the US market relative to the world market. International equity allocations also display strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts investing more internationally than older ones, but also each cohort investing more internationally over time.

Every attribute can be expressed in multiple ways. For example, car fuel economy can be expressed as fuel efficiency (“miles per gallon”), fuel cost in dollars, or tons of greenhouse gases emitted. Each expression, or “translation,” highlights a different aspect of the same attribute. We describe a new mechanism whereby translated attributes can serve as decision “signposts” because they (1) activate otherwise dormant objectives, such as proenvironmental values and goals, and (2) direct the person toward the option that best achieves the activated objective.

Consumers are often faced with the opportunity to purchase a new, enhanced product, such as a new phone, even though the product they currently own is still fully functional. The authors propose that consumers act more recklessly with their current products when in the presence of appealing, though not yet attained, product upgrades (not just mere replacements). Carelessness and neglect toward currently owned products stem from a desire to justify the attainment of upgrades without appearing wasteful.

Whereas past research has focused on the downsides of task switching, the present research uncovers a potential upside: increased creativity. In two experiments, we show that task switching can enhance two principal forms of creativity — divergent thinking (Study 1) and convergent thinking (Study 2) — in part because temporarily setting a task aside reduces cognitive fixation.

We make three points in response to Boyce, Daly, Hounkpatin, and Wood (2017). First, we clarify a misunderstanding of the goal of our analyses, which was to investigate the links between life satisfaction and spending patterns, rather than spending volume. Second, we report a simulation study we ran to demonstrate that our results were not driven by the proposed statistical artifact. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of why, in a world of big data, small but reliable effect sizes can be valuable.

Using proprietary data on millions of trades by retail investors, we provide the first large-scale evidence that retail short selling predicts negative stock returns. A portfolio that mimics weekly retail shorting earns an annualized risk-adjusted return of 9%. The predictive ability of retail short selling lasts for one year and is not subsumed by institutional short selling. In contrast to institutional shorting, retail shorting best predicts returns in small stocks and those that are heavily bought by other retail investors.

We propose the anticipation-event-recall (AER) model. Set in a continuous time frame, the AER model formally links the three components of total utility (i.e., utility from anticipation, event utility, and utility from recall). The AER model predicts the temporal profiles of instant utility experienced before, during, and after a given event. Total utility is calculated as the integral of instant utility. The model builds on the psychological elements of conceptual consumption, adaptation, and time distance.

Rivalry is prevalent across many competitive environments and differs in important ways from non-rival competition. Here, we draw upon research on relational schemas and automatic goals to explore whether mere exposure to or recall of a rival can be sufficient to increase individuals' Machiavellianism and unethical behavior, even in contexts where their rivals are not present.

The present research considered what leads perceivers to evaluate someone as a good or poor judge of people. In general, we found a substantial role for agreement: perceivers evaluated another person as a good judge when he or she agreed with their perception of someone's characteristics. Importantly, the effect of agreement depended on who this " someone" was. We found that perceivers' evaluation of another individual as a good judge was more heavily shaped by agreement about their own characteristics than by agreement about a third-party target's characteristics.

We consider the implications for optimal fiscal policy when taxes are non-distortionary and households are heterogeneous and borrowing constrained. The main result is that optimal policy keeps some households borrowing constrained in order to reduce interest rates on government debt.

Decades of questionnaire and interview studies have revealed various leadership behaviors observed in successful leaders. However, little is known about the actual behaviors that cause those observations. Given that lay observers are prone to cognitive biases, such as the halo effect, the validity of theories that are exclusively based on observed behaviors is questionable. We thus follow the call of leading scientists in the field and derive a parsimonious model of leadership behavior that is informed by established psychological theories.

While most studies of the formalization of pay systems suggest that it helps reduce inequality, some recent studies suggest the opposite. The present study draws on social identity theory to shift this debate from whether formalization reduces inequality to when, or under what conditions, less formalized pay systems may also serve to reduce inequality. Specifically, I consider both the gender of the decision maker and the job of the employee being evaluated.

Despite lab-based evidence supporting the argument that double standards — by which one group is unfairly held to stricter standards than another — explain observed gender differences in evaluations, it remains unclear whether double standards also affect evaluations in organization and market contexts, where competitive pressures create a disincentive to discriminate.

This paper studies a quantitative general equilibrium model of housing. The model has two key elements not previously considered in existing quantitative macro studies of housing finance: aggregate business cycle risk, and a realistic wealth distribution driven in the model by bequest heterogeneity in preferences. These features of the model play a crucial role in the following results. First, a relaxation of financing constraints leads to a large boom in house prices. Second, the boom in house prices is entirely the result of a decline in the housing risk premium.

The present research investigates whether close intercultural relationships promote creativity, workplace innovation, and entrepreneurship — outcomes vital to individual and organizational success. We triangulate on these questions with multiple methods (longitudinal, experimental, and field studies), diverse population samples (MBA students, employees, and professional repatriates), and both laboratory and real-world measures.

We explore captain-ownership and vessel performance in eighteenth-century transatlantic shipping. Although contingent compensation often aligned incentives between captains and ship owners, one difficult-to-contract hazard was threat of capture during wartime. We exploit variation across time and routes to study the relationship between capture threat and captain-ownership. Vessels were more likely to have captain-owners when undertaking wartime voyages on routes susceptible to privateers.

A stigma — originally a branding-iron mark on a prisoner or slave — serves as a mark of disgrace. To carry the stigma of a bankruptcy, an HIV infection, an addiction, a reviled religion, or another negatively stereotyped social group is to be dishonored, disapproved, or even dehumanized by others.

Past investigations show that asking participants to recall a personal episode of power affects behavior in a variety of ways. Recently, some researchers have questioned the replicability of such priming effects. This article adds to this conversation by investigating a moderator of power recall effects: ease of retrieval. Four experiments find that the effects of the power recall manipulation are reduced or even reversed when the power episode is difficult to recall.

Couples appear to help each other remember outstanding tasks ("to-dos") by issuing reminders. We examine if women and men differ in the frequency with which they offer this form of mnemonic assistance. Five studies measure how heterosexual couples coordinate mnemonic work in romantic relationships. The first two studies demonstrate that men are assumed to do less of this form of mnemonic work (Study 1) and experience less societal pressure to do so than women do (Study 2).

Recent bank regulations have imposed large compliance costs on banks of all sizes, and have increased the costs of borrowing to both consumers and companies. But in this summary of his recent book, the author argues that the problems with banking system regulation go well beyond the excessive costs. Indeed, Dodd-Frank and other post-crisis regulatory reforms have failed to address the major shortcomings that produced the crisis of 2007–2009. Most importantly, excessive housing finance risk was not dealt with adequately, and is already on the rise again.

The factors that combined to help elect the new US president have the internet as a common denominator, reckons – and these factors are now inherent in an internet-based economy and society