Working Papers

• Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election (with Charles Angelucci and Michel Gutmann).
• Meritocracy Across Countries (with Oriana Bandiera, Ananya Kotia, Ilse Lindenlaub, and Chris Moser).
• Measuring Organizational Capital (with Wei Cai and Jiehang Yu).
• Political Power and Market Power (with Bo Cowgill and Tommaso Valletti).

Vox: Political power and market power: Evidence from mergers

• Knowledge Acquisition in a High-Stakes Environment: Evidence from the Covid-19 Pandemic (with Charles Angelucci, Amit Khandelwal, and Ashley Swanson).

Publications

• Communication within Firms: Evidence from CEO Turnovers (with Stephen Michael Impink and Raffaella Sadun). Management Science, forthcoming.

The Visible Hand: Episode 9: Communication in Organizations.

• Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News (with Charles Angelucci). American Economic Review, 114(4): 887-925, April 2024.

Ideas Made to Matter: What factors affect Americans' ability to identify real news?

The Hill: How much do Americans know about the news?

• Competing Models (with Jose Luis Montiel-Olea, Pietro Ortoleva, and Mallesh Pai). Quarterly Journal of Economics, 137(4): 2419-2457, November 2022.

• Attention Oligopoly (with Tommaso Valletti). AEJ Micro, 14(3): 530-557, August 2022.

  Antitrust Writing Awards, 2022: Economics Academic Articles, Winner

  Vox: Merger Policy in the Age of Facebook

• Organizational Capital, Corporate Leadership, and Firm Dynamics (with Wouter Dessein). Journal of Political Economy, 130(6): 1477-1536, June 2022.

Vox: Three Perspectives on How Management Affects Performance

• The Allocation of Authority in Organizations: A Field Experiment with Bureaucrats (with Oriana Bandiera, Michael Best, and Adnan Khan). Quarterly Journal of Economics, 136(4): 2195-2242, November 2021.

The Visible Hand: Episode 41: The Allocation of Authority in Organizations

Vox: Autonomy -- not rules -- may be a government's best weapon in the fight against corruption

• Do Women Respond Less to Performance Pay? Building Evidence from Multiple Experiments (with Oriana Bandiera, Greg Fischer, and Erina Ytsma). AER Insights, 3(4): 435-54, December 2021. .

World Bank: Do women respond to performance pay differently than men?

• CEO Behavior and Firm Performance (with Oriana Bandiera, Stephen Hansen, and Raffaella Sadun). Journal of Political Economy, 128(4): 1325-69, April 2020.

  Harvard Business Review: A Survey of How 1,000 CEOs Spend Their Day Reveals What Makes Leaders Successful

  Freakonomics podcast: What Does a CEO Actually Do?

• The Contingent Effect of Management Practices (with Steve Blader and Claudine Gartenberg). Review of Economic Studies, 87(2): 721-749, March 2020.

Atlantic Monthly: Data Can Make for Cutthroat Coworkers

• Where Do People Get Their News? (with Patrick Kennedy). Economic Policy, Volume 34, Issue 97, January 2019, Pages 5-47,

Vox: Information Inequality

• Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance (with Claudine Gartenberg and George Serafeim). Organization Science, 30(1), 2019.

  Harvard Business Review: The Type of Purpose That Makes Companies More Profitable

  Forbes: Make Every Employee A Chief Purpose Officer

• Media Power. Journal of Political Economy, 126(4): 1747-83, August 2018.

  Vox: How Can We Measure Media Power?

Slate: Can Fox News Get Trump Elected?

• Transparency and Deliberation within the FOMC: A Computational Linguistics Approach (with Stephen Hansen and Michael McMahon). Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(2): 801-870, May 2018.

The Economist: Transparency and Central Banking: More Data, Less Gumption

• Managing the Family Firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work (with Oriana Bandiera, Renata Lemos, and Raffaella Sadun). Review of Financial Studies, 31(5): 1605-1653, 1 May 2018. (Editor's Choice)

  Forbes: Family CEOs Spend Less Time At Work.

  Wall Street Journal: Do CEOs of Family-Owned Businesses Work Less?

• Sellers with Misspecified Models (with Kristóf Madarász). Previously circulated as "Screening with an Approximate Type Space." Review of Economic Studies, 84(2): 790-815, April 2017.
• Managerial Attention and Worker Performance (with Marina Halac), American Economic Review, 106(10): 3104-32, October 2016.
• Spatial Asset Pricing: A First Step (with Francois Ortalo-Magné), Economica, 83(329): 130-171, January 2016.
• Media Capture and Media Power. In Handbook of Media Economics (eds. S. Anderson, J. Waldfogel, and D. Stromberg), Vol. 1b, North Holland, 2015.
• Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives (with Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, and Raffaella Sadun), Journal of Labor Economics, Volume 33, Issue 3, pp. 623-681, July 2015.
• Communication and Influence (with Antoni Calvó-Armengol and Joan de Martí), previously circulated as "Endogenous Communication in Complex Organizations," Theoretical Economics, Volume 10, Number 2 (May 2015), 649-690.
• The Real Effects of Relational Contracts (with Steve Blader, Claudine Gartenberg, and Rebecca Henderson), American Economic Association Papers & Proceedings , May 2015.
• On the Political Economy of Urban Growth: Homeownership against Affordability (with Francois Ortalo-Magné). American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 6(1), 154-81, 2014.
• The Political Economy of Mass Media (a survey with David Strömberg. In Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of the Econometric Society, 2013.
• Organizational Economics with Cognitive Costs (a survey with Luis Garicano), In Advances in Economics and Econometrics: Theory and Applications, Proceedings of the Tenth World Congress of the Econometric Society, 2013.
• Is Private Campaign Finance a Good Thing? Estimates of the Potential Informational Benefits (with Riccardo Puglisi and James Snyder), Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 5(3): 892-925, March 2011.
• Institutional Trade Persistence and Long-Term Equity Returns (with Amil Dasgupta and Michela Verardo), previously circulated as "The Price of Conformism," Journal of Finance, 6692):635-53, April 2011.
• The Price Impact of Institutional Herding (with Amil Dasgupta and Michela Verardo), Review of Financial Studies, 24(3): 892-925, March 2011.
• Active and Passive Waste in Government Spending: Evidence from a Policy Experiment (with Oriana Bandiera and Tommaso Valletti), American Economic Review, 99(4): 1278-1308, September 2009.
• Information aggregation in financial markets with career concerns, (with Amil Dasgupta), Journal of Economic Theory, 143(1): 83-113, November 2008.
• Language and the Theory of the Firm (with Jacques Cremer and Luis Garicano), Quarterly Journal of Economics 122(1): 373-407, February 2007.
• Handcuffs for the Grabbing Hand? The Role of the Media in Political Accountability (with Timothy Besley), American Economic Review, 96(3): 720-736, June 2006.
• Financial Equilibrium with Career Concerns (with Amil Dasgupta), Theoretical Economics, forthcoming, Volume 1, Issue 1, March 2006.
• The Wrong Kind of Transparency, American Economic Review, 95(3): 862-877, June 2005. For a previous version with additional material, click here.
• Games Played through Agents (with Aldo Rustichini), Econometrica 71(4), 2003.
• Risk Taking and Optimal Contracts for Money Managers (with Frederic Palomino), RAND Journal of Economics 34(1): 113-137, 2003.
• Should a Team Be Homogeneous? European Economic Review (46)7: 1187-1207, 2002.
• Campaign Advertising and Voter Welfare Review of Economic Studies 69(4): 997-1017, 2002.
• Campaign Spending with Office-Seeking Politicians, Rational Voters, and Multiple Lobbies Journal of Economic Theory 103(1): 162-189, 2002.
• The Value of Public Information in Monopoly (with Marco Ottaviani), Econometrica 69(6): 1673-1683, 2001.
• Spectrum Auctions versus Beauty Contests: Costs and Benefits (with Tommaso Valletti), Rivista di Politica Economica 91(3): 59-110, 2001.
• Inefficient Equilibria in Lobbying (with Georg Kirchsteiger), Journal of Public Economics (82)3: 349-375, 2001.
• Hierarchies of Processors with Endogenous Capacity, Journal of Economic Theory, 77(1), p. 214-222, 1997.
• Shared Knowledge vs. Diversified Knowledge in Teams, Journal of the Japanese and International Economies, 10, 181-195, 1996.

Older Working Papers

• The Impact Factor of Managers (with Ignacio Palacios-Huerta). Previously circulated as "Measuring the Impact Factor of Agents within an Organization Using Communication Patterns."
• Span of Control and Span of Attention (with Oriana Bandiera, Raffaella Sadun, and Julie Wulf, )

  Wall Street Journal: Where's the Boss? Trapped in a Meeting.

• What Do CEOs Do? (with Oriana Bandiera, Luigi Guiso, and Raffaella Sadun)
• Commercial Television and Voter Information (with David Strömberg)
• Pension Fund Governance and the Choice between Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution Plans (with Timothy Besley)
• Sequential Common Agency (with Aldo Rustichini)

Non-Technical Writing and Other Media

• Informazione e democrazia, Festival Internazionale dell'Economia, June 2024.
• How Good Are We At Spotting Fake News? Not Another Politics Podcast, May 2024.
• Political Power and Market Power: Evidence from Mergers, Vox, May 2022.
• Measuring and Protecting Media Plurality in the Digital Age, Knight First Amendment Institute: The Tech Giants, Monopoly Power, and Public Discourse, August 2020.
• Autonomy -- not rules -- may be a government's best weapon in the fight against corruption, VoxDev, May 2020.
• What Bernie Sanders's Plan to Save American Journalism Gets Right -- and What It Misses, Pro Market, September 2019.
• Committee for the Study of Digital Platforms: Media Report (with G Rolnik (chair), J. cage, J. Gans, E. Goodman, B. Knight, A. Schiffrin, P. Raj), Committee for the Study of Digital Platforms, Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State, July 2019.
• Three Perspectives on How Management Affects Firm Performance, Vox, February 2019.
• Merger Policy in the Age of Facebook, Vox, July 2018.
• Information Inequality, Vox, November 2017.
• A Survey of How 1,000 CEOs Spend Their Day Reveals What Makes Leaders Successful. Harvard Business Review, October 2017.
• Can Fox News Get Trump Elected? The Network Exerts More Power over the Electorate Than You Might Think. Slate, June 2016.
  (see also: Andrew Gelman, Why I Don't Believe the Claim That Fox News Can Get Trump Elected. Washington Post, June 2016)
• Tasse di successione: sconto ai figli degli imprenditori La Voce, June 2016.
• Modello BBC per la nuova Rai? La Voce, March 2015.
• Managing the family firm: Evidence from CEOs at Work Vox, February 2015.
• How Can We Measure Media Power? Vox, August 2014.
• Central Bank Transparency and Committee Deliberation Vox, June 2014.
• How Do CEOs Spend their Time? Vox, May 2011.
• The Ruling Class: Management and Politics in Modern Italy (editor, with Tito Boeri and Antonio Merlo), Oxford University Press, 2010.
• La classe dirigente: intreccio tra business e politica (editor, with Tito Boeri and Antonio Merlo), Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Perché nella ricerca non facciamo gli inglesi? (with Oriana Bandiera), La Voce, July 2010.
• Che cosa determina la qualità della ricerca in un sistema universitario pubblico? Analisi di dati internazionali e discussione dell'esperienza britannica, Presentation to the Italian Parlament, 18 March 2010.
• A Political Economy View of Financial Regulation, Vox, March 2009.
• Italian Managers: Fidelity or Performance?, Report prepared for The Ruling Class, X European ConferenceFondazione Rodolfo Debenedetti, 2008.
• Rational Voters and Political Advertising, in the Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (eds. Barry R. Weingast and Donald A. Wittman), 2006.
• Tutti uguali davanti alla borsa, Radio 3 Scienza, 15 December 2005 (informal discussion of The Price of Conformism on an Italian radio program -- starts at minute 15).
• The More Closely we are Watched, the Better we Behave?, in Transparency: The Key to Better Governance? (eds. Christopher Hood and David Heald), Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Miti e realtà della scuola italiana, La Voce, 27 June 2005.
• Una lezione dal Perù, La Voce, 16 May 2005.
• Credible Pensions" (with Timothy Besley), Fiscal Studies, vol. 26(1): 119-135, 2005.
• Torino-Lione: 13 miliardi spesi bene?, La Voce, 14 May 2004.
• La cittadinanza dei bambini (with Graziella Bertocchi), La Voce, 16 October 2003.
• Rivista di Politica Economica Marzo-Aprile 2003, p. 197--226.
• Mass Media and Political Accountability (with Timothy Besley and Robin Burgess), in The Right to Tell: The Role of Mass Media in Economic Development (ed. Roumeen Islam), The World Bank, 2002.
• Lo `spettro' delle frequenze radio (with Tommaso Valletti), Mercato, Concorrenza, Regole, II, 3, 2000
• An Economic Analysis of Campaign Finance, World Economics 1(2):13-28, 2000.
• Efficiency Properties of a Constant-Ratio Mechanism for the Distribution of Tradable Emission Permits, in Environmental Markets, Eds. G. Chichilnisky and G. Heal, Columbia University Press, 2000
• Fretta e incertezza sono state cattive consigliere (with Tommaso Valletti), Il Sole 24 Ore, 26 October 2000
• UMTS: un business che merita l'asta (with Tommaso Valletti), Il Sole 24 Ore, 18 april 2000
• Risk Incentives in the Money Management Industry (with Frederic Palomino), Risico and Rendement, 1999