Columbia Business School Research

Trendsetters and cutting-edge brands constantly seek new styles and fresh designs that set them apart from previous trends. However, in recent decades, these early adopters and innovators have also increasingly turned to selected pieces from the past, a market phenomenon often referred to as “vintage.” But what are vintage products exactly?

Data assets are increasingly vital in modern economies, yet macroeconomic measurement is not well-adapted to capturing their value. Part of the problem is that data is an intangible asset: investments in data are missed in national accounts, and

Bank balance sheet lending is commonly viewed as the predominant form of lending. We document and study two margins of adjustment that are usually absent from this view using microdata in the $10 trillion U.S. residential mortgage market. We first document the limits of the shadow bank substitution margin: shadow banks substitute for traditional “deposit-taking” banks in loans which are easily sold, but are limited from activities requiring on-balance-sheet financing.

Who behaves dominantly—and why? Much compelling prior research spotlights motivational sources. We focus here on beliefs, proposing that people are less likely to behave dominantly when they expect dominance to incur greater relationship costs. We posit that this situation-specific expectancy is shaped by a general competitive worldview, seeing the social world as a “competitive jungle.” In five preregistered studies, we tested whether those with a competitive worldview expected dominance to incur less relationship harm and whether expected relationship harm predicted dominance.

We study a regulatory spillover in which audit regulations for public firms can affect auditing practices for private firms through the channel of common partners—partners who audit both public and private firm clients. We exploit a regulation in China that applies only to public firm auditing and aims to enhance transparency and rigor in audit procedures. We find that audit partners are more inclined to issue modified opinions for private firm clients following the implementation of the regulation.

For general choice spaces, standard dynamic preference models cannot simultaneously satisfy the properties of time consistency, the separation of time and risk preferences, and the ability to accommodate an indifference to the timing of when risk is resolved. In the context of a consumption-portfolio choice problem often underlying asset pricing and macro models, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions such that all three properties are satisfied.

In a monetary union, the risk-free rate cannot respond to country-level fiscal positions, leaving only default spreads and convenience yields to respond. Empirically, we find that convenience yields explain a large share of the variation in Eurozone sovereign bond yields. Eurozone countries earn larger convenience yields when they experience larger surpluses, suggesting convenience yields are important fiscal shock absorbers.

As generative AI systems rapidly improve, a key question emerges: how do users adapt to these changes, and when does such adaptation matter for realizing performance gains? This paper studies prompt adaptation—how users adjust their inputs in response to evolving model behavior—using a common experimental design applied to two preregistered tasks with 3,750 total participants who submitted nearly 37,000 prompts. We show that the importance of prompt adaptation depends critically on task structure.

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are often informative insofar as they require differential knowledge and effort to produce. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' access to GAI can increase—but also decrease—an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.

Climate-friendly technologies are the best way to stymie rising inflation — and will get better and cheaper over time.

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We document new evidence on the capitalization, funding structure, and performance of private credit funds using comprehensive fund-and asset-level data covering most of the industry. Private credit funds are highly capitalized, with equity typically accounting for 65-80% of total assetsmore than six times the capitalization of U.S. banks, where equity represents about 10%. Debt usage is moderate and largely reflects bank credit lines used for liquidity management.