Columbia Business School Research

Stocks with recent past high idiosyncratic volatility have low future average returns around the world. Across 23 developed markets, the difference in average returns between the extreme quintile portfolios sorted on idiosyncratic volatility is -1:31% per month, after controlling for world market, size, and value factors. The effect is individually significant in each G7 country. In the United States, we rule out explanations based on trading frictions, information dissemination, and higher moments.

How public pension plan assets should be invested is an important but unsettled question. Some observers endorse the standard practice of investing heavily in higher yielding but riskier equities, reasoning that the higher average returns will reduce future required tax receipts and also help to reduce underfunding over time. Others advocate a more conservative approach that reduces the volatility of funding levels and the likelihood of severe shortfalls during economic downturns when government resources are already constrained.

Accumulating evidence suggests that targets' displays of emotion shape perceivers' impression of those targets. Prior research has highlighted generalization effects, such as an angry display prompting an impression of hostility. In two studies, we went beyond generalization to examine the interaction of displays and behaviors, finding new evidence of augmenting effects (behavior-correspondent inferences are stronger when behavior is accompanied by positive affect) and discounting effects (such inferences are weaker when behavior is accompanied by negative affect).

Three experiments demonstrated that the experience of power leads to an illusion of personal control. Regardless of whether power was experientially primed (Experiments 1 and 3) or manipulated through roles (manager vs. subordinate; Experiment 2), it led to perceived control over outcomes that were beyond the reach of the power holder.

Understanding the role of emotion in forming preferences is critical in helping firms choose effective marketing strategies and consumers make appropriate consumption decisions. In five experiments, participants made a set of binary product choices under conditions designed to induce different degrees of emotional decision processing. The results consistently indicate that greater reliance on emotional reactions during decision making is associated with greater preference consistency and less cognitive noise.

A recurring theme in attribution theory is that lay explanations for intentional and nonintentional behaviors diverge (Buss, 1978; Fincham & Jaspers, 1980; Kruglanki, 1975; Malle, 2004; White, 1991). In this vein, Reeder (this issue) proposes that they evoke different inferential paths that produce different attributional patterns. In response to nonintentional behavior, perceivers think like scientists, reasoning abstractly about causes, seeking parsimony by discounting personal forces given plausible situational forces.

This monograph focuses on the use of incomplete contracting models to study transfer pricing. Intrafirm pricing mechanisms affect division managers' incentives to trade intermediate products and to undertake relationship-specific investments so as to increase the gains from trade. Letting managers negotiate over the transaction is known to cause holdup (underinvestment) problems. Yet, in the absence of external markets, negotiations frequently outperform cost-based mechanisms, because negotiations aggregate cost and revenue information more efficiently into prices.

This special issue was conceived as a way to highlight how social cognition researchers are using the paradigm of negotiations to ask and answer a range of important questions central to their core concerns: how do communication media affect social information processing; how do different roles affect preferred processing styles; how do goals and expectancies shape interactions and outcomes?

Several recent papers assume that private information (PIN), proposed by Easley et al. [2002. Is information risk a determinant of asset returns? Journal of Finance 57, 218–2221; 2004. Factoring information into returns. Working Paper, Cornell University], is a determinant of stock returns. We replicate Easley et al. (2002) and show that while PIN does predict future returns in the sample they analyze, the effect is not robust to alternative specifications and time periods.

This paper examines liquidity and how it affects the behavior of mutual fund portfolio managers, who account for a significant portion of trading in many assets. We define an asset to be perfectly liquid if a portfolio manager can trade the quantity she desires when she desires at a price not worse than the uninformed expected value. A portfolio manager is limited by both what she needs to attain and the ease with which she can attain it, making her sensitive to three dimensions of liquidity: price, timing, and quantity.

As the record of Fed interventions from December 2007 to December 2008 make abundantly clear, a foremost concern of monetary authorities in responding to the financial crisis has been to avoid a repeat of the great depression, and especially a repeat of the monetary contraction identified as the major cause of the 1930s depression.

The relevance and importance of marketing in innovation management has been questioned in recent years. Marketing has been blamed directly or indirectly for poor returns on investment in innovation, and marketing models of the diffusion of innovations have not been widely adopted. In this monograph we argue that marketing is currently in a unique position to reaffirm its critical role in innovation management. We review some recent research that has already started this "reinstatement" process and propose some future directions that may help complete it.

Empirical evidence suggests that as much as 1/3 of the U.S. business cycle is due to nominal shocks. We calibrate a multi-sector menu cost model using new evidence on the cross-sectional distribution of the frequency and size of price changes in the U.S. economy. We augment the model to incorporate intermediate inputs. We show that the introduction of heterogeneity in the frequency of price change triples the degree of monetary non-neutrality generated by the model.

Traditional monopoly pricing models assume that firms have full information about the market demand and consumer preferences. In this article, we study a prototypical monopoly pricing problem for a seller with limited market information and different levels of demand learning capability under relative performance criterion of the competitive ratio (CR). We provide closed-form solutions for the optimal pricing policies for each case and highlight several important structural insights.

We find that fixed effects related to the location of firm's headquarters explain variation in broad based option grants after controlling for industry effects and firm characteristics traditionally known to affect option granting. Location matters because of local labor market conditions and social interaction with neighboring firms.

The present investigation explores the neural mechanisms underlying the impact of social influence on preferences. We socially tagged symbols as valued or not — by exposing participants to the preferences of their peers — and assessed subsequent brain activity during an incidental processing task in which participants viewed popular, unpopular, and novel symbols.

We investigate how nonfinancial performance measures (NPMs) can be used to encourage cooperation across divisions. The implementation of a project often requires joint efforts by multiple divisions. However, privately informed division managers sometimes find it in their self-interest to forgo profitable joint projects or to underinvest in relationship-specific assets.

In this article, we define good scholarship, highlight our points of disagreement with Locke and Latham (2009), and call for further academic research to examine the full range of goal setting's effects. We reiterate our original claim that goal setting, like a potent medication, can produce both beneficial effects and systematic, negative outcomes, and as a result, it should be carefully prescribed and closely monitored.

Recent empirical evidence supports the view that the income process has an individual-specific growth rate component [Baker (1997), Guvenen (2007b), and Huggett, Ventura, and Yaron (2007)]. Moreover, the individual-specific growth component may be stochastic. Motivated by these empirical observations, I study an individual's optimal consumption-saving and portfolio choice problem when he does not observe his income growth. As in standard income fluctuation problems, the individual cannot fully insure himself against income shocks.

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.

Generalizing earlier work on staffing and routing in telephone call centers, we consider a processing network model with large server pools and doubly stochastic input flows. In this model the processing of a job may involve several distinct operations. Alternative processing modes are also allowed. Given a finite planning horizon, attention is focused on the two-level problem of capacity choice and dynamic system control. A pointwise stationary fluid model (PSFM) is used to approximate system dynamics, which allows development of practical policies with a manageable computational burden.

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.

Past work on interpersonal assertiveness and organizational effectiveness paints a mixed picture: some research suggests a positive link, other work highlights negative effects. This article reviews recent research and an account that stems from a different perspective, looking at assertiveness as a factor in leadership shortcomings and failure. This approach suggests that interpersonal assertiveness is a major factor and has a curvilinear, inverted-U-shaped relationship with leadership effectiveness. I review evidence for this effect as well as social and instrumental outcome mediators.

A criticism of mechanism design theory is that the optimal mechanism designed for one environment can produce drastically different actions, outcomes, and payoffs in a second, even slightly different, environment. In this sense, the theoretically optimal mechanisms usually studied are not "robust." To study robust mechanisms while maintaining an expected utility maximization approach, we study a multiagent model in which the mechanism must be designed before the environment is as well understood as is usually assumed.

We revisit and critically reevaluate the widely accepted modernization hypothesis which claims that per capita income causes the creation and the consolidation of democracy. Existing studies find support for this hypothesis because they fail to control for the presence of omitted variables. Controlling for these factors either by including country fixed effects in a linear model or by including parameterized random effects in a non-linear double hazard model removes the correlation between income and the likelihood of transitions to and from democratic regimes.

We investigate pricing effects of the joint production of loans and security underwritings. We control for firm and borrower characteristics, including differences in sequencing, which are important for pricing. Contrary to previous studies, when banks combine lending and underwriting within the same customer relationship they charge premiums for both loans and underwriting services. Abstracting from effects of joint production within relationships, depository banks engaged in underwriting price lending and underwriting more cheaply than stand alone investment banks.

Past research has established a connection between regret (negative emotions connected to cognitions about how past actions might have achieved better outcomes) and both depression and anxiety. In the present research, the relations between regret, repetitive thought, depression, and anxiety were examined in a nationally representative telephone survey. Although both regret and repetitive thought were associated with general distress, only regret was associated with anhedonic depression and anxious arousal.

The Financial Accounting Standards Committee of the American Accounting Association (the Committee) is charged with responding to requests for comments from standard-setters on issues related to financial reporting. The Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) released for public comment on December 18, 2007 with a response period ending on February 10, 2008, "Proposed Changes to Oversight, Structure, and Operations of the FAF, FASB, and GASB (the proposal). This commentary concerns four important public policy issues in the proposal with the most relevance for accounting standard setting:

We offer a constructive critique of Regulatory Engagement Theory (Higgins, E. T. (2006). Value from hedonic experience and engagement. Psychological Review, 113(3), 439?460.; Higgins, E. T., and Scholer, A. A. (2009). Engaging the consumer: The science and art of the value creation process. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(2).). After highlighting the major tenets of the theory and its main contributions, we identify some of its conceptual ambiguities.

We identify the relative importance of changes in the conditional variance of fundamentals (which we call "uncertainty") and changes in risk aversion in the determination of the term structure, equity prices, and risk premiums. Theoretically, we introduce persistent time-varying uncertainty about the fundamentals in an external habit model. The model matches the dynamics of dividend and consumption growth, including their volatility dynamics and many salient asset market phenomena.

Affine jump-diffusion (AJD) processes constitute a large and widely used class of continuous-time asset pricing models that balance tractability and flexibility in matching market data. The prices of e.g., bonds, options, and other assets in AJD models are given by extended pricing transforms that have an exponential-affine form; these transforms have been characterized in great generality by Duffie et al. [2000. Transform analysis and asset pricing for affine jump-diffusions. Econometrica 68, 1343–1376].

This paper examines the effect of spatial confinement on consumer choices. Building on reactance theory and the environmental psychology literature, we propose that spatially confined consumers react against an incursion to their personal space by making more varied and unique choices. We present four laboratory experiments and one field study to support our theorizing. Study 1 demonstrates that people in narrower aisles seek more variety than people in wider aisles. Study 2 indicates that this effect of confinement in narrow aisles also extends to more unique choices.

Stock price synchronicity has been attributed to poor corporate governance and a lack of firm-level transparency. This paper investigates the association between different kinds of firm interlocks, control groups, and synchronicity in Chile. A unique data set containing equity cross holdings, common individual owners, and director interlocks is used to map out firm ties and control groups in the economy. While there is a correlation between synchronicity and shared ownership and equity ties, synchronicity is more strongly correlated with interlocking directorates.

Anchoring refers to a biased judgment on a stimulus based on the initial assessment of another stimulus and the insufficient adjustment away from that initial assessment. Previous research indicates that anchoring seems to be a general phenomenon, underlying a wide variety of processing strategies (Epley and Gilovich 2001; Johnson and Puto 1987; Tversky and Kahnemann 1974). Every time when individuals form an impression or an image about a stimulus while another stimulus is present, these impressions may be subject to anchoring effects.

This paper argues that the U.S. mortgage debacle must be analyzed in the broader setting of global real estate markets. Recent U.S. home price growth closely tracked increases in other developed economies. The analysis distinguishes among market regions in terms of supply elasticity and localized transactions-costs. A series of user-cost models are presented which imply that interest rate fluctuations must figure prominently in any explanation of movements in price/rent ratios. National factors such as the expansion of subprime credit must also be accounted for.

The first hints of trouble in the mortgage market surfaced in mid-2005, and conditions subsequently began to deteriorate rapidly. Mortgage defaults and delinquencies are particularly concentrated among borrowers whose mortgages are classified as "subprime" or "near-prime." The main factors underlying the rise in mortgage defaults appear to be declines in house prices and deteriorated underwriting standards, in particular an increase in loan-to-value ratios and in the share of mortgages with little or no documentation of income.

We document how starting prices differentially impact outcomes in negotiations and auctions. In negotiations (where the number of actors is often predetermined), starting prices drive cognitive processes, leading individuals to selectively focus on information consistent with, and make valuations similar to, the starting value. Thus, starting high will often lead to ending high in negotiations.

In our recent article (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, April 2008), we presented evidence supporting the idea that multicultural experience can facilitate creativity. In a reply to that article, Rich (2009, this issue) has argued that our review, although timely and important, was somewhat limited in scope, focusing mostly on smaller forms of creativity ("little c": e.g., paper- and-pencil measures of creativity) as well as on larger forms of multicultural experience ("Big M": e.g., living in a foreign country).