Job Market Paper
Job Market Paper
In this paper, I exploit the Covid-19 pandemic and associated government restrictions as a natural experiment in order to study the resilience of businesses in the United States. I use a border-county identification strategy with data on government restrictions, employment and open small businesses, in order to assess the resilience of small businesses in the United States. In my main results, I find negative impacts of stay-at-home orders on the number of open small merchants. In particular, shutdowns of businesses accelerated 8 weeks after imposition of a stay-at-home order, suggesting that many businesses were only resilient enough to handle adverse conditions for 8 weeks. On average, a county with a stay-at-home order experienced an additional 1.51 percentage points loss in the number of open small businesses, relative to January 2020, 8 weeks later compared to a neighboring county that did not have a stay-at-home order. Firms were quicker to resort to layoffs. On average a county with an active stay at home order in a month experienced an additional 1.19 percentage point loss in employment, relative to January 2020, the following month compared to a neighbor that did not have a stay-at-home order the previous month. I also find that stay-at-home orders caused significant reductions in movement in both directions between neighboring counties.
Let’s Go Home: Evidence for Career Concerns in Major League Baseball Umpires
Major League Baseball games can be dramatically shaped by minor lapses in judgement from the umpires officiating the game. Due to the indefinite length a game may have, this can include having the game shaped in a way that ends it faster. In this paper I study whether evidence for the career concerns model can be found in baseball umpires. A career concerns model would suggest that older umpires, whose careers and reputations are much more established than younger ones, would be more inclined to improperly make judgements that favor the end of the game in extra innings. I use data on MLB umpires and extra-innings games from the 2010-2018 seasons to conduct my empirical analysis. I use a linear probability model to isolate the impact of the umpires’ tenure on the probability they make a “bad call.” I find some evidence supporting the career concerns hypothesis, that the probability that an umpire makes a bad call increases with their tenure. These results are robust to the inclusion of other controls in the specification.
In this paper I show that career concerns can lead to a situation where fund managers inefficiently diversify their asset holdings. In a risk neutral setting, fund managers would maximize their expected return by only trading on assets that they have the best information about. However, using a twoperiod model, I show that there exists an equilibrium where managers will also trade an asset they have less knowledge about, lowering their expected profit in the first period. They do this in order to raise their chances of being retained and thus raise their total two period profit. A manager who is more knowledgeable about one asset over another has a profitable deviation in the immediate period to only trading that asset if investors and managers are risk neutral. However the deviation leads to long term losses since the investor believes a manager who does not trade an asset is not knowledgeable about that asset, and fire him after that period. The manager’s keep-or-fire decision is robust to a range of parameter values for the skill of a knowledgeable manager, and the proportion of managers who are skilled.