Quiet Life

Enjoying the Quiet Life? Corporate Governance and Managerial Preferences

Much of our understanding of corporations builds on the idea that managers, when they are not closely monitored, will pursue goals that are not in shareholders’ interests. But what goals would managers pursue? This paper uses variation in corporate governance generated by state adoption of antitakeover laws to empirically map out managerial preferences. We use plant-level data and exploit a uni...

Quiet healing.

Both physicians and patients want deeply healing doctor-patient relationships. Too often, though, the ever-expanding demands of medical practice combine with the defenses of the patient to create doctor-patient isolation. Eastern and Western cosmologies and traditions may encourage different approaches to human interaction and healing. At times, probing the patient with more questions may open ...

Quiet caring.

D URING A WALK ABOUT THE ONCOLOGY unit where I was receiving antibiotics for pneumonia, I encountered an elderly woman, her arm splinted and wrapped by a sling and burdened by intravenous and oxygen tubing. She was slowly and painfully making her way to the family lounge with her nurse and daughter. I helped them into the room, and then we all sat down. I asked her about her arm. She told me th...

Quiet Lasers

Quiet bubbles

Classic speculative bubbles are loud – price is high and so are price volatility and share turnover. The credit bubble of 2003-2007 is quiet – price is high but price volatility and share turnover are low. We develop a model, based on investor disagreement and short-sales constraints, that explains why credit bubbles are quieter than equity ones. Since debt up-side payoffs are bounded, debt is ...