Evidence matters

Distance Still Matters: Evidence from Municipal Bond Underwriting

We provide evidence of “soft” information production in investment banking. Using 2191 municipal bond offerings from 1997-2001, we find that “local” investment banks have substantial comparative and absolute advantages over non-local counterparts – locals charge lower fees and sell bonds at lower yields. Local investment banks’ strongest comparative advantage is at underwriting bonds with highe...

Performing Best When It Matters Most: Evidence from Professional Tennis

Stakes affect aggregate performance in a wide variety of settings. At the individual level, we define the critical ability as an agent’s ability to adapt performance to the importance of the situation. We identify individual critical abilities of professional tennis players, relying on point-level data from twelve years of the US Open tournament. We establish persistent heterogeneity in critica...

How Each Prosodic Boundary Cue Matters: Evidence from German Infants

Previous studies have revealed that infants aged 6-10 months are able to use the acoustic correlates of major prosodic boundaries, that is, pitch change, preboundary lengthening, and pause, for the segmentation of the continuous speech signal. Moreover, investigations with American-English- and Dutch-learning infants suggest that processing prosodic boundary markings involves a weighting of the...

Milieu matters: Evidence that ongoing lifestyle activities influence health behaviors

Health behaviors occur within a milieu of lifestyle activities that could conflict with health actions. We examined whether cognitions about, and performance of, other lifestyle activities augment the prediction of health behaviors, and whether these lifestyle factors are especially influential among individuals with low health behavior engagement. Participants (N = 211) completed measures of p...

Tomorrow's People Matters: Evidence for Action in Oman.