Toni M. Whited | Lightnews

Toni Whited 😷

@toniwhited.bsky.social

14K followers 520 following 180 posts

Economics prof at the U. of Michigan. Editor, Journal of Financial Economics. Corporate finance, structural estimation. One-handed pull-ups, cooking, languages, stop harassing me about the mask. https://lsa.umich.edu/econ/people/faculty/toni-whited.html .. more

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Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Mar 5

rodneywhitecenter.wharton.upenn.edu/2025-summer-...

12 more days to apply to our summer school in structural estimation! It's a hands-on course in which you learn how to do SMM and then work on a problem set with your classmates. Open to PhD students in finance, accounting, econ. And faculty.

2025 Summer School on Structural Estimation in Corporate Finance

rodneywhitecenter.wharton.upenn.edu

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 26

Me me me!!!

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 26

I was today old when I learned that there are two camps of people who use LaTeX. Those who tolerate a gazillion errors as long as the pdf looks OK, and those who like zero errors.

HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE WITH A GAZILLION LATEX ERRORS It's just not that hard to learn enough LaTeX to make it work right.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 23

Greatest email from a student:

"Now I get why you taught us about good replication practices - they are really important."

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 4

Luke Taylor, Stephen Terry, and I are doing it again. This will be the 5th structural summer school in finance. We do not just teach papers. We teach techniques, and then we have students work on a problem set. Please get your students to apply.

rodneywhitecenter.wharton.upenn.edu/2025-summer-...

2025 Summer School on Structural Estimation in Corporate Finance

rodneywhitecenter.wharton.upenn.edu

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 3

So the bottom line is that the original Holmstrom intuition works, but only in small markets when the stakes are relatively low. Otherwise, heterogeneity in costs across competitors matters more for their strategies.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 3

so airlines don't want to enter when demand is high because this good state of the world gets filtered out, and they are less likely to exit when demand is low because they are not punished for this common shock.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 3

RPE has no effect on entry-exit strategies in large markets. Demand is so high that all the airlines always want to enter. In medium-sized markets, removing RPE helps weak competitors, who are no longer compared to their more efficient rivals. In small markets, RPE filters out common shocks,

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 3

So we estimated a dynamic game in which airlines compete with one another under the assumption that their contracts contain RPE incentives. (I know. Not an optimal contract. But it is what we see in the data, so our estimation is just characterizing an observed equilibrium with observed contracts.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 3

Not heavily researched. Why? No data. Measuring how much an executive's compensation depends on competitors' performance by looking at proxy statements is a mess. There's information there, but it does not provide clean measures. So it's a casualty of lampost economics.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Feb 3

Well, this got accepted at the RFS a while back, but I've been avoiding social media, so I didn't post about it. My coauthor, Li He, was the brains here. We are looking at the interaction between relative performance evaluation and competition.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Relative Performance Evaluation and Strategic Competition

We examine how relative performance evaluation (RPE) affects industry competition--a question relevant for corporate boards interested in incentivizing executiv

papers.ssrn.com

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Jan 20

A new reason to hate Overleaf. Its grammar checker doesn't know when to use "due to" and "because of."

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Jan 12

Work avoidance behavior for reviewing PhD applications.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Jan 9

Just finished teaching the first class of my Econ undergrad course (which is basically an investments course). Love these kiddos. Smart. Good attitudes. So much more fun than in my previous life as a b school prof.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 30

Please don't just dump important parts of papers into internet appendices to make them appear shorter. Make a coherent, self-contained essay, and then figure out what is ancillary and what is not. Only the ancillary stuff goes in an appendix.

Referees hate LONG papers.

Reposted by Jason M. Fletcher, Robert Böhm, Steven Glazerman , and 10 more Jason M. Fletcher, Robert Böhm, Steven Glazerman, Mauricio Romero, Ulrich Kaiser, Feng Hu, Toni M. Whited, Alan Sánchez, Filippo Belloc, Petra Moser, Dietmar Fehr, Alex Braithwaite, Andreas Steinmayr

Pedro Sant’Anna @pedrosantanna.bsky.social · Dec 30

Here are the first five sets of slides:

01 Introduction: psantanna.com/DiD/01_Intro...

02 Classical 2x2 setup: psantanna.com/DiD/02_two_b...

03 Clustering issues: psantanna.com/DiD/03_Clust...

04 Functional form: psantanna.com/DiD/04_Funct...

05 Covariates: psantanna.com/DiD/05_Covar...

Reposted by Toni M. Whited

VoteVets @votevets.org · Dec 29

Rest in peace to Submariner LT James Earl Carter Jr, USN (Ret). Carter, the only U.S. President to graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy, leaves a legacy of service. The USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23), a Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine, carries his name in honor of his dedication to our nation.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 26

Burgers and slaw for Xmas dinner. And beer.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 17

Just way too many mistakes. It's kinda impressive. This is for coding in anything but python. Even other open-source languages.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 17

I mostly use Claude, so this is why the change in GPT was a surprise.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 17

I haven't used GPT in a while because I've mostly been using Claude.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 17

Haven't used chatGPT in a while. Its answers have gotten VERY wordy. There must be a LOT of overly verbose garbage on whatever training data it has used.

Reposted by Toni M. Whited

Irwin (Bud) Collier @irwincollier.bsky.social · Dec 10

#EconSky Price theory à la UCLA taught by Jack Hirshleifer in 1972. His course outline with reading list has been transcribed and posted at Economics in the Rear-view Mirror. www.irwincollier.com/ucla-price-t...

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 7

The Puritans. Edward Hopper.

Reposted by Toni M. Whited

Ivan T Ivanov @ivantivanov.bsky.social · Dec 7

The expiration of the TCJA next year will renew debates on whether the federal income tax exemption of municipal bonds should be preserved or eliminated. The exemption subsidizes infrastructure spending at the state/local level with federal taxpayer money. A 🧵:

Reposted by Toni M. Whited

Ryan Tennant @ryantennant.ca · Dec 6

Still N95 masking.

Still lugging around air cleaners.

Still monitoring CO2 levels.

Still advocating for improved indoor air quality on campus because clean air is an accessibility issue.

A selfie phot of a white male with glasses and a grey hat, wearing a black winter coat standing on the corner of a road. A black and yellow university of Waterloo sign can be seen in the background along with cars and traffic lights. He is carrying a black garbage bag.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 5

Disagree. Reading Plato can turn you into a better public speaker. Other things in the humanities, however, are total nonsense.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 4

Waking up to 8 new decision letters to write.

Toni Whited 😷 @toniwhited.bsky.social · Dec 4

What do you mean by credible? A genuinely good quasi-experimental estimate? A deeper structural parameter whose value several studies have shown to be more or less the same? The quasi-experimental elasticities are functions of deeper parameters.

Reposted by Toni M. Whited

Asaf Manela @amanela.bsky.social · Dec 3

1/ Does finance benefit society? 📈📉 In a forthcoming Review of Financial Studies paper, @mjha91.bsky.social , Hongyi Liu, and yours truly tackle this question by leveraging large language models to measure sentiments in books spanning centuries and continents. 🧵

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