Publications

Individuals frequently perceive a tradeoff between health and taste, leading to poor dietary choices. This research identifies a novel pathway to healthier eating by harmonizing seemingly conflicting goals: seeking beauty in food. Across seven…

Can leaders benefit from vocalizing uncertainty? Past research outlines two opposing positions. On one hand, individuals who express confidence signal competence and, as a result, attain greater influence in social groups. On the other hand,…

Empirical research in economics often examines the behavior of agents located in a geographic space. In such cases, statistical inference is complicated by the interdependence of economic outcomes across locations. A common approach to account…

We study three centuries of U.K., U.S. and Dutch fiscal history. When a country is the dominant safe asset supplier, it can issue more debt than what is justified by its future primary surpluses, even after accounting for seigniorage revenue from…

This paper studies the motives behind socially pressuring others in the context of voter mobilization. In this online experiment, college students choose whether to send an email that pressures their campus peers to register to vote for the 2020…

In this overview piece, I review the literature and identify important directions for how developing societies can break out of such ethnic growth traps and instead leverage the gains that can often be had from ethnic diversity. To do this…

Organizational brokers, such as producers, diplomats, and middle managers, connect people within and across organizations. Trust in brokers promotes their effectiveness in connecting unfamiliar counterparts and transferring information between…

Open banking (OB) empowers bank customers to share their financial transaction data with fintechs and other banks. New cross-country data shows 49 countries adopted OB policies, privacy preferences predict policy adoption, and adoption spurs…

What can we learn from the high-frequency responses in bond and currency markets to the recent tariff announcement about the status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency? The dollar depreciated by 3.4% after April 4 in spite of rising…

Background

Flexible machine learning tools are increasingly used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects.

Aims

This paper gives an accessible tutorial demonstrating the use of the causal forest algorithm, available in…

We provide evidence on how a low-cost, online, and scalable financial education program influences older participants’ financial knowledge. We test the program using a field experiment that includes short stories covering three fundamental…

In 2022, Democrats spent $53 million on ads helping far-right candidates win Republican primaries. Paying for ads that support far-right candidates, the reasoning went, could help Democrats win in the general elections because it is…

Allocating capital to investment projects is one of a manager’s most critical responsibilities. However, such decisions are shaped by managers’ own beliefs and risk preferences, which can differ from those of diversified shareholders. To study…

Decision makers often aim to learn a treatment assignment policy under a capacity constraint on the number of agents that they can treat. When agents can respond strategically to such policies, competition arises, complicating estimation of the…

This paper provides an economic perspective on data-driven innovation in digital products, focusing on the role of complex experiments in measuring and improving social impact. The discussion highlights how tools and insights from economics…

We study how selective exposure to information by voters impacts electoral competition between two policy-motivated candidates. Each candidate has stochastic valence that is realized after the candidates choose platforms. In our model of…

The growth of electric vehicles (EVs) has raised concerns about the disposition of their batteries once they reach the end of their life. Currently, recycling is regarded as the potential solution for retired Li-ion batteries (LIBs). However,…

Differentiating letter shapes accurately is a core competence for any reader. Are letter shapes as distinctive as they could be? The visual shapes of letters, contrary to the phonemes of spoken languages, lack a unified description — an…

We study how information disclosure concerns shape the choice of limited partners (LPs) by venture capitalists (VCs). Late-2002 court rulings prevented public LPs from providing confidentiality to investment managers. The best-performing VCs, but…

We develop a model of disclosure timing in which the firm can commit to disclose its revenues at a fixed date (a time-based disclosure policy) or after a certain number of transactions have occurred (a news arrival-based disclosure policy). We…