Publications

What explains the relative persistence of same-race romantic relationships? One possible explanation is structural – this phenomenon could reflect the fact that social interactions are already stratified along racial lines – while another…

We calculate increases in contributions required to achieve full funding of state and local pension systems in the United States over 30 years. Without policy changes, contributions would have to increase by 2.5 times, reaching 14.1 percent of…

We use an extensive data set of bilateral exposures on credit default swap (CDS) to estimate the impact on collateral demand of new margin and clearing practices and regulations. We decompose collateral demand for both customers and dealers into…

We reexamine the classic yet static information asymmetry model of Myers and Majluf (1984) in a fully dynamic market. A firm has access to an investment project and can finance it by debt or equity. The market learns the quality of the firm over…

This paper studies a dynamic communication game in which the seller of an asset, whose credibility is unknown to the market, reports changes in the asset value during multiple periods before selling the asset. We characterize the strategy by…

This paper analyzes how the audience for internet news varies with the source of the referral, comparing the audience when users navigate directly to news outlets to that when users are referred by social media. On average, the audience referred…

There is growing appreciation for the advantages of experimentation in the social sciences. Policy-relevant claims that in the past were backed by theoretical arguments and inconclusive correlations are now being investigated using more…

Motivated by India’s nationwide biometric program for social inclusion, we analyze verification (i.e., one-to-one matching) in the case where we possess similarity scores for 10 fingerprints and two irises between a resident’s biometric…

Facebook’s Gross National Happiness (FGNH) indexes the positive and negative words used in the millions of status updates submitted daily by Facebook users. FGNH has face validity: it shows a weekly cycle and increases on national holidays. Also…

We study how competition for talent affects CEO compensation, taking into consideration that CEO decisions and CEO skills or talent are not observable, and CEOs can manipulate performance as measured by outsiders. Firms compete by offering…

This paper explores consumers’ commitment to and conviction about their beliefs in the form of attitude certainty. Based on a review of past research, we present a new framework for understanding attitude certainty and how consumers’…

Demographic lexica have potential for widespread use in social science, economic, and business applications. We derive predictive lexica (words and weights) for age and gender using regression and classification models from word usage in Facebook…

We develop a model of information exchange through communication and investigate its implications for information aggregation in large societies. An underlying state determines payoffs from different actions. Agents decide which other agents to…

We introduce a new method, differential language analysis (DLA), for studying human development in which computational linguistics are used to analyze the big data available through online social media in light of psychological theory. Our open…

We provide a real-options model of an industry in which agents time abandonment of their projects in an effort to protect their reputations. Agents delay abandonment attempting to signal quality. When a public common shock forces abandonment of a…

We consider the problem of allocating m objects to n agents. Each agent has unit demand, and has strict preferences over the objects. There are qj units of object j available and the problem is balanced in the sense that ∑jqj=…

We document some early effects of how mobile devices might change Internet and retail commerce. We present three main findings based on an analysis of eBay’s mobile shopping application and core Internet platform. First, early adopters of mobile…

In this article, we argue that institutional changes to the seniority system have electoral consequences to incumbents. Building on the theory of Conditional Party Government, we argue that the consolidation of power in the hands of party…

Uncertainty has qualitatively different implications than risk in studying executive incentives. We study the interplay between profitability uncertainty and moral hazard, where profitability is multiplicative with managerial effort. Investors…