Publications

State and federal governments invest millions of dollars in providing accurate and relevant information on expected outcomes to students pursuing higher education, but whether such information targets what students value about college is unclear…

We formulate the problem of constructing multiple simultaneously valid confidence intervals (CIs) as estimating a high probability upper bound on the maximum error for a class/set of estimate-estimand-error tuples, and refer to this as the error…

Democratic values are eroding just as citizens perceive increasing corruption, with numerous cases implicating the highest-level politicians. Could perceived increases in apex corruption be weakening democracy? We first present event study…

We explore the evolution of financial innovation using US finance patents. Patented financial innovations are substantial and increasingly economically important. Their subject matter has changed, consistent with the industry’s shift toward…

Dehumanization of others has been attributed to institutional processes that spread dehumanizing norms and narratives, as well as to individuals’ denial of mind to others. We propose that blatant dehumanization also arises when people actively…

In this study, we examine complementarities in usage across a set of related software products from a multi-product firm. We employ a novel experimental approach to causally estimate complementarities, leveraging rich usage data and advertising…

In this Closer Look, we consider whether ESG is a luxury good — a good whose high price tag stimulates demand. During times of economic prosperity, shareholders expressed willingness to sacrifice personal financial benefit to see environmental…

Venture capitalists’ unique approach to investment and innovation has played a pivotal role in launching one-fifth of the largest U.S. public companies. And three-quarters of the largest U.S. companies founded in the past 50 years would not have…

The Massachusetts Firearms Records Bureau recently published administrative data covering the universe of legal firearm transactions in the state. We use these data to validate state-level background checks as a proxy for firearm transactions and…

Politicians invest heavily in social media to amplify narratives about their nations, but the effectiveness of such approaches remains unclear. Analyzing 758,222 posts from US and UK politicians on X (formerly Twitter), we found that right-wing…

Determining emergency department (ED) nurse staffing decisions to balance quality of service and staffing costs can be extremely challenging, especially when there is a high level of uncertainty in patient demand. Increasing data availability and…

Economic theory suggests that production complementarity is an important driver of sectoral co-movements and business cycle…

Motivated by applications in queueing theory, we consider a class of singular stochastic control problems whose state space is the d-dimensional positive orthant. The original problem is approximated by a drift control problem, to which…

Descriptive norms, the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group, play a key role in shaping individual decisions in managerial contexts and beyond. Organizations are increasingly using information about descriptive norms to nudge…

We study the effect of Facebook and Instagram access on political beliefs, attitudes, and behavior by randomizing a subset of 19,857 Facebook users and 15,585 Instagram users to deactivate their accounts for 6 wk before the 2020 U.S. election. We…

How does competition from online platforms affect the organization, performance, and editorial choices of newspapers? What are the implications of these changes for the information voters are exposed to and for their political choices? We study…

Model selection in supervised learning provides costless guarantees as if the model that best balances bias and variance was known a priori. We study the feasibility of similar guarantees for cumulative regret minimization in the stochastic…

This paper estimates state corporate tax incidence using new data and methods for estimating the effects on profits. Extending Suárez Serrato and Zidar (2016), we develop two identification approaches that use the effects on incumbent firm labor…

Past theories have linked science denial to religiosity but have not explained its geographic variability. We hypothesize that it springs not only from religious intensity but also from religious intolerance, which depends greatly on the…

The large amounts of resources required for producing the materials our garments are made of and the significant levels of pollution associated with textile and garment production and disposal are some of the major environmental concerns…