Publications

When researchers develop new econometric methods it is common practice to compare the performance of the new methods to those of existing methods in Monte Carlo studies. The credibility of such Monte Carlo studies is often limited because of the…

Estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects (HTE) is of prime importance in many disciplines, from personalized medicine to economics among many others. Random forests have been shown to be a flexible and powerful approach to HTE…

Clinical care in modern intensive care units (ICUs) combines multidisciplinary expertise and a complex array of technologies. These technologies have clearly advanced the ability of clinicians to do more for patients, yet so much equipment also…

This paper studies the semisupervised novelty detection problem where a set of “typical” measurements is available to the researcher. Motivated by recent advances in multiple testing and conformal inference, we propose AdaDetect, a flexible…

We propose an economic framework for determining the optimal allocation of a scarce supply of vaccines that become gradually available during a public health crisis, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Agents differ in observable and unobservable…

Background

Little is known about hospital pricing for coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Using new price transparency data, we assessed variation in CABG prices across US hospitals and the association between higher…

Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking — where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies — seems to threaten the universality of Bayesian…

Using administrative data, we analyze the response to Proposition 30, a 2012 measure that increased California marginal tax rates by up to 3 percentage points for high-income households. Relative to baseline departure rates, an additional 0.8…

We empirically document two adjustment margins that are usually absent from the predominant “bank balance sheet lending” view of financial intermediation. For the shadow bank substitution margin, shadow banks substitute for traditional banks…

We examine the role of assurance — third-party verification — on carbon accounting quality. We develop a measure of carbon accounting quality based on the deviation of reported emissions from a model-based expected level and use two other survey-…

The emergence of COVID-19 dramatically changed social behavior across societies and contexts. Here we study whether social norms also changed. Specifically, we study this question for cultural tightness (the degree to which societies generally…

Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as…

Using debit and credit card data, we find a one standard-deviation increase in firms’ earnings surprise is linked to a 3% or $5.6 billion increase in aggregate quarterly consumption of local households near the disclosing firms’ headquarters. The…

Innovative public firms sell 9.6% (615) more patents in the last month, relative to the first half of the fiscal year. Consistent with reporting incentives driving these sales, they are more pronounced among firms with strong incentives to meet…

Gossip, the exchange of personal information about absent third parties, is ubiquitous in human societies. However, the evolution of gossip remains a puzzle. The current article proposes an evolutionary cycle of gossip and uses an agent-based…

We study how investment fees vary within private equity funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management- and performance-based fees. Managers of…

Each year, people spend less time reading and more time viewing images, which are proliferating online. Images from platforms such as Google and Wikipedia are downloaded by millions every day, and millions more are interacting through social…

Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize and extend this theoretical result and test it using data from…

Modern websites rely on personal data to measure and improve their performance and to market to consumers. The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) limited access to such personal data, with the goal of protecting consumer…