Publications

In this essay I discuss potential outcome and graphical approaches to causality, and their relevance for empirical work in economics. I review some of the work on directed acyclic graphs, including the recent The Book of Why (Pearl and…

We study a market for a skill that is in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service that they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. We use this model to evaluate the belief that…

Wind power development is an increasingly vital source of renewable electricity that significantly contributes globally to reduced greenhouse gas emissions and the combatting of climate change. The environmental impacts of wind turbines have…

Women make less than men in some science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. While explanations for this gender pay gap vary, they have tended to focus on differences that arise for women and men after they have worked for a period…

As of 2020, there are only 27 MW of installed wind capacity in Israel. Yet, the country’s northern region is expected to soon become the site of numerous additional wind farms. The externalities associated with wind turbines frequently arouse…

We study the frictions in dealer-intermediation in residential real estate through the lens of “iBuyers,” technology entrants, who purchase and sell residential real estate through online platforms. iBuyers supply liquidity to households by…

This paper examines whether, when, and why job seekers use firms’ financial information in the job search process. We find first evidence of financial information’s relevance to job seekers by documenting a substantial increase in job search…

Decision makers called to evaluate and approve a reform, proposed by an interest group, a politician, or a bureaucracy, suffer from a double asymmetric information problem: about the competence of the proposer and the consequences of the proposal…

The lack of board diversity is one of the most controversial topics in corporate board governance. We investigate one important influence on diversity by studying whether shareholders value diversity on corporate boards in director elections.…

Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google’s Android platform instead of automatically defaulting them to Google’s own search engine. I show…

An internal survey of faculty, staff, and program alumni at Stanford University’s Byers Center for Biodesign revealed some of the same patterns as their industry-wide research on gender bias. While well-intentioned male leaders reported a…

We generalize the scope of random allocation mechanisms, in which the mechanism first identifies a feasible “expected allocation” and then implements it by randomizing over nearby feasible integer allocations. The previous literature has…

We consider a cheap‐talk setting with two senders and a continuum of receivers with heterogeneous preferences. Each receiver is constrained to listen to one of the senders but can choose which sender to listen to. The introduction of a…

The goal of this paper is to evaluate blockchain technology in the context of value chain management, and identify the types of applications where the technology can potentially offer a real advantage over traditional solutions. We begin by…

This paper reviews the literature examining how costs of monitoring for, acquiring, and analyzing firm disclosures — collectively, “disclosure processing costs” — affect investor information choices, trades, and market outcomes. The…

We consider several economic uncertainty indicators for the U.S. and UK before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: implied stock market volatility, newspaper-based policy uncertainty, Twitter chatter about economic uncertainty, subjective…

Objective: 

Employers affect the health of employees and their families through work environments and employee benefits. We sought to understand employer decisions around those topics.

Methods: …

Environmental costs are a legal obligation of companies and proper corporate governance requires that they be dealt with responsibly. Unfortunately, disturbing examples exist where companies have taken aggressive action to separate their…

Firm volatilities comove strongly over time, and their common factor is the dispersion of the economy-wide firm size distribution. In the cross section, smaller firms and firms with a more concentrated customer base display higher…