Publications

Leading research is converging on the finding that citizens from immigrant-receiving nations strongly prefer the entry of high-skilled to low-skilled immigrants. Prior studies have largely interpreted this “skill premium” as deriving from…

Political science is in large part the study of power, but power itself is difficult to measure. We argue that we can use newspaper coverage — in particular, the relative amount of space devoted to particular subjects in newspapers — to measure…

We collaborated with UNICEF and launched a field experiment in Panamá to test the effectiveness of communicating different means–goal associations in promoting children’s consumption of water. This research is the first to examine whether…

I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake to align incentives. Financial regulation is necessary because…

Economic elites regularly seek to exert political influence. But what policies do they support? Many accounts implicitly assume economic elites are homogeneous and that increases in their political power will increase inequality. We shed new…

This Data Spotlight provides data and statistics on shareholder activism and the market for corporate control. This data supplements the issues introduced in the Quick Guides “The…

We study state taxes as a potential source of spatial misallocation in the U.S.. We build a spatial general equilibrium framework that incorporates salient features of the U.S. state tax system, and use changes in state tax rates between 1980 and…

We examine the relation between managers’ personal income tax rates and their corporate investment decisions. Using plausibly exogenous variation in federal and state tax rates, we find a positive relation between managers’ personal tax rates and…

In this Closer Look, we examine the tensions between corporate culture, financial incentives, and employee conduct as illustrated by the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal. In 2016, Wells Fargo admitted that employees had opened as many as 2…

This study explores how and when the institutionalized classification system for products (or services) in a specific national market domain affects consumer perceptions of authenticity. We argue that “type authenticity” presupposes a well-…

We examine theoretically the role of reserves management and macro-prudential capital controls as ex-post and ex-ante safeguards, respectively, against sudden stops, and argue that these measures are complements rather than …

Over the past twenty years, especially the past decade, China has taken enormous strides to develop its bond market as an integral step of financial reform, along with its tremendous effort in interest rate liberalization and internalization of…

Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy

We explore what private market data can tell us about the appropriate discount rates for valuing investments in climate change abatement. We estimate the term structure of…

Motivated by jail overcrowding and the U.S. correctional system’s widespread use of risk models to aid in inmate release decisions both prior to trial (i.e., pretrial release) and near the end of their jail sentence (i.e., split sentencing), we…

Throughout their lifetime, individuals today are more responsible for their personal finances than ever before. With life expectancies rising, pension and social welfare systems are being strained. In many countries, employer-sponsored defined…

We propose generalized random forests, a method for nonparametric statistical estimation based on random forests (Breiman [Mach. Learn. 45(2001) 5–32]) that can be used to fit any quantity of interest identified as…

Most investors throughout the world have a single goal: to earn the highest risk-adjusted financial returns. They would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced social benefits.

More recently, an increasing…

In display advertising markets, advertisers often purchase ad placements through bidding in repeated auctions based on realized viewer information. We study how budget-constrained advertisers may compete in such sequential auctions in the…