Publications

The Gong, Young, and Zhou (GYZ) (Gong et al. 2023) paper examines potential earnings management by movie studio…

As Romer and Weitzman emphasized in the 1990s, new ideas are often combinations of existing ideas, an insight absent from recent models. In Kortum’s research around the same time, ideas are draws from a probability distribution, and Pareto…

Using comprehensive data on U.S. corporate bond trades since 2002, we find evidence that retail bond investors over rely on untimely credit ratings to their financial detriment. Specifically, they appear to select bonds by first screening on a…

Extensive evidence suggests that managers strategically choose the complexity of their descriptive disclosures. However, their motives in doing so appear mixed, as complex disclosures are used to obfuscate in some cases and to provide information…

ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define,…

We develop a framework to measure the value of free goods and services available on the internet. The conventional method of measuring consumer surplus based on monetary expenditures is ineffective because these goods’ prices are predominantly…

We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data about candidates’ valence…

Through their products and services, businesses have a meaningful impact on their customers’ health. When markets reward products that induce unhealthy behaviors, like poor diet and limited physical activity, they fuel the chronic disease…

Discourse about people seeking refuge from conflict varies considerably. To understand what components of this discourse reach refugees the most, we examined refugees’ perceptions of how their host communities perceive them (i.e., intergroup…

Importance: A wide variety of novel medical diagnostics and devices are determined safe and effective by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year, but to our knowledge the literature lacks evidence documenting how long it takes to…

We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, regulators evaluating…

Grabbing and keeping your audience’s focus is critical to communication success. What you have to say is important, so give yourself the best chance to convey your message to your audience by first gaining attention, but then, more importantly,…

To reduce spending and improve quality, some primary care clinics in the USA have focused on high-need, high-cost (HNHC) Medicare beneficiaries, which include clinically distinct subpopulations: older adults with frailty, adults under 65 years…

A new National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report, “Achieving Whole Health: A New Approach for Veterans and the Nation,” redefines what it means to be healthy and creates a roadmap for health systems, including the Veterans…

Numerous multinational firms have recently pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to a net-zero position by the year 2050. These pledges currently lack a unified measurement and reporting structure, leaving the public unsure about the…

Search engines and e-commerce platforms have substantial difficulty exposing new products to their users on account of an information problem: new products typically do not have enough sales or other user engagement that enables platforms to…

In this paper, I develop a measure of the difference in the amount of information that investors expect a forthcoming disclosure to contain should it reveal good news versus bad news (the disclosure’s “asymmetry”). To do so, I first show that…

Levelized cost is a life-cycle cost measure that aggregates investment expenditures and operating costs into a unit cost figure. So far, most applications of this concept have originated in relation to energy technologies. This paper describes…

Does Facebook enable ideological segregation in political news consumption? We analyzed exposure to news during the US 2020 election using aggregated data for 208 million US Facebook users. We compared the inventory of all political news that…

We examine bankruptcy within business groups. Groups have incentives to support financially distressed subsidiaries, as the bankruptcy of a subsidiary may impose severe costs on the group as a whole. This is in part because, in several…