Publications

Women are less financially literate than men. It is unclear whether this gap reflects a lack of knowledge or, rather, a lack of confidence. Our survey experiment shows that women tend to disproportionately respond “do not know” to questions…

We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage points more…

Two-sided marketplace platforms often run experiments to test the effect of an intervention before launching it platform-wide. A typical approach is to randomize individuals into the treatment group, which receives the intervention, and the…

How does news about the economy influence voting decisions? We isolate the effect of the information environment from the effect of change in the underlying economic conditions themselves by taking advantage of left‐digit bias…

Estimating causal effects under exogeneity hinges on two key assumptions: unconfoundedness and overlap. Researchers often argue that unconfoundedness is more plausible…

I study how private communication among competitors affects their public disclosures. Theory suggests that competing firms can use public disclosure to coordinate, and predicts less public disclosure when there is more private communication.…

Cross-border capital flows are often opaque. Global firms commonly finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, including shell companies in tax havens, making it difficult to observe the true economic linkages between investors and borrowers…

The field of asset pricing is a rich and diverse discipline that has contributed to many areas of discourse, including those of fundamental importance to policy makers, investors, and households. As we look ahead during a time of substantial…

We study the consequences of misreporting in settings where ambiguity-averse investors face uncertainty about two aspects of the firm: its productivity and the weakness of its reporting system. We show that the joint presence of these two sources…

We investigate the effect of patent disclosures on corporate innovation. Using the American Inventor’s Protection Act (AIPA) as a shock that increased patent disclosures, we find an increase in innovation for firms whose rivals…

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption — i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. In this work, we present a tractable bandit algorithm that is not…

Past research has uncovered actions that would seem to undermine but in fact frequently enhance persuasion. For example, expressing doubt about one’s view or presenting arguments against it would seem to weaken one’s case, but can sometimes…

Ample research documented the effects of guiding principles in people’s lives, as reflected in personal values, on a variety of behaviors. But do these principles universally guide behaviors across all cultural contexts? To address this question…

Research over the past decade has shown that grandiose narcissists are often successful at attaining leadership positions in organizations. However, there is no evidence that narcissists lead higher performing firms, and while they see themselves…

Excess administrative costs in the US health care system are routinely referenced as a justification for comprehensive reform. While there is agreement that these costs are too high, there is little understanding of what generates administrative…

Effective therapies for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are urgently needed, and pre-clinical data suggest alpha-1 adrenergic receptor antagonists (α1-AR antagonists) may be effective in reducing mortality related to hyperinflammation…

The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration–exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be suboptimal in general.…

The Affordable Care Act substantially increased the share of farmworkers with medical insurance, but it had little effect on employer-provided benefits, including health care insurance. Eligible workers with pre-existing health conditions…

When valuing a firm, investors must assess not only its expected future cash flows but also the systematic risk inherent in these cash flows. In this paper, we model the process by which investors may learn about firms’ betas from earnings and…

Emergency Department (ED) crowding is a major public health challenge since it can seriously impact patient outcomes; and accurate prediction of patient flow in EDs is essential for improving operational efficiency and quality of care. We present…