Publications

Absent theoretical guidance, empiricists have been forced to rely upon numerical comparative statics from constant tax rate models in formulating testable implications of trade-off theory in the context of natural experiments. We fill the…

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already in use by other firms in their home country. We characterize the growth rate using a summary statistic of the…

We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert democracy if…

We develop SHOPPER, a sequential probabilistic model of shopping data. SHOPPER uses interpretable components to model the forces that drive how a customer chooses products; in particular, we designed SHOPPER to capture how items interact with…

Since 2002, the U.S. government has encouraged business investment using accelerated depreciation policies that significantly reduce investment costs. We provide the first in-depth analysis of this stimulus on employment and earnings. Our local…

Despite a vast literature on the determinants of prescription opioid use, the role of health insurance plans has received little attention. We study how the form of Medicare beneficiaries’ drug coverage affects the volume of opioids they consume…

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Two weeks later, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative administered a survey to 224 mostly scaled ($1 million+ revenue) Latino-owned businesses in the United…

In recent years, scholars have addressed the most important topics in corporate law based on a flawed assumption: that the ratio of the market value of a corporation’s securities to their book value is a valid measure of the value of the…

We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user’s complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like health…

Gender diversity has been linked to positive business results. Yet limited data exist to characterize the gender landscape in health technology, a field that draws employees from both biomedical engineering and medicine. To better understand the…

We model a simple market setting in which fragmentation of trade of the same asset across multiple exchanges improves allocative efficiency. Fragmentation reduces the inhibiting effect of price-impact avoidance on order submission. Although…

Adaptivity is an important yet under-studied property in modern optimization theory. The gap between the state-of-the-art theory and the current practice is striking in that algorithms with desirable theoretical guarantees typically involve…

The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with…

We study heuristics for a class of complex multi-armed bandit problems, the period-by-period choice of a set of objects or “toolkit” where the decision maker learns about the value of tools within the chosen toolkit. This paper studies heuristics…

The dynamic problem of choosing subsets of objects or “toolkits” when their value distribution is unknown is a multi-armed bandit problem with non-independent arms. Accordingly, except for very simple specifications, this problem cannot (…

The personality of leaders has been shown to have important effects on their followers. Recently, organizational researchers have become increasingly concerned with the potentially destructive consequences of narcissistic leadership. Evidence…

Adaptive experiment designs can dramatically improve statistical efficiency in randomized trials, but they also complicate statistical inference. For example, it is now well known that the sample mean is biased in adaptive trials. Inferential…

For over twenty years, electricity market liberalization has advanced short-term market efficiency in wholesale markets, but little progress has been made on coordinated transmission and generation investments. With fast penetration of renewables…

In the present report, we describe two planned direct replications of studies on the relationship between social class and prosocial behavior. In the original studies, individuals with higher socioeconomic status have been shown to behave less…

We examine the role of concurrent information in the striking increase in investor response to earnings announcements from 2001 to 2016, as measured by return variability and volume following Beaver (1968). We find management guidance, analyst…