Working Papers

Governments may extract rent from private citizens by inflating taxes and spending on projects which benefit special interests. Using a spatial equilibrium model, I show that less elastic housing supplies increase governments’ abilities to…

We examine the economic determinants of short-sale supply, and its consequences for future stock returns.  Lendable supply increases with expected borrowing costs and decreases with financial statement constructs that indicate overvaluation…

We estimate the spillovers of properties financed by the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) onto surrounding neighborhood residents. We nonparametrically estimate the impact of LIHTC development on nearby house prices by developing a new…

We study the calculation of exact p-values for a large class of non-sharp null hypotheses about treatment effects in a setting with data from experiments involving members of a single connected network. The class includes null hypotheses that…

In this paper we study the problems of estimating heterogeneity in causal effects in experimental or observational studies and conducting inference about the magnitude of the differences in treatment effects across subsets of the population. In…

Which budgetary institutions result in efficient provision of public goods? We analyze a model with two parties bargaining over the allocation to a public good each period. Parties place different values on the public good, and these…

Older wealthholders spend down assets slowly. To study this pattern, the paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model in which different preferences for bequests, expenditures when in need of long-term care (LTC), and ordinary…

We show that the vast majority of low-income high achievers do not apply to any selective college. This is despite the fact that selective institutions typically cost them less, owing to generous financial aid, than the two-year and nonselective…

This paper analyzes the economic incidence of sustained changes in federal government spending at the local level. We use a new identification strategy to isolate geographical variation in formula-based federal spending and develop three sets of…

Many empirical studies use Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity (FRD) designs to identify treatment effects when the receipt of treatment is potentially correlated to outcomes. Existing FRD methods identify the local average treatment effect (LATE) on…

We propose a new form of hybrid capital for banks, Equity Recourse Notes (ERNs), which ameliorate booms and bust by creating counter-cyclical incentives for banks to raise capital, and so encourage bank lending in bad times. They avoid the…

This paper studies the role of ex-ante information asymmetries in second price, common value auctions. Motivated by information structures that arise commonly in applications such as online advertising, we seek to understand what types of…

We investigate the role of networks of military alliances in preventing or encouraging wars between groups of countries. A country is vulnerable to attack if some allied group of countries can defeat the defending country and its (remaining)…

This paper considers dynamic moral hazard settings, in which the agent’s actions have consequences in the future. To maintain incentives, the optimal contract ties deferred compensation and termination to future performance. Some of the…

This paper analyzes how the audience for internet news varies with the source of the referral, comparing the audience when users navigate directly to news outlets to that when users are referred by social media. On average, the audience referred…

This paper studies the endogenous formation of supply chain networks when procurement is subject to disruption risk. We argue that the presence of non-convexities in the chain (e.g., due to non-convex production technologies or financial…