Working Papers

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) will likely be the most important technology we have ever developed. Technologies such as electricity, semiconductors, and the internet have been transformative, reshaping economic activity and dramatically…

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on…

This paper studies gun-use regulation and firearm mortality. I gather historical schedules of deer hunting season in North Carolina and Virginia and pair them with morgue records at county-day frequency. Hunters increase firearm use during deer…

This paper studies demand, fatalities, and regulation in firearm markets. I assemble 20 years of administrative data from California, recording all licit handgun purchases and fatalities. Leveraging variation from the entry timing of firearm…

This paper studies the roles of market power and taxes in determining market surplus and social welfare in the U.S. consumer firearms industry. Using microdata from Massachusetts and aggregate data from other states, we estimate an equilibrium…

Policymakers often distort goods markets to effect redistribution—for example, via price controls, differential taxation, or in-kind transfers. We investigate the optimality of such policies alongside the (optimally-designed) income tax. In our…

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the United States effectively “spent” about 4 percent of GDP — via reduced economic activity — to address a mortality risk of around 0.3 percent. Many experts believe that catastrophic risks from advanced A.I. over…

Building on the canonical “bottleneck” model of Vickrey (1969), we show that carpooling and road pricing are highly complementary in addressing traffic congestion: they can be much more effective jointly than each one separately, and can improve…

A solution concept that is a refinement of Nash equilibria selects for each finite game a nonempty collection of closed and connected subsets of Nash equilibria as solutions. We impose three axioms for such solution concepts. The axiom of…

Effective information sharing is critical for the success of organizations and governments. Because information that is easy to access is more likely to be adopted, leaders often minimize friction in information delivery. However, one type of…

We use administrative corporate tax data from the IRS to study a particular form of tax avoidance for US multinational corporations (MNCs). This strategy relies on cost sharing agreements (CSAs), which govern joint R&D efforts conducted with…

In this paper, we argue that the New York City congestion pricing plan whose implementation was paused in the summer of 2024 had a major shortcoming: as designed, it would have had a much more severe impact on the drivers of personal vehicles…

We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample upper…

Qini curves have emerged as an attractive and popular approach for evaluating the benefit of data-driven targeting rules for treatment allocation. We propose a generalization of the Qini curve to multiple costly treatment arms that quantifies the…

We consider the problem of using observational bandit feedback data from multiple heterogeneous data sources to learn a personalized decision policy that robustly generalizes across diverse target settings. To achieve this, we propose a minimax…

Online marketplaces have adopted new quality control mechanisms that can accommodate a flexible pool of providers. In the context of ride-hailing, we measure the effectiveness of these mechanisms, which include ratings, incentives, and behavioral…

This paper studies the transmission of a county’s historical exposure to the U.S.frontier into its consumers’ present-day preferences for firearm ownership and regulation. Counties with an additional decade on the frontier between 1790–1890 have…

One thread of empirical work in social science focuses on decomposing group differences in outcomes into unexplained components and components explained by observable factors. In this paper, we study gender wage decompositions, which require…

The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…

Has the United States economy become less competitive in recent decades? One might think so based on a body of research that has rapidly become influential for antitrust policy. We explain that the empirical evidence relating to concentration…