Working Papers

We study the impact of personalized content recommendations on the usage of an educational app for children. In a randomized controlled trial, we show that the introduction of personalized recommendations increases the consumption of content in…

We characterize the contribution of immigrants to U.S. innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing…

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a low-cost and scalable program that supports women in Poland in transitioning into jobs in the information technology sector. This program, called “Challenges,” helps…

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a “contextual bandit”) to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant’s survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

Two leading hypotheses for why individuals unintentionally share misinformation are that 1) they are unable to recognize that a post contains misinformation, and 2) they make impulsive, emotional sharing decisions without thinking about whether a…

Learning optimal policies from historical data enables the gains from personalization to be realized in a wide variety of applications. The growing policy learning literature focuses on a setting where the treatment assignment policy does not…

Online platforms often face challenges being both fair (i.e., non-discriminatory) and efficient (i.e., maximizing revenue). Using computer vision algorithms and observational data from a microlending marketplace, we find that choices made by…

Labor economists regularly analyze employment data by fitting predictive models to small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets. Although modern machine learning methods offer promise for such problems, these survey datasets are too…

We revisit the classic result on the (non-)existence of pure-strategy Nash equilibria in the Generalized First-Price Auction for sponsored search advertising and show that the conclusion may be reversed when ads are ranked based on the product of…

We study an economy with traders whose payoffs are quasilinear and their private signals are informative about an unobserved state parameter. The limit economy has infinitely many traders partitioned into a finite set of symmetry classes called…

We consider the problem of a rational, Bayesian agent receiving signals over time for the purpose of taking an action. The agent chooses when to stop and take an action based on her current beliefs, and prefers (all else equal) to act sooner…

We propose a new adaptive empirical Bayes framework, the Bag-Of-Null-Statistics (BONuS) procedure, for multiple testing where each hypothesis testing problem is itself multivariate or nonparametric. BONuS is an adaptive and interactive knockoff-…

We study how tax policies that lower the cost of capital impact investment and labor demand. Difference-in-differences estimates using confidential Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that tax policies increased both investment and…

Profit shifting by multinational corporations is thought to reduce tax revenue around the world. We analyze the introduction of standard regulations aimed at limiting profit shifting. Using administrative tax and customs data from Chile in…

The property tax is the most under-utilized tax in developing countries. We evaluate the revenue and welfare effects of the main policy instruments used to raise property tax revenue: tax rate changes and enforcement. Using administrative data…

This paper studies the construction of p-values for nonparametric outlier detection, taking a multiple-testing perspective. The goal is to test whether new independent samples belong to the same distribution as a reference data set or are…

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the…

Existing survival analysis techniques heavily rely on strong modelling assumptions and are, therefore, prone to model misspecification errors. In this paper, we develop an inferential method based on ideas from conformal prediction, which can…

Firms have ever increasing access to consumer data, which they use to personalize their advertising and to price discriminate. This raises privacy concerns. Policymakers have argued in response that consumers should be given control over their…

Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates — often for convenience, tractability, or both. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? In this paper, we answer this…