Working Papers

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…

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…

Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide…

I incorporate computational constraints into decision theory in order to capture how cognitive limitations affect behavior. I impose an axiom of computational tractability that only rules out behaviors that are thought to be fundamentally hard. I…

We study the hierarchy of communities in real-world networks under a generic stochastic block model, in which the connection probabilities are structured in a binary tree. Under such model, a standard recursive bi-partitioning algorithm is…

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…

I propose a new approach to mechanism design: rather than assume a common prior belief, assume access to a common dataset. I restrict attention to incomplete information games where a designer commits to a policy and a single agent responds. I…

We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on a setting where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects are small, where sample sizes are large and where assignment is completely…

Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on their effects on market outcomes and welfare. The effects of this policy are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer protection…

Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two barriers to long-acting reversible…