Working Papers

In collaboration with Feeding America, we aim to redesign Real-Time—a tool on its food sourcing and rescue platform, MealConnect—that facilitates the connection of ad-hoc, time-sensitive food donations to local agencies (e.g., meal programs)…

An enduring challenge in contagion theory is that the pathways contagions follow through social networks exhibit emergent complexities that are difficult to predict using network structure. Here, we address this challenge by developing a causal…

Insights from psychology suggest competitive interference: when a firm advertises, consumers are less likely to think of its competitor, benefiting the advertiser by keeping it top of mind and suppressing competitor recall. We empirically…

This paper studies partisan differences in medical practice over 1999-2019. I link physicians in the Medicare claims data with campaign contributions to identify party alignment. In 1999, there are no partisan differences in medical expenditure…

We compute the cross-country transfers that result from unconventional monetary policy in the Eurozone. The ECB funds the expansion of its aggregate balance sheet mostly by issuing bank reserves and cash in core countries. The national central…

The recent elimination of the United States de minimis exemption for import tariffs has been reported to have a significant impact on ultra-fresh fashion companies such as Shein and Temu. This paper develops a game-theoretic model to investigate…

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…

We study how Russian oligarch-affiliated companies operate globally and respond to sanctions. We construct a dataset tracking 70 companies, 1,800 international subsidiaries, and their institutional investors between 2009 and 2023. These companies…

Over the past decade, the use of machine learning (ML) models in healthcare applications has rapidly increased. Despite high performance, modern ML models do not always capture patterns the end user requires. For example, a model may predict a…

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…

Firms’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies have received significant scrutiny in recent years, including their efficacy and role in long-term value creation. We provide new evidence on these issues by studying what is arguably the…

Obesity and excess weight are major global health challenges. A number of technological solutions, including mobile apps, have been developed to help people lose weight. Many such applications provide access to human coaches who help consumers…

Responding to economic and environmental pressures, a growing number of companies seek to repurpose products (assets) that retain functional capacity beyond their initial first life. This paper examines a generic valuation model for used capacity…

This paper studies expectations formation when the underlying process has fat tails. Using a large sample of firm sales growth expectations, we document three facts: (i) the relationship between forecast revisions and future forecast errors is…

Over the last half-century, economic growth stagnated but stock-market wealth boomed. I present evidence that declining innovation productivity reconciles these trends. At the macro level, I document that R&D spending has fallen relative to…

This paper studies whether households are selectively inattentive to interest rates and examines its macroeconomic implications. We first use existing and newly-designed household surveys to establish that households close to durables purchases…

Student loans with income-contingent repayment insure borrowers against income risk but can reduce their incentives to earn more. Using a change in Australia’s income-contingent repayment schedule, I show that borrowers reduce their labor supply…

Sovereign debt yields have declined dramatically over the last half-century. Standard explanations, including aging populations and increases in asset demand from abroad, encounter difficulties when confronted with the full range of evidence. We…

Since the 2000s, U.S. public pension funds have actively shifted their risky investments away from public equities and toward alternative assets like private equity and hedge funds—some much more than others. We explore a range of possible…