Working Papers

Consumer inertia, the tendency to remain inactive, is a robust and well-documented phenomenon. However, if consumers are aware of their future inertia they can act to mitigate its effects on their outcomes. Using a large-scale randomized field…

Why do people withdraw the dignity of humanity from others? Sociologists have focused on the roles of institutional processes through which blatantly dehumanizing norms and narratives diffuse through a population, whereas social psychologists…

Shifting attachments to social groups are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of group identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized group-level properties and individual differences, this article instead…

Descriptive norms — the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group — play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior.…

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in a generalized continuous-time framework that accommodates both jumps and recursive preferences. I show that, regardless of the presence of jumps,…

Corporate credit lines are drawn more heavily when funding markets are more stressed. This covariance elevates expected bank funding costs. We show that credit supply is inefficiently dampened by the associated debt-overhang cost to bank…

Executive compensation contracts use information from markets and accounting to elicit efficient incentives. We structurally estimate the contribution of each performance to quantify the relative importance of price versus accounting. For…

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…

A core assumption in the impression management literature is that organizations voluntarily disclose information about their positive social and environmental activities, policies, and performance in order to improve or maintain their reputation…

We explore the welfare implications of data-tracking technologies that enable firms to collect consumer data and use it for price discrimination. The model we develop centers around two features: competition between firms and consumers’ level of…

We study social learning and information transmission in a sender-receiver game wherein senders may be attacked (“cancelled”) for challenging the status-quo beliefs. We find that cancellations (and self-censorship) don’t arise unless there is a…

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…

Our efforts here represent an exploratory attempt to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of gender and organizational culture. In doing so, we report on a wide-ranging survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (…

Before the era of large central bank balance sheets, banks relied on incoming payments to fund outgoing payments in order to conserve scarce liquidity. Even in the era of large central bank balance sheets, rather than funding payments with…

Does going public affect the amount and type of corporate tax planning? Using a panel of U.S. corporate tax return data from 1994 to 2018, we show that IPO completion is associated with the implementation of multinational income shifting…

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…