Working Papers

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies…

For an incompatible patient-donor pair, kidney exchanges often forbid receipt-before-donation (the patient receives a kidney before the donor donates) and donation-before-receipt, causing a double-coincidence-of-wants problem. Our proposed…

An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…

When debt is priced fairly, governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government decides to fully insure bondholders by manufacturing risk-free debt, then it cannot insure taxpayers against permanent macro-…

In severe viral pneumonia, including Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the viral replication phase is often followed by hyperinflammation (‘cytokine storm syndrome’), which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure,…

This note presents a preliminary approach to the design of an across-the-curve credit spread index (AXI). The index is a measure of the recent average cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly listed U.S. bank holding companies and…

We introduce a new class of methods for finite-sample false discovery rate (FDR) control in multiple testing problems with dependent test statistics where the dependence is fully or partially known. Our approach separately calibrates a data-…

What leads people to feel negatively about members of other social groups? While recent work has mostly focused on the strength of group identity, we propose that perceptions of intergroup difference, and the animus they catalyze, are often…

We study the joint determination of product quality and complexity in a rational setting. We introduce a novel notion of complexity, which affects how costly it is for an agent to acquire information about product quality. In our model, an agent…

We compare the revenue of the optimal third-degree price discrimination policy against a uniform pricing policy. A uniform pricing policy offers the same price to all segments of the market. Our main result establishes that for a broad class of…

There has been an increase in interest in experimental evaluations to estimate causal effects, partly because their internal validity tends to be high. At the same time, as part of the big data revolution, large, detailed, and representative,…

We explain how the common practice of size-discovery trade detracts from overall financial market efficiency. At each of a series of size-discovery sessions, traders report their desired trades, generating allocations of the asset and cash that…

We develop an analytical framework to study experimental design in two-sided platforms. In the settings we consider, customers rent listings; rented listings are occupied for some amount of time, then become available. Platforms typically use two…

The standard solution concept for stochastic games is Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE); however, its computation becomes intractable as the number of players increases. Instead, we consider mean field equilibrium (MFE) that has been popularized…

Drawing on lessons from the 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and a simple conceptual framework, we examine the response of U.S. bank regulators to the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that the current regulatory strategy of “watchful waiting…

While information design has gained significant attention in the recent literature as a tool for shaping consumers’ purchase behavior, little is known about its use and implications in two-sided marketplaces, where both supply and demand…

We study the interaction of search and application approval in credit markets. We combine a unique dataset, which details search behavior for a large sample of mortgage borrowers, with loan application and rejection decisions. Our data reveal…