Working Papers

We develop a heterogeneous-agents network-based model to analyze alternative policies during a pandemic outbreak, accounting for health and economic trade-offs within the same empirical framework. We leverage a variety of data sources, including…

I review the functionality of the secondary market for U.S. Treasuries in March 2020, when the Covid-19 crisis triggered investor flows that overwhelmed intermediaries. Although the Fed was able to largely restore market liquidity through its…

How costly is foreclosure? Estimates of the social cost of foreclosure typically focus on financial costs. Using random judge assignment instrumental variable (IV) and propensity score matching (PSM) approaches in Cook County, Illinois, we find…

Which groups are most likely to become visionaries that define the future of their field? Because vision is difficult to measure, prior work has reached conflicting conclusions: one perspective emphasizes the benefits of being large,…

I explain the meaning of an interoperable payment system and why interoperability is crucial for efficiency. I review some alternative approaches to interoperability, including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), hybrid CBDCs, and two-ledger…

The rapid deployment of electric vehicles is widely viewed as a promising path towards decarbonizing the transportation sector. The pace at which electric vehicles will replace those with internal combustion engines will depend to a large…

We examine whether a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions creates stakeholder pressure for firms to subsequently reduce their emissions. For UK-incorporated listed firms such a mandate was adopted in 2013. Using a difference-in-…

We address whether mandatory forecasts of earnings announcement dates are informative and what are the informational tradeoffs between mandatory and voluntary forecasts. We find China mandatory forecasts predict actual earnings announcement dates…

This paper examines the automation and sharing aspects of the competitive dynamics of the emerging automated mobility industry. It applies strategic management, technological innovation, and forecasting frameworks to examine how the…

One of the hallmarks of the SEC’s investigative process is that it is shrouded in secrecy — only the SEC staff, high-level managers of the company being investigated, and outside counsel are typically aware of active investigations. We obtain…

Modern applications in statistics, computer science and network science have seen tremendous values of finer matrix spectral perturbation theory. In this paper, we derive a generic ℓ2→∞ eigenspace perturbation bound for symmetric random matrices…

While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitate one particular form of…

Is bank capital structure designed to extract deposit subsidies? We address this question by studying capital structure decisions of shadow banks: intermediaries that provide banking services but are not funded by deposits. We assemble, for the…

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already in use by other firms in their home country. We characterize the growth rate using a summary statistic of the…

We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert democracy if…

We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user’s complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like health…

We model a simple market setting in which fragmentation of trade of the same asset across multiple exchanges improves allocative efficiency. Fragmentation reduces the inhibiting effect of price-impact avoidance on order submission. Although…

Adaptivity is an important yet under-studied property in modern optimization theory. The gap between the state-of-the-art theory and the current practice is striking in that algorithms with desirable theoretical guarantees typically involve…

Adaptive experiment designs can dramatically improve statistical efficiency in randomized trials, but they also complicate statistical inference. For example, it is now well known that the sample mean is biased in adaptive trials. Inferential…

In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or a growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women…