Working Papers

We follow a representative panel of millions of consumers in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017 and document several facts on the long-term effects of the Great Recession. There were about six million foreclosures in the ten-year period after Lehman’s…

Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…

Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data documents what donors actually want from government; and existing research largely neglects donors’ views on individual issues. We…

When macroeconomic tools fail to respond to wealth inequality optimally, regulators can still seek to mitigate inequality within individual markets. A social planner with distributional preferences might distort allocative efficiency to achieve a…

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with…

In this paper, I study the impact of a firm’s risk disclosure on investors’ desire to acquire information about the firm. I first show that risk disclosure complements private learning by enabling sophisticated investors to acquire information…

In this paper, I develop an option-pricing model that formally incorporates a disclosure event. Using the model, I first theoretically examine how two properties of the disclosure — its overall informativeness and its informativeness given good…

We study when and how intervention to stop a project is optimally used in a repeated relationship between a principal and a policymaker. The policymaker is privately informed about his ability, where a higher ability policymaker has a lower cost…

Prior to 2018, U.S. repatriation taxes motivated companies to retain cash offshore.  Using confidential jurisdiction-specific data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we find that firms with high tax-induced foreign cash have approximately…

In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to consumers, as well as…

We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Prior papers document positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically conclude that…

Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of acceptable job…

We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration, and the impact of the arbitrator selection process on outcomes. We collect a novel data set containing roughly 9,000 arbitration cases in…

Certain markets are illicit because the supply is partly coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can restore…

We study which types of activities migrate to the shadow banking sector, why migration occurs in some sectors, and not others, and the quantitative importance of this migration. We explore this question in the $10 trillion US residential mortgage…

Two salient features of most online platforms are that they do not dictate the transaction prices, and use commissions/subscriptions for extracting revenues. We consider a platform that charges commission rates and subscription fees to sellers…

We study the dynamic mechanism design problem of a seller that repeatedly auctions independent items over a discrete time horizon to buyers that face a cumulative budget constraint. A driving motivation behind our model is the emergence of real-…

As technology platforms have created new markets and new ways of acquiring information, economists have come to play an increasingly central role in tech companies – tackling problems such as platform design, strategy, pricing, and policy. Over…

This note explains a new type of auction based on an existing derivatives risk-management technique known as “compression.” A compression auction can be used to convert centrally cleared contracts on an underlying benchmark, such as the London…