Working Papers

I examine the conditions under which trade can support peaceful coexistence and prosperity when particular ethnic groups are cheap targets of violence. A simple theoretical framework reveals that for a broad set of cases, while inter-ethnic…

Commercial radio spectrum use rights in the US are traditionally assigned using licenses over large geographic areas with 10- or 15-year terms, to encourage infrastructure investment. However, such long-term licenses are difficult to reassign as…

We evaluate the effects of three ECB policies (the Securities Markets Programme, the Outright Monetary Transactions, and the Long-Term Refinancing Operations) on government bond yields.  We use a novel Kalman-filter augmented event-study…

Classic arguments for decentralization, augmented by ideas about how participation empowers the poor, motivate the widely used approach in foreign aid called community-driven development.  CDD devolves control over the selection,…

Using a comprehensive sample of reverse merger (RM) transactions, we examine the effects of China’s IPO regulations on the prices and returns of its publicly listed stocks. During 2007-2015, unlisted Chinese firms paid an average of 3 to 4…

Given the promise of 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing, some innovative consumer goods companies have started to experiment with such a technology for on-demand production. However, the potential impact of 3D printing on retail…

We model a firm’s optimal capital structure decision in a framework in which it may later choose to enter either Chapter 11 reorganization or Chapter 7 liquidation. Creditors anticipate equityholders’ ex-post reorganization incentives and price…

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from…

This paper tackles the intersection of two trends, the increasing prevalence of flat, so-called horizontal organizations and the greater gender diversity of the workers that such organizations employ. We investigate why these organizations may be…

Politicians are widely perceived to lose significance upon leaving office. Yet media accounts often highlight politicians’ legacies as a source of influence that endures even after they retire. This article assesses these contrasting views by…

Recent advances in advertising technology have lead to the development of “native advertising”, which is a format of advertising that mimics the other non-sponsored content on the medium. While advertisers have rapidly embraced the format on a…

Leading research is converging upon the finding that citizens from immigrant-receiving nations strongly prefer the entry of high-skilled to low-skilled immigrants. Prior studies have largely interpreted this “skill premium” as deriving from…

Many irreversible long-run capital investments entail opportunities for managers to respond flexibly to changes in the economic environment. However, common levelized cost measures used to guide decision-making, such as the levelized cost of…

The fabrication and manufacturing of industrial commodities such as iron, glass and cement is carbon-intensive. A major reason capture of carbon dioxide from flue gases of industrial processes has not been widely adopted as a climate mitigation…

Forthcoming in The Review of Financial Studies

I analyze a model in which risk-averse investors trade on signals regarding both a stock’s expected payoffs and its risk. These investors may trade in the stock and a derivative…

A Health Savings Account (HSA) is a tax-advantaged savings account available only to households with high-deductible health insurance. This paper provides initial answers to two questions related to HSAs: 1) How should a household determine its…

Many scientific and engineering challenges — ranging from personalized medicine to customized marketing recommendations — require an understanding of treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric causal forest for…

We propose generalized random forests, a method for non-parametric statistical estimation based on random forests (Breiman, 2001) that can be used to fit any quantity of interest identified as the solution to a set of local moment equations.…

Two-sided matching platforms, such as those for labor, accommodation, dating, and taxi hailing, can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how the search for partners should be designed, we consider a…

Financialized corporate governance as commonly practiced causes significant inefficiencies and harm. Corporations and governments routinely fail to design and enforce rules that reduce the opacity of corporations, create effective commitments…