Working Papers

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…

We model a dynamic economy with strategic complementarity among investors and endogenous government interventions that mitigate coordination failures. We establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness, and show that one intervention can affect…

The deceased-donor kidney transplant candidates in the US are ranked according to characteristics of both the donor and the recipient. We seek the ranking policy that achieves the best efficiency-equity tradeoff, taking into account patients’…

Research shows that optimism can positively impact health, but when and why people feel optimistic when confronting health challenges is less clear. Findings from six studies show that the frames people adopt when thinking about health challenges…

I study the robust predictions of optimal dynamic learning strategy when the measure of signal informativeness is an indirect measure from sequential cost minimization. I first show that an indirect information measure is supported by sequential…

Previously titled: Finite Population Causal Standard Errors

Consider a researcher estimating the parameters of a regression function based on data for all 50 states in the United States or on data for all visits to a website. What…

‘Notice and Choice’ has been a mainstay of policies designed to safeguard consumer privacy. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior when faced with notice and choice which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their…

How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question, given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to…

We study the design of macro-prudential stress tests and capital requirements. The tests provide information about correlation in banks portfolios. The regulator chooses contingent capital requirements that create a liquidity buffer in case of a…

CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it…

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of complex asset markets with endogenous entry and exit in which the investment technology of investors with more expertise is subject to less asset-specific risk. The joint equilibrium distribution of…

In 2014, the Associated Press (AP) began using algorithms to write media articles about firms’ earnings announcements. These “robo-journalism” articles synthesize information from firms’ press releases, analyst reports, and stock performance, and…

We examine whether anticipation of a repatriation tax reduction affects the amount of cash U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) hold overseas. We find that U.S. MNCs most likely to benefit from a repatriation tax reduction accumulated…