Working Papers

We study specialized lending in a credit market competition model with private information. Two banks, equipped with similar data processing systems, possess “general” signals regarding the borrower’s quality. However, the specialized bank gains…

Many proposed surface water transfers undergo a series of regulatory reviews designed to mitigate hydrological and economic externalities. While these reviews help limit externalities, they impose substantial transaction costs that also limit…

We study the dynamics between local segregation, partisanship, and political polarization. We exploit large-scale, exogenous and high-stakes peer assignment due to universal conscription of soldiers assigned from each of 34,947 municipalities to…

We characterize the relation between exchange rates and their macroeconomic fundamentals without committing to a specific model of preferences, endowment or menu of traded assets. When investors can trade home and foreign currency risk-free bonds…

We use administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau to estimate the causal effects of loose credit conditions on firm employment and worker earnings. To obtain quasi-random variation in firms’ exposure to credit booms, we exploit the…

There are a number of available methods for selecting whom to prioritize for treatment, including ones based on treatment effect estimation, risk scoring, and handcrafted rules. We propose rank-weighted average treatment effect (RATE) metrics as…

New AI tools have the potential to change the way workers perform and learn, but little is known about their impacts on the job. In this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from…

We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about new…

Social networks utilize award recognition and front pages to motivate user content creation, facilitate consumer discovery of content, and provide attention and recognition to the best content. Past research shows that such attention and…

In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains…

How does the digital revolution affect bank competition and financial stability? I use hand- collected data and a novel identification strategy to show that after adopting digital platforms, banks branchlessly operate in more markets,…

How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…

Tropical deforestation for agriculture causes alarming CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. To prevent this, various governments and multinational commodity-buyers offer a positive incentive for locals conditional on no…

This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares…

In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000 college…

We study price and non-price provisions of debt contracts to gauge how creditors evaluate changes in senior executives’ personal income taxes (“managerial taxes”) of their borrowers. Because managers’ personal income taxes can exacerbate…

A higher U.S. government debt/output ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current debt/output ratio. The market…

Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We…

This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup’s Series A…

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries…