Working Papers

We explore the evolution of financial innovation, using 24,000 U.S. finance patents applied for and granted over last two decades. Patented financial innovations are substantial and economically important, with annual grants expanding from a few…

Generalized trust is essential for supporting the functioning of modern societies, yet many countries experience limited trust. Given the social, economic, and political benefits of trust, it is crucial to understand how to increase generalized…

Online Appendix for Scaling Auctions as Insurance: A Case Study in Infrastructure Procurement

We compare political mobilization and support for democratic values during the French Revolution among the home bailliages and among individual members of French regiments sent with the Comte de Rochambeau to fight alongside American…

Theory of mind (ToM), or the ability to impute unobservable mental states to others, is central to human social interactions, communication, empathy, self-consciousness, and morality. We tested several language models using 40 classic false-…

We combine newly collected election data with records of public denials of the results of the 2020 election to estimate the degree to which election-denying Republican candidates for senator, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general…

Contextual bandit algorithms often estimate reward models to inform decision-making. However, true rewards can contain action-independent redundancies that are not relevant for decision-making. We show it is more data-efficient to estimate any…

For individuals who take on the responsibility of caring for another person due to illness, disability, or declining abilities, it can often be challenging, lonely, costly, and exhausting. As the United States continues to address the…

The problem of how to genetically modify cells in order to maximize a certain cellular phenotype has taken center stage in drug development over the last few years (with, for example, genetically edited CAR-T, CAR-NK, and CAR-NKT cells entering…

During a global pandemic, how can we best prompt social media users to demonstrate discernment in sharing information online? We ran a contextual adaptive experiment on Facebook Messenger with users in Kenya and Nigeria and tested 40 combinations…

[Submitted to Management Science.]

This paper examines a grocery retailer’s management of a premade food product. The retailer’s goal is to maximize a weighted sum of direct profit and customer welfare. Multiple items of the…

We attempt here to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of the relationship between organizational size and culture. In doing so, we report on a survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (men and women) in the US…

Using cross-border holding data from all custodians in China’s Stock Connect, we provide evidence that Chinese mainland insiders tend to evade the see-through surveillance by round-tripping via the Stock Connect program. After the regulatory…

Do stock price run-ups predictably revert? We develop a model of financial markets with two types of investors: rational investors and “oversensitive” investors who react excessively to salient public news. The model yields a summary statistic…

This paper provides a dynamic theory of the effects of organizational capacity on public policy. Consistent with prevailing accounts, a bureaucratic organization with higher capacity, i.e., a better ability to get things done, is more likely to…

Consumer inertia, the tendency to remain inactive, is a robust and well-documented phenomenon. However, if consumers are aware of their future inertia they can act to mitigate its effects on their outcomes. Using a large-scale randomized field…

Why do people withdraw the dignity of humanity from others? Sociologists have focused on the roles of institutional processes through which blatantly dehumanizing norms and narratives diffuse through a population, whereas social psychologists…

Shifting attachments to social groups are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of group identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized group-level properties and individual differences, this article instead…

Descriptive norms — the behavior of other individuals in one’s reference group — play a key role in shaping individual decisions. When characterizing the behavior of others, a standard approach in the literature is to focus on average behavior.…

This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in a generalized continuous-time framework that accommodates both jumps and recursive preferences. I show that, regardless of the presence of jumps,…