Publications

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the…

Polarization is both a description of the current state of politics and a dynamic path that has rippled across the political domain over decades. We provide a simple model that explains why polarization appears incrementally and why it was elites…

Deep-learning methods can extract high-dimensional feature vectors for objects, concepts, images, and texts from large-scale digital data sets. These vectors are proxies for the mental representations that people use in everyday cognition and…

Flow is a subjective state characterized by immersion and engagement in one’s current activity. The benefits of flow for productivity and health are well-documented, but a rigorous description of the flow-generating process remains elusive. Here…

Existing survival analysis techniques heavily rely on strong modelling assumptions and are, therefore, prone to model misspecification errors. In this paper, we develop an inferential method based on ideas from conformal prediction, which can…

Do financial resources relate to how important meaning is for one’s happiness? Across three large-scale datasets spanning over 500,000 individuals across 123 countries, we examined the relationship between meaning and happiness for individuals…

Our study addresses whether integrated report quality, IRQ, is negatively associated with stock price synchronicity, an inverse measure of firm-specific information, and the extent to which the relation between IRQ and synchronicity is attenuated…

Two-sided marketplace platforms often run experiments (or A/B tests) to test the effect of an intervention before launching it platform-wide. A typical approach is to randomize users into a treatment group, which receives the intervention, and a…

We empirically characterize how China is internationalizing the Renminbi by selectively opening up its domestic bond market and propose a dynamic reputation model to explain China’s internationalization strategy. While previously closed to…

Despite the complexity of memory and its diverse manifestations in our daily lives, certain mnemonic effects appear to hold across a wide range of conditions. We identify the effects of recency, contiguity, similarity, primacy, and repetition as…

We introduce a framework for calibrating machine learning models so that their predictions satisfy explicit, finite-sample statistical guarantees. Our calibration algorithm works with any underlying model and (unknown) data-generating…

This empirical white paper is part of a broader research project on the explainability and fairness of machine learning in credit underwriting. The research is being conducted in collaboration with Professors Laura Blattner and Jann Spiess at the…

Lay perceptions of medical conditions and treatments determine people’s health behaviors, guide biomedical research funding, and have important consequences for both individual and societal well-being. Yet it has been nearly impossible to…

The COVID-19 pandemic brought renewed national attention to the profound and persistent racial differences in American health outcomes. The Centers for Disease Control’s national snapshot of health in 2019 painted a troubling picture prior to the…

How did the introduction of mass commercial television in the postwar era change American consumer behavior? Media scholars and U.S. historians claim that TV with its unprecedented advertising appeal drew Americans into a culture of upscaling and…

Education in Brazil and Latin America is typically associated with a shorter school day than in most OECD countries. This paper assess the impact of a Brazilian policy that extends the high school day on student test scores. The program lengthens…

The current research reveals that the pursuit of peace entails an inherent paradox. The urgent need to save lives and alleviate human suffering necessitates swift solutions to the problem of intergroup conflict. However, because the human mind…

COVID-19 accelerated a decade-long shift to remote work by normalizing working from home on a large scale. Indeed, 75% of US employees in a 2021 survey reported a personal preference for working remotely at least one day per week, and studies…

Firms have ever increasing access to consumer data, which they use to personalize their advertising and to price discriminate. This raises privacy concerns. Policymakers have argued in response that consumers should be given control over…

We use discounted cash flow analysis to measure a country’s fiscal capacity. Crucially, the discount rate applied to projected cash flows includes a GDP risk premium. We apply our valuation method to the CBO’s projections for the U.S. federal…