Publications

Executive compensation contracts use information from markets and accounting to elicit efficient incentives. We structurally estimate the contribution of each performance to quantify the relative importance of price versus accounting. For…

We study the impact of personalized content recommendations on the usage of an educational app for children. In a randomized controlled trial, we show that the introduction of personalized recommendations increases the consumption of content in…

We characterize the contribution of immigrants to U.S. innovation, both through their direct productivity as well as through their indirect spillover effects on their native collaborators. To do so, we link patent records to a database containing…

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a low-cost and scalable program that supports women in Poland in transitioning into jobs in the information technology sector. This program, called “Challenges,” helps…

A core assumption in the impression management literature is that organizations voluntarily disclose information about their positive social and environmental activities, policies, and performance in order to improve or maintain their reputation…

We explore the welfare implications of data-tracking technologies that enable firms to collect consumer data and use it for price discrimination. The model we develop centers around two features: competition between firms and consumers’ level of…

In this Closer Look, we examine individual investor perception of ESG to gauge their concern for environmental and social issues, their view of whether fund managers should use their voting power to influence ESG practices, and their willingness…

In summer 2022, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Hoover Institution Working Group on Corporate Governance at Stanford University, and Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University jointly conducted a nationwide survey of 2,…

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation but struggle to take coordinated action.…

We consider a matching market where buyers and sellers arrive according to independent Poisson processes at the same rate and independently abandon the market if not matched after an exponential amount of time with the same mean. In this…

We study social learning and information transmission in a sender-receiver game wherein senders may be attacked (“cancelled”) for challenging the status-quo beliefs. We find that cancellations (and self-censorship) don’t arise unless there is a…

This paper reviews the empirical methods used in the accounting literature to draw causal inferences. Similar to other social science disciplines, recent years have seen a burgeoning growth in the use of methods that seek to provide as-if random…

This essay describes the evolution and recent convergence of two methodological approaches to causal inference. The first one, in statistics, started with the analysis and design of randomized experiments. The second, in econometrics, focused on…

We design and implement an adaptive experiment (a “contextual bandit”) to learn a targeted treatment assignment policy, where the goal is to use a participant’s survey responses to determine which charity to expose them to in a donation…

Two leading hypotheses for why individuals unintentionally share misinformation are that 1) they are unable to recognize that a post contains misinformation, and 2) they make impulsive, emotional sharing decisions without thinking about whether a…

We examine methods for evaluating interventions designed to improve decision-making quality when people misunderstand the consequences of their choices. In an experiment involving financial education, conventional outcome metrics (financial…

Our efforts here represent an exploratory attempt to make some progress on developing a fuller understanding of gender and organizational culture. In doing so, we report on a wide-ranging survey we administered to a sample of full-time workers (…

This paper studies strategic consumer shopping behavior in response to a macroeconomic policy and quantifies its unintended consequences for retailers vis-à-vis the policy goal. Using transaction-level data from a large retail chain in India, we…

Before the era of large central bank balance sheets, banks relied on incoming payments to fund outgoing payments in order to conserve scarce liquidity. Even in the era of large central bank balance sheets, rather than funding payments with…