We empower faculty to design and discover original research that challenges conventions and creates breakthroughs that push boundaries of knowledge.
Publication Types
Journal Articles
Books
Working Papers
Case Studies
Browse Publications
Generalized Random Forests
We propose generalized random forests, a method for nonparametric statistical estimation based on random forests (Breiman [Mach. Learn. 45(2001) 5–32]) that can be used to fit any quantity of interest identified as…
How Investors Can (and Can't) Create Social Value
Most investors throughout the world have a single goal: to earn the highest risk-adjusted financial returns. They would not accept a lower financial return from an investment that also produced social benefits.
More recently, an increasing…
Learning in Repeated Auctions with Budgets: Regret Minimization and Equilibrium
In display advertising markets, advertisers often purchase ad placements through bidding in repeated auctions based on realized viewer information. We study how budget-constrained advertisers may compete in such sequential auctions in the…
Made in the USA? A Study of Firm Responses to Domestic Production Incentives
How do U.S. companies respond to incentives intended to encourage domestic manufacturing? I study the Domestic Production Activities Deduction (DPAD), which was enacted in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 and was the third largest U.S.…
Making Time Matter: A Review of Research on Time and Meaning
In this conceptual article, we review three decades of research on time and meaning in consumer research and psychology to identify key themes that have emerged, build frameworks that integrate past research, and reveal areas of potential for…
Making Time Matter: A Review of Research on Time and Meaning
In this conceptual paper, we review three decades of research on time and meaning in consumer research and psychology to identify key themes that have emerged, build frameworks that integrate past research, and reveal areas of potential for…
Not All Debt is Created Equal: On the Mental Accounting of Debt Forms
Abstract coming soon.
On Ladders and Pyramids: Hierarchy's Shape Determines Relationships and Performance in Groups
Hierarchies take different forms, which individuals mentally represent using different geometric shapes. We propose and empirically demonstrate that individuals’ mental representations of the shape hierarchy takes affect its consequences. Five…
Optimal Exploration-Exploitation in a Multi-Armed Bandit Problem with Non-Stationary Rewards
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the gambler’s objective…
Perceiving attitude change: How qualitative shifts augment change perception
Attitude change and persuasion are among the most studied topics in social psychology. Surprisingly, though, as a field we have virtually zero insight into perceived attitude change—that is, how people assess the magnitude of a shift in…
Prone to Fail: The Pre-Crisis Financial System
The financial crisis that began in 2007 was triggered by over-leveraged homeowners and a severe downturn in US housing markets. However, a reasonably well-supervised financial system would have been much more resilient to this and other types of…
Repatriation Taxes and Foreign Cash Holdings: The Impact of Anticipated Tax Reform
We examine whether an anticipated reduction in future repatriation taxes affects the amount of cash U.S. multinationals hold overseas. We find that the expected benefits of a repatriation tax reduction are positively associated with accelerated…
Technological Links and Return Predictability
Employing a classic measure of technological closeness between firms, we show that the returns of technology-linked firms have strong predictive power for focal firm returns. A long-short strategy based on this effect yields monthly alpha…
The Effect of Payment Frequency on Spending Behavior
Abstract coming soon.
The Impact of Chinese Trade on U.S. Employment: The Good, the Bad, and the Apocryphal
Using establishment-level micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper studies the impact of Chinese import penetration on firm reorganization and relocation across local labor markets. We find three main results. First, the negative effect…
A Toolkit of Policies to Promote Innovation
Economic theory suggests that market economies are likely to underprovide innovation because of the public good nature of knowledge. Empirical evidence from the United States and other advanced economies supports this idea. We summarize the pros…
Venture Capital and Pre-IPO Governance: Data
This Data Spotlight provides data and statistics on the venture capital industry and the governance of pre-IPO companies in the United States. This data supplements the issues introduced in the Quick Guide “…
Wealth, Slaveownership, and Fighting for the Confederacy: An Empirical Study of the American Civil War
How did personal wealth and slaveownership affect the likelihood Southerners fought for the Confederate Army in the American Civil War? On the one hand, wealthy Southerners had incentives to free-ride on poorer Southerners and avoid fighting; on…
Who Wants to Run? How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization
The growing ideological gulf between Democrats and Republicans is one of the biggest issues in American politics today. Our legislatures, composed of members from two sharply disagreeing parties, are struggling to function as the founders…
Why High-Order Polynomials Should Not Be Used in Regression Discontinuity Designs
It is common in regression discontinuity analysis to control for third, fourth, or higher-degree polynomials of the forcing variable. There appears to be a perception that such methods are theoretically justified, even though they can lead to…