Publications

In a reflective moment during his brief but crisis-prone presidency, the late President John F. Kennedy once observed:

The essence of ultimate decision remains impenetrable to the observer—often, indeed, to the decider himself… . There…

Two frameworks — cultural attraction theory and epistemic vigilance — predict a cultural disadvantage for counter-intuitive beliefs. We review several cognitive mechanisms that conspire to render pro-vaccination beliefs counter-intuitive. Trust…

The prevalence and widespread usage of email has given businesses a direct and cost effective way of providing consumers with targeted discount offers. While these discounts are expected to increase the demand for the promoted products, are they…

For the past 40 years, the conventional univariate model of self-monitoring has reigned as the dominant interpretative paradigm in the literature. However, recent findings associated with an alternative bivariate model challenge the conventional…

Using ethnographic, experimental and survey data from an Indian handicraft cluster, this paper studies the conditions under which individuals who identify with their work prioritize financial rewards in their economic decisions. I argue that the…

In rural areas of resource-poor countries, basic access to health workers, medicines, and supplies is often stalled by the poor condition of health transportation. Social enterprise Riders for Health strengthens African health supply chains by…

The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that delivers its food assistance mainly via transoceanic shipments of commodity-based in-kind food. This approach is more costly and less timely than cash-based assistance, which…

This paper proposes the Q-Lasso method for wait time prediction, which combines statistical learning with fluid model estimators. In historical data from four remarkably different hospitals, Q-Lasso predicts the emergency department (ED) wait…

Researchers in accounting, corporate finance, economics, and law regularly evaluate the impact of corporate governance provisions on firm performance and managerial actions. Many of these studies rely on publicly available governance summaries…

Over the past 30 years, venture capital has become a dominant force in the financing of innovative American companies. From Google to Intel to FedEx, companies supported by venture capital have profoundly changed the U.S. economy. Despite…

Several regions of the human brain respond more strongly to faces than to other visual stimuli, such as regions in the amygdala (AMG), superior temporal sulcus (STS), and the fusiform face area (FFA). It is unclear if these brain regions are…

Not everyone who has committed a misdeed and wants to warn others against committing it will feel entitled to do so. Six experiments, a replication, and a follow-up study examined how suffering for a misdeed grants people the legitimacy to advise…

Rising healthcare costs have sparked debate about the best way to provide high-quality affordable health insurance. We discuss the potential for regulated insurance markets to outperform single-payer public insurance. We use as an example the…

This chapter reviews the literature on how changes in corporations, firms, and markets influence the dynamics of social movements. It describes the concepts of corporate and industry opportunity structure, and looks at the way…

Racial inequity continues to plague America, yet many Whites still doubt the existence of racial advantages, limiting progress and cooperation. What happens when people are faced with evidence that their group benefits from privilege? We suggest…

Empirical work on asset prices suggests that pricing kernels have to be almost perfectly correlated across countries. If they are not, real exchange rates are too smooth to be consistent with high Sharpe ratios in asset markets. However, the…

We study estimation and inference in settings where the interest is in the effect of a potentially endogenous regressor on some outcome. To address the endogeneity, we exploit the presence of additional variables. Like conventional instrumental…

Exchange rates strongly co-vary against their base currency. We uncover a gravity equation in this factor structure: the key determinant of a country’s exchange rate beta on the common base factor is the country’s distance from the base country.…

The extreme fragility of the financial system that gives rise to systemic risk and crises is rooted in the incentives of people within this system and the failure of regulation to counter these incentives. The same forces that increase systemic…