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Ripple Effects of Hospital Team Faultlines on Patient Outcomes
Medical errors are rampant across healthcare settings, imposing a significant burden on patient safety. Here, we examined the ripple effects of diversity splits, or faultlines, within hospital teams on patient safety and care. Hospitals consist…
The Design of Macroprudential Stress Tests
We study the design of stress tests that provide information about aggregate and idiosyncratic risk in banks’ portfolios and impose contingent capital requirements. In the optimal static test, an adverse scenario fails all weak and some strong…
The Rest of the World’s Dollar-Weighted Return on U.S. Treasurys
Since 1980, foreign investors have timed their purchases and sales of U.S. Treasurys to yield particularly low returns. Their annual “dollar-weighted” returns, measured by the internal rate of return on their purchases and sales of Treasury bonds…
Trends in State and Local Pension Funds
Unfunded public pension obligations represent the largest liability for state and local governments in the United States. As of fiscal year 2021, the total reported unfunded liabilities of these plans are $1.076 trillion. In contrast, the market…
Uncovering the Semantics of Concepts Using GPT-4
The ability of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to generate human-like texts suggests that social scientists could use these LLMs to construct measures of semantic similarity that match human judgment. In this article…
What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment
How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…
Area Conditions and Positive Incentives: Engaging Local Communities to Protect Forests
Tropical deforestation for agriculture causes alarming CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. To prevent this, various governments and multinational commodity-buyers offer a positive incentive for locals conditional on no…
Can Personalized Digital Counseling Improve Consumer Search for Modern Contraceptive Methods?
This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of a personalized digital counseling intervention addressing informational constraints and choice architecture, cross-randomized with discounts for long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs),…
A Century of Pluralistic Ignorance: What We Have Learned About Its Origins, Forms, and Consequences
The concept of pluralistic ignorance was introduced a century ago by social psychologist, Floyd Allport. It has been broadly applied in the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. Pluralistic ignorance…
Complex Asset Markets
Investors’ individual arbitrage models introduce idiosyncratic risk into complex asset strategies, driving up average returns and Sharpe ratios. However, despite the attractive risk-return trade-off, participation is limited. This is because…
Contracting in Peer Networks
We consider multi-agent multi-firm contracting when agents benchmark their wages to those of their peers, using weights that vary within and across firms. When a single principal commits to a public contract, optimal contracts hedge relative wage…
Corporate Tax Policy in Developed Countries and Economic Activity in Africa
This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares…
Estimated Average Treatment Effect of Psychiatric Hospitalization in Patients with Suicidal Behaviors
Importance Psychiatric hospitalization is the standard of care for patients presenting to an emergency department (ED) or urgent care (UC) with high suicide risk. However, the effect of hospitalization in reducing subsequent…
Financial Literacy and Financial Well-Being: Evidence from the U.S.
This paper examines financial literacy in the United States, using the 2021 National Financial Capability Study data. A large volume of papers have demonstrated the importance of financial knowledge and documented the low level of financial…
Human-like Intuitive Behavior and Reasoning Biases Emerged in Large Language Models but Disappeared in ChatGPT
We design a battery of semantic illusions and cognitive reflection tests, aimed to elicit intuitive yet erroneous responses. We administer these tasks, traditionally used to study reasoning and decision-making in humans, to OpenAI’s generative…
Information Acquisition, Efficiency, and Non-Fundamental Volatility
We analyze non-fundamental volatility and efficiency in large games featuring strategic interaction and endogenous information acquisition. We adopt the rational inattention approach to information acquisition but generalize to a large class of…
Machine Learning Who to Nudge: Causal vs Predictive Targeting in a Field Experiment on Student Financial Aid Renewal
In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000 college…
Privacy and Market Concentration: Intended and Unintended Consequences of the GDPR
We show that websites’ vendor use falls after the European Union’s (EU’s) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but that market concentration also increases among technology vendors that provide support services to websites. We collect panel…
Semantic Determinants of Memorability
We examine why some words are more memorable than others by using predictive machine learning models applied to word recognition and recall datasets. Our approach provides more accurate out-of-sample predictions for recognition and recall than…
Sovereign Debt Ratchets and Welfare Destruction
We study an impatient, risk-neutral government that cannot commit to a particular debt path, financed by competitive lenders. In equilibrium, debt adjusts slowly toward a debt-to-income target, exacerbating booms and busts. Strikingly, gains from…