Publications

Most U.S. government spending on highways and bridges is done through “scaling” procurement auctions, in which private construction firms submit unit price bids for each piece of material required to complete a project. Using data on bridge…

We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on a setting where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects are small, where sample sizes are large and where assignment is completely…

In this note, we introduce a general version of the well-known elliptical potential lemma that is a widely used technique in the analysis of algorithms in sequential learning and decision-making problems. We consider a…

As news reports describing Artificial Intelligence (AI) proliferate, will people’s perceptions of human nature change such that they rate distinctively human attributes as more essential? Five studies (N = 5111) demonstrate this “AI…

College is regarded as the great equalizer. People with four-year degrees expect to reap the rewards of their education. This paper examines the pivotal transition from college to the labor market. How do candidates fare when they reveal to…

Every government that controls an exhaustible resource must decide whether to exploit it or to conserve and thereby let the subsequent government decide whether to exploit or conserve. This paper develops a positive theory of this situation and…

Using generalized random forests and rich Swedish administrative data, we show that the earnings effects of job displacement due to establishment closures are extremely heterogeneous across workers, establishments, and markets. The decile of…

We examine whether corporate money in politics benefits or hurts labor using the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United, which rendered bans on political election spending unconstitutional. In difference-in-difference analyses, affected states…

The torch-choice is an open-source library for flexible, fast choice modeling with Python and PyTorch. torch-choice provides a ChoiceDataset data structure to manage databases flexibly and memory-efficiently. The paper demonstrates constructing a…

There appears to be a tension between trade proponents and environmental activists. This paper shows, however, how Contingent Trade Agreements (CTAs) can motivate conservation. I first analyse a standard trade model where trade-specific…

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…

We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior. We embed a field experiment in job recommendation emails from a leading career advice agency in the U.S. The…

How do organizations reconcile the cross-pressures of conformity and differentiation? Existing research predominantly conceptualizes identity as something an organization has by virtue of the products or services it offers. Drawing on…

Using a wide sample of international publicly traded firms, this paper studies the rapidly increasing practice of incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics in executive compensation contracts. Our evidence suggests that…

We survey public employees across the United States about their preferences regarding retirement plan options, and in particular at what employer contribution rate public employees would agree to switch to a defined contribution (DC) plan on a…

This primer offers a hands-on accessible guide to writing and estimating structural models. We review commonly-used methodologies, including dynamic programming, maximum likelihood, generalized and simulated method of moments, conditional choice…

People often struggle to do what they ideally want because of a conflict between their actual and ideal preferences. ​​​By focusing on maximizing engagement, recommendation algorithms appear to be exacerbating this struggle. However, this need…

In this editorial, we provided an overview of the papers in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Financial Literacy and Wellbeing. They cover topics that are at the center of academic research, from the effects of financial education in…