Publications

The prevalence of vote-buying is widely identified as a cause of poor governance in the developing world; potential mechanisms for this relationship include the selection of lower quality politicians, and the reduced accountability experienced by…

Comparison Lift is an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) application for testing online advertising audiences and creatives at JD.com. Unlike many other EaaS tools that focus primarily on fixed sample A/B testing, Comparison …

In the urgent setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, treatment hypotheses abound, each of which requires careful evaluation. A randomized controlled trial generally provides the strongest possible evaluation of a treatment, but the efficiency and…

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction — that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F) — is based on a stylized model that guides our…

Other organizational structures exist besides public corporations. Examples include family-controlled businesses, venture-backed companies, private equity-owned businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Each of these faces their own issues…

Missing attributes are ubiquitous in causal inference, as they are in most applied statistical work. In this paper we consider various sets of assumptions under which causal inference is possible despite missing attributes and discuss…

Across a wide panel of countries, the top 10% of financial stocks on average account for over 20% of a country’s market capitalization but earn on average significantly lower returns than do non-financial firms of the same size and risk exposures…

We measure financial literacy using questions assessing basic knowledge of four fundamental concepts in financial decision making: knowledge of interest rates, interest compounding, inflation, and risk diversification. Worldwide, just one in…

Restaurant hygiene grading schemes are considered exemplars of targeted transparency policies. We investigate the impact of an administrative design feature found in many schemes: repeated interactions between health inspectors and restaurateurs…

Problem definition: We study how online platforms can leverage the behavioral considerations of their users to improve their assortment decisions. Motivated by our collaboration with a dating company, we study how a platform…

Data is nonrival: a person’s location history, medical records, and driving data can be used by any number of firms simultaneously. Nonrivalry leads to increasing returns and implies an important role for market structure and property…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies…

Scrutiny of CEO pay increases during times of economic stress, when it is not clear how much pay CEOs should receive when corporate profitability suffers due to an unforeseen decline in the operating environment. On the one hand, the board might…

It has long been known that advocating for a cause can alter the advocate’s beliefs. Yet a guiding assumption of many advocates is that the biasing effect of advocacy is controllable. Lawyers, for instance, are taught that they can retain…

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly lengthened the list of developing and emerging market economies in debt distress. For some, a crisis is imminent. For many more, only exceptionally low global interest rates may be delaying a reckoning.…

For an incompatible patient-donor pair, kidney exchanges often forbid receipt-before-donation (the patient receives a kidney before the donor donates) and donation-before-receipt, causing a double-coincidence-of-wants problem. Our proposed…

This paper presents an infinite horizon dynamic model in which two firms compete in a market vertically differentiated by the qualities of their products and consumers have heterogeneous preferences for quality. Given the product qualities…

An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…

When debt is priced fairly, governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government decides to fully insure bondholders by manufacturing risk-free debt, then it cannot insure taxpayers against permanent macro-…