Publications

Depression not only creates enormous costs for treatment and lost work time, but also increases the risk for other costly chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The magnitude of these risks remains unclear, with existing…

Empirical moments of asset prices and exchange rates imply that pricing kernels are almost perfectly correlated across countries. Otherwise, observed real exchange rates would be too smooth for high Sharpe ratios. However, the cross-country…

The problem of learning treatment assignment policies from randomized or observational data arises in many fields. For example, in personalized medicine, we seek to map patient observables (like age, gender, heart pressure, etc.) to a treatment…

Which groups are most likely to become visionaries that define the future of their field? Because vision is difficult to measure, prior work has reached conflicting conclusions: one perspective emphasizes the benefits of being large,…

I explain the meaning of an interoperable payment system and why interoperability is crucial for efficiency. I review some alternative approaches to interoperability, including central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), hybrid CBDCs, and two-ledger…

Ten years ago, donors committed $1.5 billion to a pilot Advance Market Commitment to help purchase pneumococcal vaccine for low-income countries. The AMC aimed to encourage the development of such vaccines, ensure distribution to children in low-…

This paper develops a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model in which households’ preferences for safe and liquid assets constitute a violation of Modigliani and Miller. I show that the scarcity of these coveted assets created by…

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer five original research questions related to moral judgments,…

The rapid deployment of electric vehicles is widely viewed as a promising path towards decarbonizing the transportation sector. The pace at which electric vehicles will replace those with internal combustion engines will depend to a large…

Willingness to migrate is a necessary but not sufficient condition for migration from an origin to destination country. For the United States and other countries with an excess supply of immigrants, the slot rationing rule is a key determinant of…

Part I of III: Excerpted from the forthcoming book Stress in the American Workplace

In the opening chapter, Dr. Hans Selye first defined stress as the “non-specific” response of the body to any demand made upon it. With the…

Using data from the 2016–2018 Tick Size Pilot Study, we examine the efficacy of using wider tick sizes to subsidize market-making in small capitalization stocks. We demonstrate that realized spreads decay quickly within the initial microseconds…

The allocation of decision authority by a principal to either a human agent or an artificial intelligence is examined. The principal trades off an AI’s more aligned choice with the need to motivate the human agent to expend effort in learning…

We prove the folk theorem for discounted repeated games with anonymous random matching. We allow non‐uniform matching, include asymmetric payoffs, and place no restrictions on the stage game other than full dimensionality. No record‐keeping or…

We examine whether a disclosure mandate for greenhouse gas emissions creates stakeholder pressure for firms to subsequently reduce their emissions. For UK-incorporated listed firms such a mandate was adopted in 2013. Using a difference-in-…

Over the past decade, low interest rates attracted borrowers to leveraged credit markets, which have since reached an unprecedented size and risk. The collision of a highly leveraged corporate sector with the severe economic shock from COVID-19…

The coronavirus pandemic has left the corporate sector scrambling for cash. So far, a relatively robust financial system has been able to provide short-term funding, primarily through the revolving lines of bank credit available to most firms.…

For many machine learning algorithms, two main assumptions are required to guarantee performance. One is that the test data are drawn from the same distribution as the training data, and the other is that the model is correctly specified. In real…