Publications

We take issue with claims that the funding mix of banks, which makes them fragile and crisis-prone, is efficient because it reflects special liquidity benefits of bank debt. Even aside from neglecting the systemic damage to the economy that banks…

This chapter presents a selective review of a literature in marketing that analyzes diffusion and pricing over the product life-cycle. I primarily focus on empirical work, and on papers that deal with the dynamics of pricing over time. I discuss…

Conventional wisdom suggests that firms can benefit from coordinating pricing and production decisions. One way firms can coordinate such decisions is through private communication. However, private communication between competing firms is…

We develop a theory explaining how collectivism causes people to “blur” demographic differences, that is, to see less diversity than actually exists in a group, and reconciling contradictions in how collectivistic norms influence group…

This paper presents five facts on the behavior of U.S. banks between 2007 and 2015 that impose useful restrictions on the formulation of a bank problem. (1) Market to book leverage ratio diverged significantly during the crisis. (2) Book values…

Data from U.S. public firms show that in booms large firms finance with debt and payout equity, whereas small firms issue both equity and debt. Therefore, large firms generally substitute between debt and equity financing over the business cycle…

We compare health care spending in public and private Medicare using newly available claims data from Medicare Advantage (MA) insurers. MA insurer revenues are 30 percent higher than their health care spending. Adjusting for enrollee mix, health…

People seek to spend time in positive experiences, enjoying and savoring. Yet there is no escaping negative experiences, from the mundane (e.g., arguing) to the massive (e.g., death of a child). Might negative experiences confer a hidden benefit…

What makes an asset a “safe asset”? We study a model where two countries each issue sovereign bonds to satisfy investors’ safe asset demands. The countries differ in the float of their bonds and their resources/fundamentals available to rollover…

We develop a tractable and versatile model of pretrial negotiation in which the negotiating parties are optimistic about the judge’s decision and anticipate the possible arrival of public information about the case prior to the trial date. The…

Firms have an incentive to test competitors’ products to reveal violations of safety and environmental standards, in order to have competitors’ products blocked from sale. This paper shows that testing by a regulator crowds out testing by…

Although the aggregate capital share of U.S. firms has increased, capital share at the firm‐level has decreased. This divergence is due to mega‐firms that produce a larger output share without a proportionate increase in labor compensation. We…

When multiple firms are simultaneously running experiments on a platform, the treatment effects for one firm may depend on the experimentation policies of others. This paper presents a set of causal estimands that are relevant to such an…

Pre‐college advising programs exist in most disadvantaged high schools throughout the United States. These programs supplement traditional advising by high school guidance counselors and attempt to help underrepresented and disadvantaged students…

We discuss the relevance of the recent Machine Learning (ML) literature for economics and econometrics. First we discuss the differences in goals, methods and settings between the ML literature and the traditional econometrics and statistics…

A three-tiered framework for making human-centered design more inclusive of people with disabilities can help organizations improve their own programs.

This paper studies optimal contracts when managers manipulate their performance measure at the expense of firm value. Optimal contracts defer compensation. The manager’s incentives vest over time at an increasing rate, and compensation becomes…

Participants race toward completing an innovation project and learn about its feasibility from their own efforts and their competitors’ gradual progress. Information about the status of competition can alleviate some of the uncertainty inherent…

The “freemium” model for digital goods involves selling a base version of the product for free, and making premium product features available to users only on payment. The success of the model is predicated on the ability to profitably convert…