Publications

We combine U.S. Census data with SEC enforcement actions to examine employees’ outcomes, such as wages and turnover, before, during, and after periods of fraudulent financial reporting. We find that fraud firms’ employees lose about 50% of…

The growing popularity of generative AI tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical…

We survey the literature on global capital allocation. We begin by reviewing the rise of cross-border investment, the shift toward portfolio investment, and the literature focusing on aggregate patterns in multilateral and bilateral positions. We…

Governments and central banks can protect either taxpayers or bondholders from government spending shocks. When they choose to insulate taxpayers, government bond yields need to increase in response to unfunded fiscal expansions as the government…

Emerging evidence suggests that gender is a defining feature of personhood. Studies show that gender is the primary social category individuals use to perceive humanness and the social category most strongly related to seeing someone — or…

Individuals face nonlinear incentives in myriad situations. We test a fundamental assumption in such settings: that individuals display stable preferences when facing linear and nonlinear incentives. We use a laboratory experiment to characterize…

Individuals who have more ambition — a persistent striving for success, attainment, and accomplishment — are more likely to become leaders. But are these ambitious individuals also more effective in leadership roles? We hypothesize that…

Sharing experiences with racism (racial discrimination disclosure) has the power to raise awareness of discrimination and spur meaningful conversations about race. Sharing these experiences with racism on social media may prompt a range…

How does the extent of policy benefits — not simply their presence — affect political engagement? While fundamental to understanding the electoral implications of economic policymaking, addressing this question is challenging due to the…

In a wide variety of applications, including healthcare, bidding in first price auctions, digital recommendations, and online education, it can be beneficial to learn a policy that assigns treatments to individuals based on their characteristics…

We study how international agreements can take advantage of domestic time-inconsistency problems in the context of environmental policies. For example, policymakers will prefer future policies to be sustainable, but find it tempting to raise…

Why are there few debates in low-information elections where they have the greatest potential to inform vote choices? Consistent with weak incentives to reveal qualifications or make policy commitments, we find only a quarter of Parliamentary…

Conspiracy theories are a constant feature of human society but have recently risen in prominence with the flurry of COVID-19 conspiracy theories and their public display in social media. Conspiracy theories should be studied not only because of…

Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We…

Has the United States economy become less competitive in recent decades? One might think so based on a body of research that has rapidly become influential for antitrust policy. We explain that the empirical evidence relating to concentration…

During an investigation using Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy, which is a novel approach for solving violent crimes and identifying human remains, reference testing—when law enforcement requests a DNA sample from a person in a partially…

Current corporate disclosures regarding carbon emissions lack commonly accepted accounting rules. The carbon accrual accounting system described here takes the rules of historical cost accounting for operating assets as a template for generating…

Using rich data on hourly physical productivity and thousands of ownership changes from U.S. power plants, we study the effects of acquisitions on efficiency and underlying mechanisms. We find a 2% average increase in efficiency for acquired…

This paper examines the determinants of public procurement prices using comprehensive data on pharmaceutical purchases by the public sector in Chile. We first document sizable price differences between buyers for the same product and quantity…