Publications

While the shareholder benefits of audits are well documented, evidence on whether audits can facilitate opportunistic behavior by corporate insiders is scarce. In this paper, we examine whether the audit process facilitate one particular form of…

Is bank capital structure designed to extract deposit subsidies? We address this question by studying capital structure decisions of shadow banks: intermediaries that provide banking services but are not funded by deposits. We assemble, for the…

The growth of the internet has spawned new “attention markets,” in which people devote increasing amounts of time to consuming online content, but the neurobehavioral mechanisms that drive engagement in these markets have yet to be elucidated. We…

Consider an extensive‐form mechanism, run by an auctioneer who communicates sequentially and privately with bidders. Suppose the auctioneer can deviate from the rules provided that no single bidder detects the deviation. A mechanism is credible…

Cambridge Analytica has become a household name, synonymous with invasion of privacy. Its controversial entanglement with Facebook was a wake-up call about how we share information online. Of course, Cambridge Analytica is gone now, and Mark…

The U.S. is facing a recession in which corporate cash flow is collapsing while credit spreads on corporate debt are surging. Yet, in significant ways, the current situation is markedly different than a typical recession. While in a typical…

How can we curb the current norm of unsustainable levels of meat consumption? Research on dynamic norms finds that learning that others are starting to eat less meat can inspire people to follow suit. Across four field experiments, we test…

This research sought to understand if physical activity recommendations — an integral component of many interventions aiming to promote physical activity — may have unexpected effects on individuals’ mindsets (in this case about the adequacy and…

Absent theoretical guidance, empiricists have been forced to rely upon numerical comparative statics from constant tax rate models in formulating testable implications of trade-off theory in the context of natural experiments. We fill the…

We study how opening to trade affects economic growth in a model where heterogeneous firms can adopt new technologies already in use by other firms in their home country. We characterize the growth rate using a summary statistic of the…

We develop a model of electoral accountability with mainstream and alternative media. In addition to regular high- and low-competence types, the incumbent may be an aspiring autocrat who controls the mainstream media and will subvert democracy if…

We develop SHOPPER, a sequential probabilistic model of shopping data. SHOPPER uses interpretable components to model the forces that drive how a customer chooses products; in particular, we designed SHOPPER to capture how items interact with…

Since 2002, the U.S. government has encouraged business investment using accelerated depreciation policies that significantly reduce investment costs. We provide the first in-depth analysis of this stimulus on employment and earnings. Our local…

Despite a vast literature on the determinants of prescription opioid use, the role of health insurance plans has received little attention. We study how the form of Medicare beneficiaries’ drug coverage affects the volume of opioids they consume…

On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Two weeks later, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative administered a survey to 224 mostly scaled ($1 million+ revenue) Latino-owned businesses in the United…

In recent years, scholars have addressed the most important topics in corporate law based on a flawed assumption: that the ratio of the market value of a corporation’s securities to their book value is a valid measure of the value of the…

We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user’s complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like health…

Gender diversity has been linked to positive business results. Yet limited data exist to characterize the gender landscape in health technology, a field that draws employees from both biomedical engineering and medicine. To better understand the…

We model a simple market setting in which fragmentation of trade of the same asset across multiple exchanges improves allocative efficiency. Fragmentation reduces the inhibiting effect of price-impact avoidance on order submission. Although…

Adaptivity is an important yet under-studied property in modern optimization theory. The gap between the state-of-the-art theory and the current practice is striking in that algorithms with desirable theoretical guarantees typically involve…