Publications

Quantification has been constitutive of psychology since its inception and is core to its scientific status. The adoption of qualitative methods eschewing inferential statistics is therefore unlikely to obtain. Rather than discarding useful tools…

Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients…

We propose a definition for the average indirect effect of a binary treatment in the potential outcomes model for causal inference under cross-unit interference. Our definition is analogous to the standard definition of the average direct effect…

DAOs can reshape society by bringing democratic control to important economic and social activities previously governed through more hierarchical means. But as many people have pointed out, DAOs have not yet achieved their goal of true…

We model a market for a skill in short supply and high demand, where the presence of charlatans (professionals who sell a service they do not deliver on) is an equilibrium outcome. In the model, reducing the number of charlatans through…

U.S. state legislatures are critical policymaking bodies and the major pipeline of candidates to national office. Polarization in state legislatures has increased substantially in recent decades, yet we understand little about the role of…

In response to the complexity, challenges, and slow pace of innovation, health care organizations are adopting interdisciplinary team approaches. Systems engineering, which is oriented to creating new, scalable processes that perform with higher…

Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

We investigate the relationship between private firms’ disclosures and the demand for the equity of their publicly traded peers. Using data on the global…

We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior, and whether workers’ preferences explain corporate disclosure decisions. We embed a field experiment in job…

It is well-established that the Conquest of the Americas by Europeans led to catastrophic declines in indigenous populations. However, less is known about the conditions under which indigenous communities were able to overcome the onslaught of…

We use new hand-collected data from corporate filings to study the drivers of corporate capital structure adjustment. Classifying firms by their adjustment frequencies, we reveal previously unknown patterns in their reasons for financing and the…

Causal inference has recently attracted substantial attention in the machine learning and artificial intelligence community. It is usually positioned as a distinct strand of research that can broaden the scope of machine learning from predictive…

We examine the role of political affiliation during the selection of Opportunity Zones, a place-based tax incentive enacted by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. We find governors are on average 7.6% more likely to select a census tract as an…

We use data on deaths in New York City, Madrid, Stockholm, and other world cities as well as in various U.S. states and other regions and countries to estimate, quickly and with limited data, a standard epidemiological model of COVID-19. We allow…

Understanding collective behavior is an important aspect of managing the pandemic response. Here the authors show in a large global study that participants that reported identifying more strongly with their nation reported greater engagement in…

In today’s vast digital landscape, people are constantly exposed to threatening language, which attracts attention and activates the human brain’s fear circuitry. However, to date, we have lacked the tools needed to identify threatening language…

Voluntary shelter-in-place directives and lockdowns are the main non-pharmaceutical interventions that governments around the globe have used to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. In this paper we study the impact of such interventions in the capital…

Requirements for integrating care across providers, settings, and over time increase with patients’ needs. Health care providers’ ability to offer care that patients experience as integrated may vary among patients with different levels of need.…