Publications

We investigate the role of uncertainty in business cycles. First, we demonstrate that microeconomic uncertainty rises sharply during recessions, including during the Great Recession of 2007–2009. Second, we show that uncertainty shocks can…

Can participation in financial markets lead individuals to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, change their political attitudes and even their votes? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned Palestinian and Israeli financial…

Crowd-sourced content in the form of online product reviews or recommendations is an integral feature of most Internet-based service platforms and marketplaces, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Netflix, and Amazon. Customers may find such information…

How can we help individuals handle financial decisions in an increasingly complex environment? We explore an easily scalable avenue for improving financial understanding: learning by online trading in stocks. We randomly assign 1345 adults…

Pivotal Politics: A Theory of U.S. Lawmaking was conceived as an instance of normal science within a nascent but nebulous paradigm. In the two decades following publication of the book, three disciplinary changes are noteworthy. First, the…

We study the evolution of risk premiums on US Treasury bonds from the perspective of a real-time Bayesian learner RA who updates her beliefs using a dynamic term structure model. Learning about the historical dynamics of yields led to…

Problem definition: Manufacturing firms are undergoing restructuring defined by a collection of adjustments and decisions, which affect the source and destination of manufactured products throughout the firm’s global supply chain network. We…

Naturalistic and small randomized trials have suggested that pharmacogenetic testing may improve treatment outcomes in depression, but its cost-effectiveness is not known. There is growing enthusiasm for personalized medicine, relying on genetic…

Despite overwhelming evidence of its existence, White privilege has received relatively little attention in psychological science. However, given the chronic and pervasive benefits tied to racial privilege, it stands to reason that living with…

The hallmark of good corporate governance is an independent board of directors to oversee management. However, it is not clear that independent directors receive the information they need to make fully informed decisions on all key matters.…

Advertising expenditures in congressional campaigns are made not directly by campaigns themselves but indirectly though intermediary firms. Using a new dataset of revenues and costs of these firms, we study the markups that these firms charge…

We decompose bank activities into passive and active components and evaluate the performance of the active components of the bank business model by controlling for passive maturity transformation strategies that can be executed in the capital…

We study firm’s incentives to invest and build reputation for quality, when quality can be certified at a cost. We consider two types of equilibria: one in which certification decisions are made based on firm’s reputation and the second in which…

Many scarce public resources are allocated through wait lists that use priorities for individual agents. A new priority system for allocating deceased donor kidneys was adopted in 2014. This redesign was guided by simulations that held decision-…

We estimate a model of consumer choices over restaurants using data from several thousand anonymous mobile phone users. Restaurants have latent characteristics (whose distribution may depend on restaurant observables) that affect consumers’ mean…

We present theory showing that the spot dollar exchange rate reflects the value of all future convenience yields that foreign investors assign to US Treasuries. The convenience yield also creates wedge, the Treasury-based dollar basis, between…

Many irreversible long-run capital investments entail opportunities for managers to respond flexibly to changes in the economic environment. However, common levelized cost measures used to guide decision-making, such as the levelized cost of…

In 2010, Gabriela Cowperthwaite read a news article that changed her life. It described how an orca whale had killed a trainer during a show at SeaWorld in Orlando. Cowperthwaite, a Los Angeles filmmaker who liked taking her twins to see orcas at…