Publications

Word embeddings are an effective tool to analyze language. They have been recently extended to model other types of data beyond text, such as items in recommendation systems. Embedding models consider the probability of a target observation (a…

Attitude data can reveal culture’s secrets, but only if analysts acknowledge and transcend two problematic forms of heterogeneity. The first, relational heterogeneity, reflects the fact that the meaning of a…

This paper was selected as a finalist for the 2014 Pierskalla award 

Currently available medication for treating many chronic diseases is often effective only for a subgroup of patients, and biomarkers…

Firms often finance their inventory through debt and subsequently sell it to generate profits and service the debt. Pricing of products is consequently driven by inventory and debt servicing considerations. We show that limited liability under…

This paper investigates the effect of a change in informational environment of borrowers on the organizational design of bank lending. We use micro-data from a large multinational bank and exploit the sudden introduction of a credit registry, an…

The financial system is meant to facilitate efficient allocation of resources, helping people and businesses fund, invest, save, and manage risks. This system is rife with conflicts of interests. Reckless practices, uncontrolled by market forces…

In online advertising markets, advertisers often purchase ad placements through bidding in repeated auctions based on realized viewer information. We study how budget-constrained advertisers may compete in such sequential auctions in the presence…

Machines are increasingly doing “intelligent” things. Face recognition algorithms use a large dataset of photos labeled as having a face or not to estimate a function that predicts the presence y of a face…

In this paper we develop new methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where a subset of units are exposed to a treatment during a subset of periods, and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the…

The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…

Historically, the literature on money management has not consistently applied the rational expectations equilibrium concept. We explain why and summarize recent developments in the money management literature that do apply this concept correctly…

How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question, given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to…

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods , for the smooth nonconvex finite-sum optimization problem. Only assuming the smoothness of each component, the complexity of SCSG…

How people think about and use their time has critical implications for happiness and well-being. Extant research on time in the consumer behavior literature reveals a predominantly dichotomized perspective of time between the present and future…

This opening chapter of the Handbook of Heroism and Heroic Leadership offers insights and inspiration about the zenith of human behavior. The contributions to this volume offer a sturdy foundations for the development of a…

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Preparing for submission

Social outliers draw a lot of attention from those inside and outside their group and yet little is known about their impact on perceptions of their group as a whole. The present studies examine how outliers influence observers’ summary…