Publications

People frequently perceive a trade-off between health and taste, leading to poor dietary choices. This research identifies a novel pathway to healthier eating: seeking beauty in food. Across seven preregistered field and lab studies, pursuing…

Small business owners play a central role in all advanced economies. Nonetheless, they are an understudied occupational group politically, particularly compared to groups that represent smaller portions of the population (e.g., union members,…

We explore debt and debt management among older Americans (ages 51–61 years) using the 2018 National Financial Capability Study. Though these individuals should have been at the peak of their retirement savings, we show that many were heavily…

Can metaphorical reasoning involving embodied experience—such as color perception—be learned from the statistics of language alone? Recent work finds that colorblind individuals robustly understand and reason abstractly about color, implying that…

In a nationwide examination of commercial prices for transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) and surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR), we observed substantial markups and variability across hospitals, payers, and plan types—including…

Work from home (WFH) surged worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic, then partially receded as the pandemic subsided. Using our Global Survey of Working Arrangements covering dozens of countries, we find that average WFH rates among college-…

Customer journey mapping (CJM) is a product and service design method that is widely used by design researchers and practitioners. It tracks the customer’s or user’s interactions with products and services during experiences and maps out…

Computational models of reinforcement learning (RL) have significantly contributed to our understanding of human behavior and decision-making. Traditional RL models, however, often adopt a linear approach to updating reward expectations,…

Responding to economic and environmental pressures, a growing number of companies seek to repurpose products (assets) that retain functional capacity beyond their initial first life. This paper examines a generic valuation model for used capacity…

We study how competition between asymmetrically informed banks, one specialized and one nonspecialized, affects loan prices. Both banks possess “general” signals regarding the borrower’s quality, which they use to screen loans. The specialized…

Social media provides citizens with direct access to information shared by politicians. Citizens, in turn, play a critical role in diffusing such content. Do conservative and liberal citizens differ in their decisions about which representatives…

Shifting attachments to organizations are a constant in the modern era. What accounts for variation in the strength of organizational identification? Whereas prior work has emphasized organization-level properties and individual differences, this…

NVIDIA has grown from a small, niche player into one of the titans of the information technology industry, alongside established leaders such as Microsoft and Apple. How has a company that started out by giving gamers a better playing experience…

Consumers frequently perceive a tradeoff between health and taste, leading to poor dietary choices. This research identifies a novel pathway to healthier eating: seeking beauty in food. Across seven pre-registered field and lab studies, pursuing…

In this paper, we present two studies from the first randomized controlled trial on the impact of a values affirmation intervention on academic performance and psychological well-being in school for deaf students in secondary deaf schools in…

This paper studies expectations formation when the underlying process has fat tails. Using a large sample of firm sales growth expectations, we document three facts: (i) the relationship between forecast revisions and future forecast errors is…

Over the last half-century, economic growth stagnated but stock-market wealth boomed. I present evidence that declining innovation productivity reconciles these trends. At the macro level, I document that R&D spending has fallen relative to…

This paper studies whether households are selectively inattentive to interest rates and examines its macroeconomic implications. We first use existing and newly-designed household surveys to establish that households close to durables purchases…

This paper examines the financial fragility of Dutch households by assessing their ability to raise €2000 within a month in the event of a financial emergency. We show that one in seven Dutch households was financially fragile well before the…