Publications

Deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) are now a standard tool used by prosecutors to punish corporate crime. Under a DPA, the defendant escapes prosecution by living up to the terms of the contract. However, if the prosecutor declares a breach,…

The representativeness heuristic constitutes a striking departure from Bayesian updating. According to a strong form of the heuristic, agents reverse a conditioning argument: for example inferring that a patient is more likely than not to have a…

AI model alignment is crucial due to inadvertent biases in training data and the underspecified machine learning pipeline, where models with excellent test metrics may not meet end-user requirements. While post-training alignment via human…

Glaeser and Lang (2024; GL) reviews the accounting literature on innovation, which has increased substantially in recent years. GL makes an important contribution to accounting research by bringing into the literature the implications of Romer’s…

This report describes insights gleaned from the Data Fellows collaboration between PayPal and the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. By embedding researchers in PayPal’s charitable giving team,…

With climate change intensifying, building resilience against climate-related shocks is now a global imperative. Historically, many societies have faced natural hazards, with some adapting through specific social and cultural practices.…

We propose a new estimator for average causal effects of a binary treatment with panel data in settings with general treatment patterns. Our approach augments the popular two‐way‐fixed‐effects specification with unit‐specific weights that arise…

In this paper, we argue that the New York City congestion pricing plan whose implementation was paused in the summer of 2024 had a major shortcoming: as designed, it would have had a much more severe impact on the drivers of personal vehicles…

We model the dynamics of endogenous organizational assignments of people to positions where those being assigned positions can themselves lobby for who gets which position. Internal labor market changes depend on how much individuals value their…

This paper revisits the descending clock “reverse” auction design used in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s 2016–2017 “incentive auction.” We use extensive computational simulations to investigate the quantitative significance of…

Margin — collateral or funds that investors deposit with their counterparties — is a crucial component of the practice of borrowing money to fund investment. While margin offers the potential for enhanced returns, it also exposes investors to the…

This paper compares two estimators – the Border Approach and an Instrumental Variable (IV) estimator – using a unified framework where identifying variation arises from “preference externalities” following the intuition in Waldfogel (2003). We…

We develop a framework for difference-in-differences designs with staggered treatment adoption and heterogeneous causal effects. We show that conventional regression-based estimators fail to provide unbiased estimates of relevant estimands absent…

We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer’s valuations within a set of distributions, called an “ambiguity” set. We identify the exact forms of…

Workers who lose their jobs during recessions face strikingly large and persistent declines in their future earnings. Using individual-level administrative data from the United States, this paper shows that an important driver of these costs is…

We study the lifetime effects of the first and largest American youth employment and training program in the United States — the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), 1933–1942. We match newly digitized enrollee records to census, World War II…

We discuss Feng et al. (2024), which studies a dynamic model of delegated investment. The paper provides novel insights into the optimal contract between a principal and an agent who obtains private information about both the timing and…

The publication of the 2023 Merger Guidelines (MG) by the DOJ and FTC marked a significant event in the expanding influence of economics on public guidance in antitrust. The economic frameworks that are outlined in the MG are not limited to…

A growing body of research has documented the negative impact narcissistic leaders can have on the organizations they lead. Studies have shown that when in positions of authority, grandiose narcissists often have subordinates who are frustrated,…