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Preparing for Generative AI in the 2024 Election: Recommendations and Best Practices Based on Academic Research
The rapid development of generative AI technology is transforming the political landscape, presenting both challenges and opportunities for the 2024 US election. This document provides a research-based overview of the potential impact of…
Proportional Response: Contextual Bandits for Simple and Cumulative Regret Minimization
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains…
Proportional Response: Contextual Bandits for Simple and Cumulative Regret Minimization
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains…
Revealed versus Potential Spatial Accessibility of Healthcare and Changing Patterns during the COVID-19 Pandemic
Spatial access to healthcare facilities (i.e., how long people need to travel to reach care) is important for understanding public health, but hard to measure. Most research so far has focused on theoretical (potential) travel times. Using…
Ripple Effects of Hospital Team Faultlines on Patient Outcomes
Medical errors are rampant across healthcare settings, imposing a significant burden on patient safety. Here, we examined the ripple effects of diversity splits, or faultlines, within hospital teams on patient safety and care. Hospitals consist…
The Design of Macroprudential Stress Tests
We study the design of stress tests that provide information about aggregate and idiosyncratic risk in banks’ portfolios and impose contingent capital requirements. In the optimal static test, an adverse scenario fails all weak and some strong…
The Rest of the World’s Dollar-Weighted Return on U.S. Treasurys
Since 1980, foreign investors have timed their purchases and sales of U.S. Treasurys to yield particularly low returns. Their annual “dollar-weighted” returns, measured by the internal rate of return on their purchases and sales of Treasury bonds…
Trends in State and Local Pension Funds
Unfunded public pension obligations represent the largest liability for state and local governments in the United States. As of fiscal year 2021, the total reported unfunded liabilities of these plans are $1.076 trillion. In contrast, the market…
Uncovering the Semantics of Concepts Using GPT-4
The ability of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to generate human-like texts suggests that social scientists could use these LLMs to construct measures of semantic similarity that match human judgment. In this article…
What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment
How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…
Area Conditions and Positive Incentives: Engaging Local Communities to Protect Forests
Tropical deforestation for agriculture causes alarming CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. To prevent this, various governments and multinational commodity-buyers offer a positive incentive for locals conditional on no…
Can Personalized Digital Counseling Improve Consumer Search for Modern Contraceptive Methods?
This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of a personalized digital counseling intervention addressing informational constraints and choice architecture, cross-randomized with discounts for long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs),…
A Century of Pluralistic Ignorance: What We Have Learned About Its Origins, Forms, and Consequences
The concept of pluralistic ignorance was introduced a century ago by social psychologist, Floyd Allport. It has been broadly applied in the social sciences, including psychology, sociology, political science, and economics. Pluralistic ignorance…
Complex Asset Markets
Investors’ individual arbitrage models introduce idiosyncratic risk into complex asset strategies, driving up average returns and Sharpe ratios. However, despite the attractive risk-return trade-off, participation is limited. This is because…
Contracting in Peer Networks
We consider multi-agent multi-firm contracting when agents benchmark their wages to those of their peers, using weights that vary within and across firms. When a single principal commits to a public contract, optimal contracts hedge relative wage…
Corporate Tax Policy in Developed Countries and Economic Activity in Africa
This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares…
Estimated Average Treatment Effect of Psychiatric Hospitalization in Patients with Suicidal Behaviors
Importance Psychiatric hospitalization is the standard of care for patients presenting to an emergency department (ED) or urgent care (UC) with high suicide risk. However, the effect of hospitalization in reducing subsequent…
Financial Literacy and Financial Well-Being: Evidence from the U.S.
This paper examines financial literacy in the United States, using the 2021 National Financial Capability Study data. A large volume of papers have demonstrated the importance of financial knowledge and documented the low level of financial…
Human-like Intuitive Behavior and Reasoning Biases Emerged in Large Language Models but Disappeared in ChatGPT
We design a battery of semantic illusions and cognitive reflection tests, aimed to elicit intuitive yet erroneous responses. We administer these tasks, traditionally used to study reasoning and decision-making in humans, to OpenAI’s generative…
Information Acquisition, Efficiency, and Non-Fundamental Volatility
We analyze non-fundamental volatility and efficiency in large games featuring strategic interaction and endogenous information acquisition. We adopt the rational inattention approach to information acquisition but generalize to a large class of…