Publications

We study how discounting and monitoring jointly determine whether cooperation is possible in repeated games with imperfect (public or private) monitoring. Our main result provides a simple bound on the strength of players’ incentives as a…

This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup’s Series A…

Two-sided platforms play an important role in reducing frictions and facilitating trade, and in doing so they increasingly engage in collecting and processing data about supply and demand. This paper establishes that platforms have an incentive…

Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries…

We construct measures of industry performance and welfare in the U.S. automobile market from 1980 to 2018. We estimate a demand model using product-level data on market shares, prices, and attributes, and consumer-level data on…

We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to…

We show current market practices relating to odd-lot quotes create a large “inside” market where better prices routinely exist relative to the National Best Bid or Offer. We show that odd-lot quotes play a price discovery role, and these quotes…

Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation — the idea that more frequent symbols in a code are simpler than less frequent ones – has been shown to hold at the level of words in many languages. We tested whether it holds at the level of individual written…

This project analyzes how a principal can motivate an agent to conserve rather than exploit a depletable resource. This dynamic problem is relevant for tropical deforestation as well as for other environmental problems. It is shown that the…

The study aims to analyze the relationship between care integration and care quality, and to examine if the relationship varies by patient risk.

The key independent variables used validated measures derived from a provider survey of…

If you want to be an effective communicator, you’re going to need to know how to pitch your ideas, concepts, and perspectives to others in both professional environments and day-to-day interactions. To be effective, a pitch needs to be…

We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and volatile. In…

For patients with complex health and social needs, care coordination is crucial for improving their access to care, clinical outcomes, care experiences, and controlling their healthcare costs. However, evidence is inconsistent regarding the core…

Recent years have seen a reemergence of the practice of awarding “mega grants” to CEOs. Mega grants are large, one-time equity awards granted in lieu of or in addition to annual awards with the intended purpose of providing significant incentive…

We design a novel across-the-curve credit spread index, AXI, a measure of the recent cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly listed US bank holding companies and commercial banks. AXI, a benchmark for bank lending and risk…

The under-representation of women in the technology industry has long been recognized as a concern, and the provision of gender-specific information on job search platforms has emerged as a potential solution. In this research, we study how…

Leaders may be seen by their followers as miscalibrating the quantity of their communication — sharing too much or too little. We propose that leaders are more likely to be seen as under-communicating than over-communicating, even though under-…

Since their introduction in Abadie and Gardeazabal(2003), Synthetic Control (SC) methods have quickly become one of the leading methods for estimating causal effects in observational studies in settings with panel data. Formal discussions often…

We provide the first, large sample evidence on third-party verification of firms’ environmental and social metrics in ESG reports (“ESG assurance”) in the United States. Focusing on S&P 500 firms from 2010-2020, we document a striking…

Classical Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs), or A/B tests, are designed to draw causal inferences about a population of units, for example, individuals, plots of land or visits to a website. A key assumption underlying a standard RCT is the…