Publications

Cognitive differences can catalyze social learning through the process of one-to-one social influence. Yet the learning benefits of exposure to the ideas of cognitively dissimilar others often fail to materialize. Why do cognitive differences…

We are interested in estimating the effect of a treatment applied to individuals at multiple sites, where data is stored locally for each site. Due to privacy constraints, individual-level data cannot be shared across sites; the sites may also…

Using a dynamic real-option model of litigation, we show that the increasingly popular practice of third-party litigation financing has ambiguous implications for total ex-post litigant surplus. A defendant and a plaintiff…

We examine whether the proprietary costs of economically linked peers influence focal firms’ merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions, which often involve extensive transfers of proprietary information across merging entities. Using data on…

In medicine, clinicians treat individuals under an implicit assumption that high-risk patients would benefit most from the treatment (‘high-risk approach’). However, treating individuals with the highest estimated benefit using a novel machine-…

Using detailed search data from half a million anonymous job seekers, we study the information content of earnings announcements for job seekers. In the spirit of Beaver (1968), we find evidence that job seekers initiate job-search activity in…

We consider off-policy evaluation of dynamic treatment rules under sequential ignorability, given an assumption that the underlying system can be modeled as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP). We propose an estimator, partial…

We examine the spillover effect of public firm disclosures on the patent trading market. The patent market is rife with information frictions, yet can potentially facilitate the reallocation of innovation to the most productive users. We find…

The Gong, Young, and Zhou (GYZ) (Gong et al. 2023) paper examines potential earnings management by movie studio…

As Romer and Weitzman emphasized in the 1990s, new ideas are often combinations of existing ideas, an insight absent from recent models. In Kortum’s research around the same time, ideas are draws from a probability distribution, and Pareto…

Using comprehensive data on U.S. corporate bond trades since 2002, we find evidence that retail bond investors over rely on untimely credit ratings to their financial detriment. Specifically, they appear to select bonds by first screening on a…

Extensive evidence suggests that managers strategically choose the complexity of their descriptive disclosures. However, their motives in doing so appear mixed, as complex disclosures are used to obfuscate in some cases and to provide information…

ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define,…

We develop a framework to measure the value of free goods and services available on the internet. The conventional method of measuring consumer surplus based on monetary expenditures is ineffective because these goods’ prices are predominantly…

We study how personalized news aggregation for rationally inattentive voters (NARI) affects policy polarization. In a two-candidate electoral competition model, an attention-maximizing infomediary aggregates source data about candidates’ valence…

Through their products and services, businesses have a meaningful impact on their customers’ health. When markets reward products that induce unhealthy behaviors, like poor diet and limited physical activity, they fuel the chronic disease…

Discourse about people seeking refuge from conflict varies considerably. To understand what components of this discourse reach refugees the most, we examined refugees’ perceptions of how their host communities perceive them (i.e., intergroup…

Importance: A wide variety of novel medical diagnostics and devices are determined safe and effective by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) each year, but to our knowledge the literature lacks evidence documenting how long it takes to…

We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, regulators evaluating…

Grabbing and keeping your audience’s focus is critical to communication success. What you have to say is important, so give yourself the best chance to convey your message to your audience by first gaining attention, but then, more importantly,…