Publications

In this research we reexamine and update prior research on the association between decision conflict and choice deferral. Decision conflict has featured prominently in psychology literature, going back to the seminal work of Lewin (1933), Miller…

We use establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau’s Annual Survey of Manufactures to study the characteristics and geographic locations of investments in robots. We find that the distribution of robots is highly skewed across locations.…

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and…

Bank-created money, shadow-bank money, and Treasury bonds all satisfy investors’ demand for liquidity. We measure the quantity of these forms of liquidity and their corresponding liquidity premium in a sample from 1934 to 2016, estimating the…

We study the joint determination of product quality and complexity. In our model complexity affects how difficult it is for an agent to acquire information about product quality. An agent can accept or reject a product proposed by a designer, who…

As a bridge between Chinese mainland and international financial markets, the Stock Connect program allows investors on both sides to gain mutual access. By analyzing how cross-border flows respond to macro-related shocks, we show that compared…

This research examines how the effort that consumers exert to earn money affects their risk tolerance. We theorize and find that working harder — that is, more effortful earning — increases perceived ownership and valuation of earnings,…

Public finance and real estate are uniquely intertwined in China, where local governments also serve as monopolist sellers of land. We shed new light on how land sale decisions and land prices depend on local governments’ financing objectives.…

In Closer Look, we highlight significant “holes” in our knowledge of corporate governance. These are central issues where insufficient or inadequate study has left us unable to answer basic questions, and where key assumptions relied upon by…

The way we evaluate an experience can be influenced by contextual factors that are unrelated to the experience at hand. A prominent factor that has been shown to infuse into the evaluation processes is incidental affect. Prior research has…

Violations of no-arbitrage conditions measure the shadow cost of intermediary constraints. Intermediary asset pricing and intertemporal hedging together imply that the risk of these constraints tightening is priced. We describe a “forward CIP…

Blockchain explorers are important tools for quick look-ups of on-chain activities. However, as centralized data providers, their reliability remains under-studied. As a case study, we investigate Beaconcha.in , a leading explorer serving…

Forest-based methods have recently gained in popularity for non-parametric treatment effect estimation. Building on this line of work, we introduce causal survival forests, which can be used to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects in survival…

Background 

Collaboration between clinical and community-based social service organizations is increasingly seen as vital for preventing and managing chronic diseases but has been challenging to establish and sustain.

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Framework agreements (FAs) are procurement mechanisms used in private and public organizations by which a central procurement agency selects an assortment of products, typically through auctions, and then affiliated organizations can purchase…

We analyze U.S. banks’ asset exposure to a recent rise in the interest rates with implications for financial stability. The U.S. banking system’s market value of assets is $2.2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of assets…

Evolutionary science has led to many practical applications of genetic evolution but few practical uses of cultural evolution. This is because the entire study of evolution was gene centric for most of the 20th century, relegating the study and…

This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in ℝd and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference between the…

Motivated by online labor markets, we consider the online assortment optimization problem faced by a two-sided matching platform that hosts a set of suppliers waiting to match with a customer. Arriving customers are shown an assortment of…

A tractable dynamic model of international climate policies is analyzed. The choice of bargaining game influences participation levels, emission quotas and technology investment levels. I derive several predictions that are arguably consistent…