Publications

Breiman’s “Two Cultures” paper painted a picture of two disciplines, data modeling, and algorithmic machine learning, both engaged in the analyses of data but talking past each other. Although that may have been true at the time, there is now…

New technologies have enabled firms to elicit granular behavioral data from consumers in exchange for lower prices and better experiences. This data can mitigate asymmetric information and moral hazard, but it may also increase firms’ market…

Overlap in baseline covariates between treated and control groups, also known as positivity or common support, is a common assumption in observational causal inference. Assessing this assumption is often ad hoc, however, and can give misleading…

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

Here we evaluate the potential for growth mindset interventions (that teach students that intellectual abilities can be developed) to inspire adolescents to be “learners” — that is, to seek out challenging learning experiences. In a previous…

We model a simple market setting in which fragmentation of trade of the same asset across multiple exchanges improves allocative efficiency. Fragmentation reduces the inhibiting effect of price-impact avoidance on order submission. Although…

We consider a system with an evolving state that can be stopped at any time by a decision maker (DM), yielding a state-dependent reward. The DM does not observe the state except for a limited number of monitoring times, which he must choose, in…

We study a Chinese policy that awards substantial tax cuts to firms with R&D investment over a threshold or “notch.” Quasi-experimental variation and administrative tax data show a significant increase in reported R&D that is partly…

We develop a model of international tariff negotiations to study the design of the institutional rules of the GATT/WTO. A key principle of the GATT/WTO is its most‐favored‐nation (MFN) requirement of nondiscrimination, a principle that has long…

Policymakers frequently use price regulations as a response to inequality in the markets they control. In this paper, we examine the optimal structure of such policies from the perspective of mechanism design. We study a buyer-seller market in…

We study a prominent energy regulation affecting large Chinese manufacturers that are part of broader conglomerates. Using detailed firm-level data and difference-in-differences research designs, we show that regulated firms cut output and…

Using City of Oakland data during COVID-19, we document that small-business components of survival capabilities (i.e., revenue resiliency, labor flexibility, and committed costs) vary by firm size. Nonemployer businesses rely on low-cost…

Contradicting existing associations between old age and negative societal consequences, such as being frail and unproductive, this research finds that people contribute more to the greater good of society (e.g., by helping strangers in need) when…

We study the labor market consequences that result from directors’ limited capacity to sit on boards and their resulting incentives stemming from career concerns and future prospects. We find that directors who leave one board are more likely to…

We propose and analyze a temporal concatenation heuristic for solving large-scale finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDP), which divides the MDP into smaller sub-problems along the time horizon and generates an overall solution by simply…

Over half of all shopping journeys start with the mobile channel. In particular, the presence of a branded mobile app significantly influences shopping across channels. However, a majority of app users decrease app usage or even abandon an app,…

This paper deals with a central challenge in organization and management research: to predict the evolution of an organization’s adaptive capability. We address both theoretical and methodological gaps in existing research. First, focusing on the…

The attitude-behavior relationship is of great import to many areas of psychology. Indeed, psychologists across disciplines have published thousands of articles on the topic. The majority of this research implies the attitude-behavior…

The standard measure of distance in social networks — average shortest path length — assumes a model of “simple” contagion, in which people only need exposure to influence from one peer to adopt the contagion. However, many social phenomena are “…