Publications

The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for blockchains: because of miners’ cross-pool diversification and pool managers’ endogenous fee setting, larger pools better…

People often respond to others’ emotions using verbal acknowledgment (e.g., “You seem upset”). Yet, little is known about the relational benefits and risks of acknowledging others’ emotions in the workplace. We draw upon Costly Signaling Theory…

Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with lower returns on financial wealth, households with high levels of financial wealth must increase savings to afford the…

Since the early 1980s, the composition of U.S. public firms has progressively shifted toward less profitable firms with high growth potential (Fama and French, 2004). We estimate a dynamic corporate finance model to quantify the role of this…

We combine U.S. Census data with SEC enforcement actions to examine employees’ outcomes, such as wages and turnover, before, during, and after periods of fraudulent financial reporting. We find that fraud firms’ employees lose about 50…

Agricultural innovation can help farmers improve their productivity, reduce their environmental impact, and address the challenges associated with ever-changing soil, weather, and market conditions. Promoting innovation often requires…

For decades now, venture capitalists have played a crucial role in the economy by financing high-growth start-ups. While the companies they’ve backed—Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and more—are constantly in the headlines, very little is…

Both the market and the regulator have incomplete information regarding the products’ characteristics, but non-governmental organizations or activists often have expertise or motivation to investigate and acquire more information. Negative…

Individuals face non-linear budget constraints in myriad situations. We test a fundamental assumption of economic analysis in such settings: that individuals display stable preferences when facing linear and non-linear incentives. We use a…

Many applied decision-making problems have a dynamic component: The policymaker needs not only to choose whom to treat, but also when to start which treatment. For example, a medical doctor may choose between postponing treatment (watchful…

We use granular data covering regulated (brokerage-financed) and unregulated (shadow-financed) margin trading during the 2015 market turmoil in China to provide the first systematic analysis of margin investors’ characteristics, leverage…

We analyze the effects of partner tenure and mandatory rotation on audit quality, pricing, and production for a large cross-section of U.S. public firms during 2008–2014. On average, we find no evidence that audit quality declines over the tenure…

The term “diversity,” although widely used, can mean different things. Diversity can refer to heterogeneity, i.e., the distribution of people across groups, or to the representation of specific minority groups. We use a conjoint experiment with a…

The article offers information about the platform annexation, and the logic using basic principles from platform economics. It analyzes the platform annexation to the traditional antitrust categories in the market. It mentions that a platform…

Adaptive experiments present a unique opportunity to more rapidly learn which of many treatments work best, evaluate multiple hypotheses, and optimize for several objectives. For example, they can be used to pilot a large number of potential…

Recent scandals over the manipulation of LIBOR, foreign exchange benchmarks, and other financial benchmarks have spurred policy discussions over their appropriate design. We characterize the optimal fixing of a benchmark as an estimator of a…

THE DIPLOMA FOR the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economics Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel that I shared in 2020 with Paul Milgrom cites “improvements in auction theory and inventions of new auction formats.” As requested by the Royal Swedish…

As supply chains become more and more globalized, even in times of disruptions and trade frictions, and as consumers are increasingly more demanding on the environmental and social responsibility performances of the supply chains that supply…

In recent decades, global flows of assets and goods have grown rapidly relative to GDP and have shifted aggressively during crises such as the global financial crisis and the current pandemic. Corporations and governments increasingly borrow from…

Optimally reallocating human capital to tasks is key for an organization to successfully navigate a transition. We study how to design employment contracts to allocate employees to different valuable projects within an organization given two…