Publications

Tractable contextual bandit algorithms often rely on the realizability assumption — i.e., that the true expected reward model belongs to a known class, such as linear functions. We investigate issues that arise in the absence of realizability and…

Are ordinary citizens or political party leaders better positioned to select candidates?  While the direct vote primary system in the United States lets citizens choose, it is exceptional, as the vast majority of democracies rely instead on…

Alongside the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, an “infodemic” of myths and hoax cures is spreading over online media outlets and social media platforms. Building on the literature on combating fake news, we evaluate experimental interventions…

Safe assets are integral to the functioning of banks, financial markets, and the international financial system. Financial market participants use safe assets to meet liquidity and transaction needs, as high-quality collateral for loans and…

Consumers regularly encounter cues of contagious disease in daily life — a commuter sneezes on the train, a colleague blows their nose in a meeting, or they read recent headlines about the dangerous spread of a disease. Research has…

We establish a link between firms managing investors’ performance expectations, earnings announcement premia, and cyclical patterns (i.e., seasonalities) in returns. Firms that are more likely to manage expectations toward beatable levels…

Combining a unique survey of Japanese firms’ GDP forecasts with accounting data for 25 years, we find three main results.

1. Firms’ GDP forecasts are associated with their employment, investment, and output growth in the subsequent year…

This paper provides a nonparametric identification result for procurement models with asymmetric bidders, dependent private information, and interdependent costs. For risk-neutral bidders, the model’s payoff-relevant primitives are the joint…

Administrative burdens may have substantial direct and indirect costs for employers and employees, making them important research topics. Here, we examine the time employees spend dealing with their health benefits administrators. Using a…

This paper studies the impact of public audit oversight on financial reporting credibility. We analyze changes in market responses to earnings news after public audit oversight is introduced, exploiting that the regime onset depends on fiscal…

The widely disseminated convergence in physical appearance hypothesis posits that long-term partners’ facial appearance converges with time due to their shared environment, emotional mimicry, and synchronized activities. Although plausible, this…

This paper documents facts about the structure of business taxation in China using administrative tax data from 2007 to 2011 from the State Taxation Administration. We first document the importance of different business taxes across industries.…

The prevalence of vote-buying is widely identified as a cause of poor governance in the developing world; potential mechanisms for this relationship include the selection of lower quality politicians, and the reduced accountability experienced by…

Comparison Lift is an experimentation-as-a-service (EaaS) application for testing online advertising audiences and creatives at JD.com. Unlike many other EaaS tools that focus primarily on fixed sample A/B testing, Comparison …

In the urgent setting of the COVID-19 pandemic, treatment hypotheses abound, each of which requires careful evaluation. A randomized controlled trial generally provides the strongest possible evaluation of a treatment, but the efficiency and…

In this paper, we use accounting fundamentals to measure systematic risk of distress. Our main testable prediction — that this risk increases with the probability of recessionary failure, P(R|F) — is based on a stylized model that guides our…

Other organizational structures exist besides public corporations. Examples include family-controlled businesses, venture-backed companies, private equity-owned businesses, and nonprofit organizations. Each of these faces their own issues…

Missing attributes are ubiquitous in causal inference, as they are in most applied statistical work. In this paper we consider various sets of assumptions under which causal inference is possible despite missing attributes and discuss…

Across a wide panel of countries, the top 10% of financial stocks on average account for over 20% of a country’s market capitalization but earn on average significantly lower returns than do non-financial firms of the same size and risk exposures…

We measure financial literacy using questions assessing basic knowledge of four fundamental concepts in financial decision making: knowledge of interest rates, interest compounding, inflation, and risk diversification. Worldwide, just one in…