Working Papers

This paper studies the roles of market power and taxes in determining market surplus and social welfare in the U.S. consumer firearms industry. Using microdata from Massachusetts and aggregate data from other states, we estimate an equilibrium…

Flexibility is a cornerstone of operations management, crucial to hedge stochasticity in product demands, service requirements, and resource allocation. In two-sided platforms, flexibility is also two-sided and can be viewed as the compatibility…

We develop a unified theory of delegated capital management by extending the paradigm of Berk and Green (2004) from mutual funds to alternative assets. With competitive markets and rational investors, we derive the optimal contract and account…

What explains wealth and portfolio differences between Black and White Americans? We find that disparities in economic factors explain portfolios well, but only partly explain the wealth gap. In a dynamic setting, economic factors often change…

We model the attorney-client relationship as a dynamic moral hazard problem where the client faces a difficult inference challenge. Clients learn about case quality by “learning from silence,” but silence is a noisy signal: it can mean the case…

Developing accurate clinical prediction models is often bottlenecked by the difficulty of generating meaningful predictive features from unstructured data. While electronic health records (EHRs) contain rich narrative information, extracting a…

This paper analyzes interactions between corporate governance and law enforcement practices, focusing on cases where deterrence is weak and harmful misconduct is profitable. We show how managerial compensation contracts, including stock-based…

In a patent privateering strategy, firms sell patents to a non-practicing entity (NPE) with the expectation that the NPE sues the seller’s rivals for patent infringement. We examine whether firms under competitive pressure and facing barriers to…

Policymakers often distort goods markets to effect redistribution—for example, via price controls, differential taxation, or in-kind transfers. We investigate the optimality of such policies alongside the (optimally-designed) income tax. In our…

We examine how patent disclosures influence technology classification decisions by patent examiners and how firms strategically tailor these disclosures to affect classification outcomes. Using a novel machine learning approach, we construct a…

We use a play-by-play dataset from the game show “Jeopardy!” to study the hot hand phenomenon, whereby people appear to exhibit “hot” states of elevated performance in domains with repeat trials. We first demonstrate that Jeopardy contestants…

We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23…

A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories…

Modern recommender systems rely on black-box machine learning models to predict consumer choices. However, because these models do not explicitly represent the underlying data-generating process (DGP), they often struggle to generalize beyond…

Online social networks have transformed the ways in which political mobilization messages are disseminated, raising new questions about how peer influence operates at scale. Building on the landmark 61-million-person Facebook experiment, we…

As increasingly capable agents are deployed, a central safety challenge is how to retain meaningful human control without modifying the underlying system. We study a minimal control interface in which an agent chooses whether to act autonomously…

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of the labor market for accountants that integrates forward-looking lifetime occupational choices with oligopsonistic employer demand. Using longitudinal resume data covering career transitions…

In collaboration with Feeding America, we aim to redesign Real-Time—a tool on its food sourcing and rescue platform, MealConnect—that facilitates the connection of ad-hoc, time-sensitive food donations to local agencies (e.g., meal programs)…

An enduring challenge in contagion theory is that the pathways contagions follow through social networks exhibit emergent complexities that are difficult to predict using network structure. Here, we address this challenge by developing a causal…

In this paper, we define and measure a previously unstudied channel by which companies react to, and attempt to shape, politics: internal policy teams. We use the text of more than 100,000 job listings to classify the roles of roughly 100 million…