Working Papers

In this study, we causally examine complementarity in usage across a set of related software products from a multi-product firm. Digital contexts are characterized by little price variation, bundled pricing plans, and infrequent purchase or…

Predicting the responses of a cell under perturbations may bring important benefits to drug discovery and personalized therapeutics. In this work, we propose a novel graph variational Bayesian causal inference framework to predict a cell’s gene…

Privately issued money often bears devaluation risk that create monetary transaction frictions. We evaluate the real effects of supplying a new type of safe money in the historical context of the U.S. in 1863. We instrument for the change in…

Legislative and regulatory reforms often contain various forms of complexity — multiple contingencies, exemptions and alike. Complexity may be desirable if it better satisfies the needs of political constituencies, and if these benefits are…

How can we assess whether macro-prudential regulations are having their intended effects? If these regulations are optimal, their marginal benefit of addressing externalities should equal their marginal cost of distorting risk- sharing. These…

We develop a new approach to identify different categories of depositors during periods of uncertainty and quantify their compensation to remain in the bank. We isolate withdrawals due to liquidity needs, deterioration of fundamentals, and…

We study an economy with traders whose payoffs are quasilinear and their private signals are informative about an unobserved state parameter. The limit economy has infinitely many traders partitioned into a finite set of symmetry classes called…

We consider the problem of a rational, Bayesian agent receiving signals over time for the purpose of taking an action. The agent chooses when to stop and take an action based on her current beliefs, and prefers (all else equal) to act sooner…

We propose a new adaptive empirical Bayes framework, the Bag-Of-Null-Statistics (BONuS) procedure, for multiple testing where each hypothesis testing problem is itself multivariate or nonparametric. BONuS is an adaptive and interactive knockoff-…

Bank balance sheet lending is commonly viewed as the predominant form of lending. We document and study two margins of adjustment that are usually absent from this view using microdata in the$10 trillion U.S. residential mortgage market. We first…

Despite great falls in global poverty, civil and ethnic conflict remains tragically common. In this chapter, I examine the patterns of persistence and change in conflict around the world through the lens of historical political economy. I compare…

We document regime change in the U.S. Treasury market post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC): dealers switched from a net short to a net long position in the Treasury market. We first derive bounds on Treasury yields that account for dealer balance…

We study how tax policies that lower the cost of capital impact investment and labor demand. Difference-in-differences estimates using confidential Census Data on manufacturing establishments show that tax policies increased both investment and…

We develop three complementary tests to examine how adverse selection affects the design of executive compensation contracts: First, we show that externally hired CEOs receive higher total pay and have fewer equity incentives relative to…

As early as St Augustine and Aquinas, philosophers have studied the epistemology of contradictions to natural laws (aka, miracles). In this article, we develop a game-theoretic framework to analyze the concept of a miracle as understood by…

Profit shifting by multinational corporations is thought to reduce tax revenue around the world. We analyze the introduction of standard regulations aimed at limiting profit shifting. Using administrative tax and customs data from Chile in…

An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether —  and how — the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”)…

Equity book-to-market ratios (BTM) should not exceed one if a firm’s return on equity exceeds its cost of capital or it employs conservative accounting. Yet, BTM is above one for many firms, particularly in recession years. We address whether…

Translating the relevance of preclinical models (in vitro, animal models, or organoids) to their relevance in humans presents an important challenge during drug development. The rising abundance of single-cell genomic data from human tumors and…

The property tax is the most under-utilized tax in developing countries. We evaluate the revenue and welfare effects of the main policy instruments used to raise property tax revenue: tax rate changes and enforcement. Using administrative data…