Working Papers

We study the frictions in dealer-intermediation in residential real estate through the lens of “iBuyers,” technology entrants, who purchase and sell residential real estate through online platforms. iBuyers supply liquidity to households by…

This paper examines whether, when, and why job seekers use firms’ financial information in the job search process. We find first evidence of financial information’s relevance to job seekers by documenting a substantial increase in job search…

Decision makers called to evaluate and approve a reform, proposed by an interest group, a politician, or a bureaucracy, suffer from a double asymmetric information problem: about the competence of the proposer and the consequences of the proposal…

The lack of board diversity is one of the most controversial topics in corporate board governance. We investigate one important influence on diversity by studying whether shareholders value diversity on corporate boards in director elections.…

Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google’s Android platform instead of automatically defaulting them to Google’s own search engine. I show…

We provide the first systematic empirical evidence on factors that successfully mobilized one of the world’s first non-violent mass movements in favor of democratic self-government, using novel data from an unlikely venue for such collective…

We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans. Our statistic incorporates life expectancy, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on this incomplete list of factors, welfare for Black Americans was 43…

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…

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…

Problem definition: We study how online platforms can leverage the behavioral considerations of their users to improve their assortment decisions. Motivated by our collaboration with a dating company, we study how a platform…

In many areas, practitioners seek to use observational data to learn a treatment assignment policy that satisfies application-specific constraints, such as budget, fairness, simplicity, or other functional form constraints. For example, policies…

For an incompatible patient-donor pair, kidney exchanges often forbid receipt-before-donation (the patient receives a kidney before the donor donates) and donation-before-receipt, causing a double-coincidence-of-wants problem. Our proposed…

An increasingly popular trend is for consumers to get paid more often, resulting in more frequent, yet smaller paychecks. However, surprisingly little is known about whether and how payment frequency impacts consumer behavior. The current work…

As households reduce discretionary spending in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, concerns are high that a resulting fall in aggregate demand can lead to a lasting recession post-COVID-19. Consequently, policies aimed at stimulating consumer…

When debt is priced fairly, governments face a trade-off between insuring bondholders and taxpayers. If the government decides to fully insure bondholders by manufacturing risk-free debt, then it cannot insure taxpayers against permanent macro-…

In severe viral pneumonia, including Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), the viral replication phase is often followed by hyperinflammation (‘cytokine storm syndrome’), which can lead to acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure,…

This note presents a preliminary approach to the design of an across-the-curve credit spread index (AXI). The index is a measure of the recent average cost of wholesale unsecured debt funding for publicly listed U.S. bank holding companies and…