Working Papers

Unfunded fiscal shocks are a significant source of risk premia in Treasury markets when central banks and governments decide to insulate taxpayers and expose bondholders’ wealth to government funding needs. We illustrate this bond risk premium…

The growing popularity of generative AI tools presents new challenges for data quality in online surveys and experiments. This study examines participants’ use of large language models to answer open-ended survey questions and describes empirical…

Governments and central banks can protect either taxpayers or bondholders from government spending shocks. When they choose to insulate taxpayers, government bond yields need to increase in response to unfunded fiscal expansions as the government…

We study how international agreements can take advantage of domestic time-inconsistency problems in the context of environmental policies. For example, policymakers will prefer future policies to be sustainable, but find it tempting to raise…

Why are there few debates in low-information elections where they have the greatest potential to inform vote choices? Consistent with weak incentives to reveal qualifications or make policy commitments, we find only a quarter of Parliamentary…

Has the United States economy become less competitive in recent decades? One might think so based on a body of research that has rapidly become influential for antitrust policy. We explain that the empirical evidence relating to concentration…

Using rich data on hourly physical productivity and thousands of ownership changes from U.S. power plants, we study the effects of acquisitions on efficiency and underlying mechanisms. We find a 2% average increase in efficiency for acquired…

We develop a theoretical model and conduct field experiments to distinguish the impact of identity on shaping beliefs from its direct effect on preferences in individual investment choices. Our model suggests that identity distorts individuals’…

We study the tax payment and innovation consequences of limiting the tax deductibility of research and development (“R&D”) expenditures. Beginning in 2022, U.S. companies are required to capitalize and amortize R&D rather than immediately…

We analyze a fundamental dilemma and time-inconsistency problem facing a climate coalition producing natural gas. In the short term, it is tempting to export more to outcompete coal. When this policy is anticipated, however, investments in…

Randomized controlled trials are often run in settings with many subpopulations that may have differential benefits from the treatment being evaluated. We consider the problem of sample selection, i.e., whom to enroll in a randomized trial, such…

While agency theory has strongly influenced real-world compensation plans, most observed compensation plans are not explicit about their economic assumptions. In this study, we derive closed-form expressions to infer the cost of effort, the…

Many empirical studies of labor market questions rely on estimating relatively simple predictive models using small, carefully constructed longitudinal survey datasets based on hand-engineered features. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on…

Traditional dynamic programming requires a mathematical model of the transition function for the state vector. Leveraging reinforcement learning techniques, we develop a framework to solve dynamic optimization problems that does not require…

We formulate the problem of constructing multiple simultaneously valid confidence intervals (CIs) as estimating a high probability upper bound on the maximum error for a class/set of estimate-estimand-error tuples, and refer to this as the error…

Democratic values are eroding just as citizens perceive increasing corruption, with numerous cases implicating the highest-level politicians. Could perceived increases in apex corruption be weakening democracy? We first present event study…

Politicians invest heavily in social media to amplify narratives about their nations, but the effectiveness of such approaches remains unclear. Analyzing 758,222 posts from US and UK politicians on X (formerly Twitter), we found that right-wing…

In the face of rising interest rates in 2022, banks mitigated interest rate exposure of the accounting value of their assets but left the vast majority of their long-duration assets exposed to interest rate risk. Data from call reports and SEC…

In influencer marketing, the differing incentives of advertisers and influencers necessitate a delicate balance between control and creativity. Investigating this trade-off, we explore the impact of contractual constraints on advertiser outcomes…

We examine the effects of stock market access, and in particular trading hours, on retail investment performance. Using discontinuities around time zone borders, we find that plausibly exogenous decreases in waking trading hours are associated…