Below is a list of associated faculty and possible research projects, organized by academic area.
Professor De Simone’s research is in the area of multinational corporations and corporate taxation. Her recent research focuses on the tax effects of financial accounting changes, multinational income shifting, the valuation of tax avoidance, and tax compliance as a strategic game.
Professor De Simone’s research project utilizes a database of separate entity financial statements, including ownership linkages that previously allowed us to identify all entities part of a multinational group. Leveraging this ownership information in greater detail will allow for a better understanding of the structure of corporate groups. Specifically, this project will identify the immediate parent of each subsidiary, the domestic parent within a given country, and how many tiers of ownership exist between the global parent and each subsidiary.
Professor Athey’s research is in the areas of industrial organization, microeconomic theory, and applied econometrics. Her current research focuses on the design of auction-based marketplaces and the economics of the internet, primarily on online advertising and the economics of the news media.
Professor Athey’s project uses data from internet browsing to show that abnormal volumes of ticker lookups at major finance sites is predictive of abnormal asset returns. Prior studies of this phenomena used Google Trends data, which does not incorporate lookups at major finance sites and is too aggregate and noisy to provide precise identification of the effects of lookups, especially for medium and low-volume stocks. Her project examines the impact of lookups on returns over time and further studies the relationship between other types of browsing activities, such as visiting trading websites and financial news websites, and ticker lookups, in order to understand what drives ticker lookups, as well as to disentangle which types of traders seem to have the greatest impact on stock prices. She is also looking at asymmetries between lookups associated with declining or increasing stock prices to further understand the scenarios in which individual investor behavior impact price.
Professor Benkard’s research is in the areas of empirical industrial organization, applied microeconomics, and econometrics, and concentrates on applying microeconomic and game theoretic models to the study of individual markets. His recent work has focused on developing methods that allow us to analyze I.O. models empirically. This includes theoretical work on how to estimate demand systems and dynamic oligopoly models, as well as empirical work that uses these techniques to analyze different industries.
Recently he has worked with a Research Fellow on an empirical project analyzing airline mergers, an empirical study of participation in social networks, and an empirical study of the video game pricing and the welfare effects of DRM.
Professor Diamond’s research studies the causes and consequences of households’ and firm’s geographic location choices across neighborhoods and cities.
A recent project analyzes why U.S. households have become increasingly geographically segregated by education level and how this segregation led to increased economic well-being inequality. Her work uses large datasets related to local labor and real-estate markets and a combination of structural and reduced-form estimation techniques.
Professor Imbens’ research focuses on developing methods for drawing causal inferences in observational studies, using matching, instrumental variables, and regression discontinuity designs.
A recent project involves developing software for new econometric techniques that have been developed — and are currently being developed — and which connect machine learning methods to causal methods in econometrics.
Professor Oyer studies the economics of organizations and human resource practices. His work has looked at the use of broad-based stock option plans, how firms use non-cash benefits, how firms respond to limits on their ability to displace workers, and how labor market conditions affect their entire careers when MBAs and PhD economists leave school.
Oyer’s current projects include studies of how firms identify and recruit workers in high-skill and competitive labor markets, with a focus on the markets for newly minted lawyers and MBAs.
Paulo Somaini studies industrial organization, econometrics and microeconomic theory. His work shows how the behavior of agents in strategic environments can reveal their preferences and information. In “Competition and Interdependent Costs in Michigan Highway Procurement Auctions” he finds that contrary to naïve theoretical predictions, firms in Michigan did not bid more aggressively for projects closer to their competitors’ plants. He shows that firms’ response to competitive pressure reveals the extent and magnitude of the winner’s curse in this type of auctions. His most recent work analyses the assignment mechanism used to assign Kindergarten students to schools in Cambridge, MA. This work shows that while parents have strong incentives to misreport their preferences to the school district, their reports provide valuable information about how much they like each school which is useful to simulate their welfare under alternative assignment rules.
Professor Yurukoglu’s research is in the area of industrial organization. He applies statistics to game theoretic models to study regulatory policy and imperfect competition. His research focuses on the media and telecommunications industries.
He has recently studied a la carte pricing regulations in cable television, and negotiations and mergers between cable channels and cable distributors.
Professor Admati’s research focuses on corporate governance, banking and financial regulation. The work is primarily theoretical/conceptual, and has taken on specific policy focus in recent years. A specific focus has been capital regulation, which is aimed to control the funding mix or indebtedness level of banks and other institutions. Admati is the coauthor, with Martin Hellwig, of the book The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It, which explains the issues around banking and the current policy debate in an accessible manner.
Over the summer, among other things, Admati worked on an essay for Annual Reviews on banking regulations, for which some updates on new related research and the state of the regulations relative to the book, whose writing concluded in 2012, need to be collected and processed.
Professor Berk’s research is primarily theoretical in nature and covers a broad range of topics in finance including delegated money management; asset pricing (the relation between stock returns and characteristics of the firm, such as accounting numbers, investment, firm size, etc.); valuing the firm’s growth potential, the firm’s capital structure decision, and the interaction between labor markets and financial markets.
Professor Berk and DeMarzo’s research project focuses on testing different asset pricing models by using stock prices and valuation methods to infer discount and growth rates. They will then test to see which asset pricing model is most consistent with implied discount rates and/or provides the most accurate forecast for cah flow growth.
Professor Peter DeMarzo’s research is in the area of corporate finance, asset securitization, and contracting, as well as market structure and regulation. Recent work has examined the optimal design of securities, compensation mechanisms, regulation of insider trading and broker-dealers, bank capital regulation, and the influence of information asymmetries on corporate disclosures and investment.
Professor and DeMarzo’s research project focuses on testing different asset pricing models by using stock prices and valuation methods to infer discount and growth rates. They will then test to see which asset pricing model is most consistent with implied discount rates and/or provides the most accurate forecast for cah flow growth.
Professor Koudijs’ research focuses on financial markets and financial intermediaries. In his research Peter studies relevant historical cases which yield important lessons for the world of today.
One of Professor Koudijs’ projects looks at the impact of different liability rules on risk taking of bankers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In another project, he studies the economic impact of changes in bankruptcy protection in the American South during the 1830s, specifically for the owners of slave plantations.
Arvind Krishnamurthy’s research is in the areas of finance and macroeconomics. He has studied the causes and consequences of liquidity crises in emerging markets and developed economies, and the role of government policy in stabilizing crises. He has also conducted extensive research on liquidity effects in the U.S. Treasury bond market and the mortgage-backed securities market.
Hanno Lustig has worked at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. Recently, his research has focused on understanding the forces that determine exchange rates in currency markets. His research has shown how currencies have different risk characteristics that are determined by a country’s role in the global economy. These risk characteristics help to understand the behavior of exchange rates. In addition, Lustig has explored the impact of government guarantees on the pricing of tail risk borne by large financial institutions. More recently, Lustig has also worked on understanding the determinants of a firm’s volatility (volatility of sales, cash flows, stock returns etc).
Professor Rauh’s research focuses on state and local public finance and the financial impacts of state debt and unfunded liabilities.
A current project studies the elasticity of California’s taxable income base with respect to state tax rates and other state tax laws. Other current projects include the effects of business taxation on the locational decisions of multi-state businesses, and the effects of pensions and retiree health obligations on city budgets.
Professor Singleton’s research focuses on econometric methods for estimation and testing of dynamic asset pricing models; modeling of term structures of government and defaultable bond yields; pricing credit derivatives; measuring and managing market, credit, and liquidity risks; and debt financing in emerging economies.
Professor Singleton’s project uses historical data on returns on equity portfolios to explore the benefits of real-time asset allocation based on returns weighted by the inverse of their volatilities.
Professor Strebulaev’s research is in the area of corporate finance, financial decision-making, venture capital, and credit risk.
Recent work has examined issues of dynamic capital structure, strategic financial decision-making, and empirical estimation of firms’ financing decisions.
Professor Vanasco’s research focuses on topics related to information asymmetries and their impact on financial markets and the real economy. Her work examines factors that lead to information and belief asymmetry, how markets provide incentives for information acquisition, and regulatory policies that can be used to increase liquidity and discipline these markets.
A recent project studies borrower-lender relationships between banks and firms, specifically investigating the mechanism through which long-term relationships might improve access to credit.
Professor Hartmann is currently working on projects related to advertising effectiveness and optimal advertising allocation. As new distribution channels for advertising emerge (internet, mobile and social), research is needed to assess their relative effectiveness and complementarities with traditional channels (e.g. TV). Given an understanding of ad effectiveness, we also develop models to assess firms’ optimal advertising strategies.
A recent working paper illustrates how equilibrium advertising in presidential elections would change in the absence of the Electoral College. An ongoing project seeks to understand when and why advertisers might seek exclusive ad distribution, such as Budweiser’s 20+ year exclusive role as the only beer advertiser during the Super Bowl. New data sets that combine individual-level exposure to both direct advertisements and indirect “earned” exposures through social media platforms with in-store sales data also provide opportunities to better assess the complete effect of an ad exposure and can provide insights into how advertisers might participate in the “social” conversation about their brands.
See the following working paper on advertising competition in presidential elections as an example.
Professor Szu-chi Huang’s research focuses on consumer motivation, documenting how consumers have different concerns in different stages of goal pursuit, and thus derive motivation in very distinct ways. Professor Huang uses experiments to tightly examine causal processes, field studies to test these findings in the real world (e.g., launching loyalty programs and donation drives), as well as secondary data from companies and organizations (e.g., Sports data, gamer data).
Her recent projects examine consumer motivation in social settings, including shared goal-pursuit context (e.g., Weight Watchers, video-game players) and competitive context (e.g., sports game, sales competition).
Professor Nair is interested in marketing analytics, and the use of data to improve marketing resource allocation within firms. One stream of his research studies empirically the dynamic effects of marketing actions. A second focuses on empirical analysis of contracts and incentives. A third stream investigates empirically contexts with network effects.
Current projects include analysis of salesforce compensation contracts combining firms’ internal HR datasets with customer transaction data; a project on the empirical investigation of advertising content on online social networks combining tools from text analysis and econometrics; and a project on measuring complementarities between advertising and product consumption using detailed panel data on consumer product choice and TV-ad viewing decisions.
Professor Sahni’s research focuses on understanding consumers’ purchase decisions and the impact of firms’ marketing actions. Navdeep’s studies employ various methodologies ranging from econometric analysis to running field experiments to make inferences from data.
Professor Sahni’s research project looks at how to quantify consumers’ willingness to pay to avoid advertising, and understand how their behavior changes when they are able to avoid it. For this project he will observe the behavior of a panel of consumers — their internet browsing, media consumption, along with their decision to pay to avoid ads.
Professor Gur’s research interests include operations management, revenue management, and service systems, with a particular emphasis on data-driven, dynamic environments, such as the ones characterizing internet-based operations.
In his research, he applies methods from areas such as stochastic optimization, machine learning, and game theory, to study how companies can improve their performance by using information that is available to them throughout their decision process.
Professor Goldberg’s research lies at the intersection of organization studies, cultural sociology and network science. He is interested in understanding how social meanings emerge and solidify through social interaction, and what role network structures play in this process. He uses and develops computationally intensive network-based methods to study how new cultural and organizational categories take form as people and organizational actors interact.
Professor Goldberg and Kosinski’s project explores the relationship between the psychological and socio-cultural composition of U.S. firms and outcomes such as firm and industry performance.
Michal Kosinski’s research focuses on individual differences in behavior, preferences, and performance. Specifically, he is interested in the mechanisms linking psychological traits (such as personality) with a broad range of organizational and social outcomes, including job performance, person-job fit, consumer preferences, and ideology, as well as the expression and recognition of psychological traits from behavioral residues, language, and facial features.
Professor Goldberg and Kosinski’s project explores the relationship between the psychological and socio-cultural composition of U.S. firms and outcomes such as firm and industry performance.
Professor Ranganathan studies questions of work and employment in the context of economic development. By applying novel methods that combine field-experimental and quantitative research designs with ethnography and interviews, her research investigates how low-income occupations in developing countries are governed, organized, seek meaning through their work and navigate the market. Through her research, Professor Ranganathan strives to advance our theoretical understanding of work, while informing the design of labor-market institutions and policy for the developing world.
Over the last year, Professor Ranganathan has been working with a large garment manufacturer in southern India and is investigating the impact of several internal organizational practices in the garment factories on worker outcomes. In particular, she is working with a research fellow to look at the impact of employer-sponsored childcare on working mothers’ labor force participation and is further investigating how this effect varies based on the gender composition of the working mothers’ children.
Professor Sterling investigates the ways organizations attract, manage, and retain high-value human capital in technology and business, the effect this has on the performance of employees and organizations, and the broader impact of these practices on inequality.
In a project using an online labor market, she is investigating how social status, quality, and the timing through which these are revealed to audiences affect the hiring of workers. Her project explores if and how employers enact arbitrage opportunities in labor markets, and how cultural fit may or may not affect selection of applicants.
Professor Casey’s research explores political economy issues in developing countries. Her approach combines applied theory, original data collection and randomized trials.
One of Professor Casey’s current research projects looks at the long run impacts of institution building. Her current project is a long run follow-up to an experimental evaluation of a community driven development program in Sierra Leone.
Professor Foarta’s research examines the links between macroeconomics and political economy. It focuses on the coordination of government policies within banking unions, on the links between local and supranational regulation and on the effects of government interventions in financial markets.
The goal of Professor Foarta’s research project is to collect data on government debt holdings in European banks, before and after the European Single Supervisory Mechanism came into force. Her project aims to examine the change in government debt holdings as a response to the regulatory change brought by the SSM.
Professor Jha’s research focuses on drawing new lessons from economic theory and history for fostering beneficial political reform and economic growth in developing societies. He is particularly interested in the role that can be played by organizational innovations in mitigating political risk, encouraging political reform and supporting peaceful co-existence between members of different ethnic, religious and social groups.
Professor Jha’s research project explores the political effects of exposure to financial markets, including on voting decisions, attitudes towards peace and towards political integration.
Professor Malhotra has been working on three main data-intensive projects.
The first analyzes online dating data to explore how political predispositions influence social sorting.
The second examines earnings call and news reports to assess the financial returns to corporate social responsibility.
The third analyzes comment threads on political websites to better understand “issue publics,” or groups of people passionate about single political issues.