Working Papers

This revision updates the original working paper with new material on the UNECE ADS regulation, the Chinese operator tier, fleet-level safety resilience, and the financial distress of the traditional automotive industry as structural forces…

We study the effects of population decline on the spatial distribution of economic activity. Empirically, we document that population growth is negatively associated with changes in spatial concentration, both across and within countries. We then…

This paper develops a model of civil discovery as strategic search. Plaintiff and defendant choose discovery intensities that determine the stochastic arrival of favorable evidence over a finite discovery period. Search improves a party’s…

We quantify the impact of the loss of reserve currency status in goods and asset markets. In goods markets, the loss of seigniorage (1% of GDP per annum) makes American households spend less, mostly on U.S. goods, leaving an excess supply of U.S…

Many large-scale transportation systems rely on decision-makers who independently allocate resources across space and time. While decentralization fosters competition, it can also generate substantial operational inefficiencies. We study this…

Despite their potential to advance financial inclusion and improve business outcomes, digital payment solutions have low adoption rates among retail merchants in developing economies. Prior interventions have tackled pre-purchase frictions such…

Bankruptcy insures consumers against large and unexpected wealth shocks. However, debtors may abuse this insurance. Indeed, close to 20% of consumer bankruptcy filings contain at least one material misstatement. I exploit the conditionally random…

Multimodal AI systems have achieved remarkable performance across a broad range of real-world tasks, yet the mechanisms underlying visual-language reasoning remain surprisingly poorly understood. We report three findings that challenge prevailing…

Recommender systems are central to how modern digital platforms connect users with content, yet they face a fundamental trade-off between predictive accuracy and explainability. Black-box models achieve strong performance but lack the…

We develop and implement a novel method to study personal financial advice from Large Language Models (LLMs). Studying this advice is challenging because it depends on the model used (i.e., supply), the questions individuals ask (i.e., demand),…

We study the interest-rate sensitivity of household wealth in a realistic life-cycle model. The model predicts that middle-aged and wealthier households should hold more long-term assets, as observed in the US data. Consequently, optimal…

Recommender systems optimized for short-term engagement often hurt long-term consumer satisfaction and retention. Yet optimizing long-term outcomes is challenging because such signals are sparse and noisy. We study short-form video platforms,…

Problem definition: Accurately modeling consumer behavior in energy operations is challenging due to uncertainty, behavioral heterogeneity, and limited empirical data-particularly in low-frequency, high-impact events. While generative AI trained…

This paper studies the impact of generative AI on U.S. households’ task allocation at home, using detailed Internet browsing data from a large sample of home devices between 2021 and 2024. Leveraging pre-ChatGPT browsing patterns, we measure…

This paper investigates the value of introducing a little flexibility into the classical n × n student-optimal stable matching (SOSM) problem. We define flexibility as the ability to relax stability constraints, and we aim to characterize the…

Despite the large common net benefits of climate mitigation, broad-based political consensus for large-scale policy action remains elusive. We hypothesize that financial exposure to energy stocks central to the green transition can induce…

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) will likely be the most important technology we have ever developed. Technologies such as electricity, semiconductors, and the internet have been transformative, reshaping economic activity and dramatically…

We report computational analysis with extensions of March’s (1991) genetic model of exploration and exploitation to further illuminate strategic exploitation challenges highlighted in field research about the transition from exploration to…

The evolutionary view posits that the intraorganizational ecology of strategy-making comprises two distinct types of strategic action. Induced strategic action involves initiatives on the part of operational and middle-level managers that fit…