Working Papers

One thread of empirical work in social science focuses on decomposing group differences in outcomes into unexplained components and components explained by observable factors. In this paper, we study gender wage decompositions, which require…

We develop a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate bank franchise value. In contrast to regulatory guidance and some existing models, we show that sticky deposits combined with low deposit rate betas do not imply a negative duration for…

In this paper, we examine biases arising in A/B tests where firms modify a continuous parameter, such as price, to estimate the global treatment effect of a given performance metric, such as profit. These biases emerge in canonical experimental…

The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…

Modern recommender systems, which rely on large-scale machine learning (ML) models to predict the next item a consumer will engage with, often lack generalizability and understanding of consumer behaviors due to their black-box nature. To address…

Companies in various industries are under growing pressure to assess the costs of decarbonizing their operations. This paper develops a generic abatement cost concept to identify the cost-efficient combination of technological and operational…

The CBO cost releases of legislative proposals contain valuable news about surpluses priced in by Treasury investors. Using daily event windows, we find that cost releases with large negative cash flows lowered Treasury valuations by more than 20…

The rapidly growing number of lithium-ion battery packs deployed in electric vehicles (EVs) entails enormous economic potential for used EV batteries to be redeployed in a second life application, e.g., for behind-the-meter stationary energy…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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…