Working Papers

Profit shifting by multinational corporations is thought to reduce tax revenue around the world. We analyze the introduction of standard regulations aimed at limiting profit shifting. Using administrative tax and customs data from Chile in…

The property tax is the most under-utilized tax in developing countries. We evaluate the revenue and welfare effects of the main policy instruments used to raise property tax revenue: tax rate changes and enforcement. Using administrative data…

This paper studies the construction of p-values for nonparametric outlier detection, taking a multiple-testing perspective. The goal is to test whether new independent samples belong to the same distribution as a reference data set or are…

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the…

Existing survival analysis techniques heavily rely on strong modelling assumptions and are, therefore, prone to model misspecification errors. In this paper, we develop an inferential method based on ideas from conformal prediction, which can…

Firms have ever increasing access to consumer data, which they use to personalize their advertising and to price discriminate. This raises privacy concerns. Policymakers have argued in response that consumers should be given control over their…

Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates — often for convenience, tractability, or both. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? In this paper, we answer this…

Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide…

I incorporate computational constraints into decision theory in order to capture how cognitive limitations affect behavior. I impose an axiom of computational tractability that only rules out behaviors that are thought to be fundamentally hard. I…

We study the hierarchy of communities in real-world networks under a generic stochastic block model, in which the connection probabilities are structured in a binary tree. Under such model, a standard recursive bi-partitioning algorithm is…

We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from smartphones, we…

I propose a new approach to mechanism design: rather than assume a common prior belief, assume access to a common dataset. I restrict attention to incomplete information games where a designer commits to a policy and a single agent responds. I…

We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on a setting where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects are small, where sample sizes are large and where assignment is completely…

Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on their effects on market outcomes and welfare. The effects of this policy are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer protection from bank…

Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two barriers to long-acting reversible…

Empirical models play a distinctive role in the study of matching markets. They provide a quantitative framework for measuring heterogeneity in preferences for schools (Hastings et al., 2009), comparing school assignment mechanisms (…

Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level information sharing across…

Banks’ reluctance to repair their balance sheets, combined with deposit insurance and regulatory forbearance in recognizing greater risks and losses, can lead to solvency problems that look like liquidity (bank-run) crises. Regulatory forbearance…

New technologies have enabled firms to elicit granular behavioral data from consumers in exchange for lower prices and better experiences. This data can mitigate asymmetric information and moral hazard, but it may also increase firms’ market…

Overlap in baseline covariates between treated and control groups, also known as positivity or common support, is a common assumption in observational causal inference. Assessing this assumption is often ad hoc, however, and can give misleading…