Working Papers

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…

While reliance on human discretion is a pervasive feature of institutional design, human discretion can also introduce costly noise (Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein 2021). We evaluate the consequences, determinants, and trade-offs associated with…

Advances in artificial intelligence (A.I.) are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they may increase economic growth as A.I. augments our ability to innovate. On the other hand, many experts worry that these advances entail existential risk:…

We study how the assignment of intellectual property rights for successful innovations between inventors and their employers affect inventor-employer matching, the generality of innovation, and innovation disclosure. To do so, we examine the…

We identify a model of early-stage company growth persistence. Using seven commercial high growth company lists (either a Top 500 or Top 100 list of companies), we find that approximately 30% of companies remain on these lists for two consecutive…

When choosing whether and how much to donate, potential donors often observe a set of default donation amounts known as an “ask string.” In an experiment with more than 400,000 PayPal users, we replace a relatively unused donation amount ($75) on…

This study investigates the labor market value of credentials obtained from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and shared on business networking platforms. We conducted a randomized experiment involving more than 800,000 learners, primarily from…

Re-examining field research findings about three critical episodes in Intel Corporation’s evolution we find that when autonomous strategic behavior significantly increased relevant organizational knowledge Intel top management provided sustained…

We introduce an approach to evaluate language model (LM) agency using negotiation games. This approach better reflects real-world use cases and addresses some of the shortcomings of alternative LM benchmarks. Negotiation games enable us to study…

We examine the role of assurance — third-party verification — on carbon accounting quality. We develop a measure of carbon accounting quality based on the deviation of reported emissions from a model-based expected level and use two other survey-…

Using debit and credit card data, we find a one standard-deviation increase in firms’ earnings surprise is linked to a 3% or $5.6 billion increase in aggregate quarterly consumption of local households near the disclosing firms’ headquarters. The…

Innovative public firms sell 9.6% (615) more patents in the last month, relative to the first half of the fiscal year. Consistent with reporting incentives driving these sales, they are more pronounced among firms with strong incentives to meet…

We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations. When asset…

The traditional model of bank-led financial intermediation, where banks issue demandable deposits to savers and make informationally sensitive loans to borrowers, has seen a dramatic decline since 1970s. Instead, private credit is increasingly…

We introduce safe asset demand for dollar-denominated bonds into a tractable incomplete market model of exchange rates. The convenience yield on dollar bonds enters as a stochastic wedge in the Euler equations for exchange rate determination.…

We evaluate a contest-based intervention intended to increase the usage of an educational app that helps children in India learn to read English. The evaluation included approximately 10,000 children, of whom about half were randomly selected to…

We study the role of export credit agencies — the predominant tool of industrial policy — on firm behavior by using the effective shutdown of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (EXIM) from 2015-2019 as a natural experiment. We show that…

Governments use their countries’ economic strength from existing financial and trade relationships to achieve geopolitical and economic goals. We refer to this practice as geoeconomics. We build a framework based on three core ingredients:…

Study the accelerated adoption of information technologies in the intermediated originate-to-distribute model, like CLOs. Show informed intermediation can be welfare reducing given severe adverse selection while informed intermediation always…