Publications

Focusing on bipolar disorder (BD), we investigate the link between mental health, creativity, and
wealth. Analyzing population data for Denmark, we find that people with BD are more likely to
be musicians, but less likely to hold other creative jobs than the population. Healthy siblings of
people with BD, however, are consistently more likely to work in creative jobs. We also show
people in the top decile of parental wealth are seven times as likely to work in creative
professions compared with the bottom decile. Yet, wealth differences only explain a small
portion of the link between BD and creativity.

We examine misreporting of ESG information, in the context of gender pay gap reporting. The UK government requires UK employers to report gender employment ratios and pay gaps. We find that a large number of employers misreport as evidenced by their reporting a set of disclosures that in concert are mathematically impossible. We also find that a disproportionate number of employers report perfectly-balanced gender statistics, consistent with some employers intentionally misreporting as a form of ESG-washing. We find that employers involved in ESG controversies and that commit labor violations are more likely to misreport, consistent with ethical considerations affecting misreporting. Consistent with capital market and media scrutiny discouraging misreporting, public employers, employers that are the subject of an article about their gender pay gap reports, and employers that receive an ESG audit or financial audit from a big-4 auditor are less likely to misreport. Employers that misreport receive higher ESG scores and are less likely to receive negative media attention, consistent with benefits of misreporting. Our results suggest that inferences drawn from measures of ESG performance collected by second parties or on information self-reported in the presence of meaningful oversight are particularly valuable.

Apportionment is the act of distributing the seats of a legislature among political parties (or states) in proportion to their vote shares (or populations). A famous impossibility by Balinski and Young (2001) shows that no apportionment method can be proportional up to one seat (quota) while also responding monotonically to changes in the votes (population monotonicity). Grimmett (2004) proposed to overcome this impossibility by randomizing the apportionment, which can achieve quota as well as perfect proportionality and monotonicity — at least in terms of the expected number of seats awarded to each party. Still, the correlations between the seats awarded to different parties may exhibit bizarre non-monotonicities. When parties or voters care about joint events, such as whether a coalition of parties reaches a majority, these non-monotonicities can cause paradoxes, including incentives for strategic voting. In this paper, we propose monotonicity axioms ruling out these paradoxes, and study which of them can be satisfied jointly with Grimmett’s axioms. Essentially, we require that, if a set of parties all receive more votes, the probability of those parties jointly receiving more seats should increase. Our work draws on a rich literature on unequal probability sampling in statistics (studied as dependent randomized rounding in computer science). Our main result shows that a sampling scheme due to Sampford (1967) satisfies Grimmett’s axioms and a notion of higher-order correlation monotonicity.

This paper studies the role of newspaper notices on citizen engagement. We examine a recent Florida legislation that revokes the requirement that public notices appear in newspapers and allows local governments to publish notices on their county’s website instead. We find that local governments located in counties with a public notice website significantly reduce newspaper notice after the legislation, particularly for topics that tend to encourage citizen engagement, such as public hearings, planning and zoning proposals, or upcoming elections. By contrast, we find no discernible changes in website traffic of counties’ public notice websites. Consistent with a decrease in citizen awareness of public notices in affected cities, we find a decline in public meeting attendance after the legislation. We also find an increase in the number of commercial zoning permits, consistent with reduced citizen activism against new construction. Overall, our results suggest that the removal of newspaper notices removes information about local government activities and reduces citizen engagement.