Publications

Across a broad range of equipment types and industries, we document a pattern of local capital reallocation from older firms to younger firms. Start-ups purchase a disproportionate share of old physical capital previously owned by more mature firms. The evidence is consistent with financial constraints driving differential demand for vintage capital. The local supply of used capital influences start-up entry, job creation, investment choices, and growth, particularly when capital is immobile. Meanwhile, as suppliers of used capital, incumbents accelerate capital replacement in the presence of younger firms. The evidence suggests previously undocumented benefits to co-location between old and young firms.

Urbane Development, led by CEO James Johnson-Piett, has a strong track record of revitalizing underserved communities by supporting local small businesses and fostering economic growth. With a primary focus on low-income neighborhoods, Urbane's project in the Little Caribbean area of Brooklyn aims to preserve and enhance the local Caribbean market while providing affordable housing and community resources. The development includes affordable housing units, a Caribbean-themed market, food hall, community kitchens, and maker labs, all designed to bolster local entrepreneurship.

The Caribbean market in Flatbush has historically been a vibrant hub for Caribbean immigrants, offering a range of island goods and serving as a cultural touchstone. Urbane's challenge is to modernize and upscale this market without displacing existing vendors, many of whom are struggling street peddlers. Urbane has promised to train these vendors in upscale merchandising to integrate them into the new complex. The concept of "development without displacement" is central to their strategy, aiming to protect the community's cultural and economic fabric from the adverse effects of gentrification.

Questions facing Urbane include whether the new market space can attract a diverse, free-spending clientele, including global tourists and the local Caribbean diaspora, while generating sufficient revenue for sustainability. Additionally, there are concerns about the potential community pushback if vendors cannot scale and are asked to leave. Most importantly, the project faces financial challenges, such as financing the development and ensuring a return on investment for partners.

A registry for epidermolysis bullosa (EB) had been designed by the Epidermolysis Bullosa Research Partnership (EBRP). EB is a debilitating and sometimes fatal genetic disorder that causes severe blistering of the skin and mucous membranes. It affects up to 50,000 people in the U.S. and about 500,000 globally. The registry aims to provide essential information to patients, guide them to appropriate medical services, and facilitate research by consolidating patient data, thereby attracting medical researchers to devise treatments.

The governance structure of the registry presents several questions. Michael Hund, CEO of EBRP, must decide whether to establish it as a for-profit entity, leveraging venture capital to scale rapidly, or as a non-profit, following the traditional model for medical charities. This decision poses implications for patients' willingness to donate data, as they may perceive for-profit motives negatively. Additionally, the governance structure will need to address complex issues of privacy and consent, particularly around the collection and use of genetic data. Each patient's DNA is unique, raising inevitable privacy concerns even when data is anonymized. Ethical dilemmas arise regarding how detailed genetic information, which could reveal susceptibilities to various other conditions, is handled and whether it might affect patients' health insurance or employment prospects.

Sports betting markets offer a novel laboratory to test theories of cross-sectional asset pricing anomalies found in financial markets. Two unique features of this market – no systematic risk and terminal values exogenous to betting activity – evade the joint hypothesis problem that allows mispricing to be detected. Examining more than one hundred thousand liquid betting contracts spanning three decades across four professional sports, I find strong evidence of momentum and weak evidence of value effects that are consistent with a model of delayed overreaction and reject models of underreaction and rational pricing. The magnitudes of momentum and value returns are a fraction of those in financial markets, and fail to overcome transactions costs, which prevents arbitrage from eliminating them. A novel insight from sports betting also predicts value and momentum returns in U.S. equities

Brand Velocity Partners (BVP) is a private equity firm founded on the belief that brand building coupled with financial expertise can unlock significant value in companies with established but underdeveloped marketing strategies. Instead of creating a traditional fund, BVP raises capital on a deal-by-deal basis, ensuring that each acquisition has its own set of investors. A unique element of BVP's approach is their "Share the Gains" program, which allocates 10% of the carried interest to non-management employees of portfolio companies, enabling broader participation in the economic benefits of investment success. This initiative aims to increase employee engagement and address societal inequality by ensuring all workers benefit from the firm's growth.

Implementing "Share the Gains" comes with challenges. BVP must navigate how to reward employees who leave before the hold period ends and effectively communicate the program to employees, senior managers, and investors. Detailed planning is required to ensure the program aligns with the firm’s goals of increasing engagement and maintaining investor returns. 

We collect a time-series database of business and related restrictions for every county in the United States from March through December 2020. We find strong evidence consistent with the idea that employee mask policies, mask mandates for the general population, restaurant and bar closures, gym closures, and high-risk business closures reduce future fatality growth. Other business restrictions, such as second-round closures of low- to medium-risk businesses and personal care/spa services, did not generate consistent evidence of lowered fatality growth and may have been counterproductive.

Medicare provides nearly universal health insurance to individuals at age 65 years. How eligibility for Medicare affects racial and ethnic disparities in access to care and health is poorly understood.

Article Choosing Bad Jobs: The Use of Nonstandard Work as a Commitment Device Laura Adler1 Abstract With nonstandard work on the rise, workers are increasingly forced into bad jobs—jobs that are low-paying, part-time, short-term, and dead-end. But some people, especially in cultural industries, embrace this kind of work. To understand why some might choose bad jobs when better options are available, this paper examines the job preferences of aspiring artists, who often rely on bad day jobs as they attempt to achieve economic success in the arts. Using interviews with 68 college-educated artists, I find that their preferences are informed not only by utility and identity considerations—two factors established in the literature—but also by the value of bad jobs as commitment devices, which reinforce dedication to career aspirations. The case offers new insights into the connection between jobs and careers and enriches the concept of the commitment device with a sociological perspec- tive, showing that these devices are not one-time contracts but ongoing practices.