Publications

This article discusses the crucial role and dearth of critical care nurses in the United States highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. This challenge of sufficient critical care nursing resources existed before the pandemic, but now concern is heightened by the need for such crucial healthcare providers now and in the future. We present strategies to address the gap, as well as challenges inherent in the suggested approaches. The discussion is relevant as nurse leaders adapt to COVID-19 and other novel challenges in the future.

In the winter of 2011, Roderick Bremby arrived in Connecticut to rescue its social services. Two months earlier, federal officials had advised the new administration of Governor Dannel Malloy that Connecticut’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP (formerly called food stamps) was among the worst in the country. Without a “tremendous turnaround,” they warned, Connecticut would be hit with millions in federal fines.

The bad news sent shock waves through the Malloy administration but to the Department of Social Services (DSS), it was old news. Connecticut’s SNAP program had been falling behind since 2008, when the number of households receiving food assistance had doubled and the number of Department of Social Services employees to certify and issue those benefits had shrunk by about eight percent. SNAP was overwhelmed, case processing delays were growing, and morale was in the tank.

SNAP is a federal program administered by the states. The U.S. Department of Agriculture provides all the funds that states give their hungry and in turn, it monitors each state’s performance. By all four measures the federal government used to track states' administration of their food assistance programs, Connecticut was failing: 1) CT SNAP was the worst offender in the country at wrongly denying food stamps to eligible applicants. 2) CT SNAP was second worst at miscalculating the correct dollar amounts of benefits. In 2010, it had overpaid recipients $35.5 million. 3) It also was not reaching a quarter of Connecticut’s poor, and 4) CT SNAP was one of the slowest in the country at providing money to those it did help.

With federal officials pressing for a turnaround plan, Governor Malloy recruited Bremby a former state official from Kansas. While Bremby was a noted systems expert, turning around the mess in Connecticut’s Department of Social Services was a big challenge. At $5.5 billion, Connecticut's DSS 2011 budget was twenty-one times the size of the department he’d run in Kansas. The sprawling department served 750,000 people, primarily for Medicaid and Medicare. Staffers spent about a third of their time on SNAP, overseeing some 336,064 residents who received food assistance.

Faced with this daunting task, Bremby considered his options. At the core of the problem was a vexing question - Why was determining eligibility for SNAP benefits, a 90-minute task, taking up to two months? The backlog in SNAP cases was hurting the department's clients and crushing the staff. Many thought that the backlog was one of the leading sources of eligibility errors as the staff rushed through key steps in verifying information. Certainly, new technology was part of the solution. Replacing DSS’s computer system was expected to cost $120 million to $150 million and take several years. But what other processes should be reconsidered to get the maximum benefit from the new technology and perhaps provide immediate improvement?

Both theory and evidence are mixed regarding the impact on prices of trading on “dark” venues partially exempt from National Market System requirements. Theory predicts that price discovery improves as dark venues siphon noisy uninformed trades, but increased adverse selection reduces liquidity. Empirical studies, which focus on intraday inefficiency, also find contradictory results. We extend that literature to investigate the impact of dark trading on a long-standing inefficiency based on under-reaction to quarterly earnings. We study a randomized controlled trial created by the “trade-at” rule of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Tick Size Pilot Program that exogenously shocks dark trading. We supplement that with ordinary least squares and two-stage least squares regressions on a more representative Compustat/Center for Research in Security Prices sample. All our results suggest that under-reaction increases with dark trading, consistent with reduced liquidity limiting arbitrage. We contribute to the literature on dark trading and inefficient processing of accounting disclosures, highlighting the role of advances in trading technology.

Four studies reveal that offering diversity awards (i.e., awards for applicants from marginalized groups) has unintentionally negative implications for equity. Across the four studies, applicants from marginalized groups were more likely to select the more lucrative award when two unrestricted awards were offered (Study 1: adults from racial groups underrepresented in U.S. colleges who were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk, N = 168; Studies 2–4: college women, N range = 152–628). However, the presence of a less lucrative diversity award caused applicants to apply for and prioritize diversity awards over more lucrative unrestricted awards. Fit, or how much applicants felt the award was for someone like them, mediated their increased likelihood of applying for diversity awards over unrestricted awards. These findings suggest that diversity awards may inadvertently siphon applicants from marginalized groups out of application pools for unrestricted awards. Greater examination of unrestricted awards is needed to increase their attractiveness and fit, especially in instances when diversity awards are also offered

Previous research suggests that choice causes an illusion of control—that it makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes, even when they are selecting among options that are functionally identical (e.g., lottery tickets with an identical chance of winning). This research has been widely accepted as evidence that choice can have significant welfare effects, even when it confers no actual control. In this article, we report the results of 17 experiments that examined whether choice truly causes an illusion of control (N = 10,825 online and laboratory participants). We found that choice rarely makes people feel more likely to achieve preferable outcomes—unless it makes the preferable outcomes actually more likely—and when it does, it is not because choice causes an illusion but because choice reflects some participants’ preexisting (illusory) beliefs that the functionally identical options are not identical. Overall, choice does not seem to cause an illusion of control.

Copyrights, which establish intellectual property in music, science, and other creative goods, are intended to encourage creativity. Yet, copyrights also raise the cost of accessing existing work—potentially discouraging future innovation. This paper uses an exogenous shift toward weak copyrights (and low access costs) during World War II to examine the potentially adverse effects of copyrights on science. Using two alternative identification strategies, we show that weaker copyrights encouraged the creation of follow-on science, measured by citations. This change is driven by a reduction in access costs, allowing scientists at less affluent institutions to use existing knowledge in new follow-on research.

I examine the relation between firms’ financial conduct and wage theft. Wage theft represents the single largest form of theft committed in the United States and primarily affects firms’ most vulnerable employees. I show that wage theft is more prevalent (i) when firms just meet or beat earnings targets and (ii) when executives’ personal liability for wage theft decreases. Wage theft precedes financial misconduct while the theft is undetected, but once firms are caught engaging in wage theft they are more likely to shift to engaging in financial misconduct. My findings highlight an economically meaningful yet previously undocumented way in which firms’ financial incentives relate to employee treatment.

The theory of regulatory capture has long been used to make the case for deregu- lation by questioning the legitimacy of government’s regulatory function. How do government officials, who are tasked with regulating, embrace deregulation? This article explores that question in the context of Boston’s debate over regulating transportation network companies (TNCs). Analyzing media coverage, I identify two types of frames that emerged as stakeholders attempted to influence TNC regulation: issue frames aimed to shape the interpretation of the ride-for-hire industry, while meta-frames shifted the focus of debate from TNCs to regulation itself. Specifically, a meta-frame invoking the theory of regulatory capture became central. Supplementing media coverage with in-depth interviews, I show that government officials did not refute the capture frame but rather used this frame to draw a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate regulation. I propose that these distinctions are central to legitimizing a deregulatory agenda, as officials condemn specific types of regulation in order to shore up the broader category of regulation. The case sheds light on how the idea of government as an impediment to innovation is embraced by government officials themselves, paving the way for new market configurations.

The economic effects from labor market integration are crucially affected by the extent to which countries are open to trade. In this paper we build a multi-country dynamic general equilibrium model to study and quantify the economic effects of trade and labor market integration of the 2004 European Union enlargement. In our model, trade is costly and households of different skills and nationalities face costly forward-looking relocation decisions. We use the EU Labour Force Survey to construct annual migration flows by employment status, skill, and nationality across EU countries for the period 2002-2014. We exploit the timing of the changes in policies due to the EU enlargement to identify the changes in migration costs. We apply our model and use these estimates, as well as the observed changes in tariffs, to quantify the effects from the enlargement. We find that new member state countries are the largest winners, with heterogenous effects across skill groups. We find smaller welfare gains for EU-15 countries. However, in the absence of changes to trade policy, the EU-15 would have been worse off after the enlargement. We study even further the interaction effects between trade and migration policies, the importance of the timing of migration policy, and the role of different mechanisms in shaping our results. Our results highlight the importance of trade for the quantification of the welfare and migration effects from labor market integration. We also use our framework to quantify the general equilibrium effects of imposing migration and trade restrictions due to Brexit.