Publications

I study the long-term effects of landing a first job at a large firm versus a small one using Spanish administrative data. Size could be a relevant employer attribute for inexperienced workers since large firms are associated with greater productivity, wages, and training. The key empirical challenge is selection into first jobs based on unobserved worker characteristics. I develop an instrumental variable approach that, keeping business cycle conditions fixed, leverages variation in the composition of labor demand that labor market entrants face. Initially matching with a larger firm persistently improves long-term outcomes, even through subsequent jobs. Mechanisms suggest better skill development at large firms.

This paper proposes a theory of large-scale government bond purchases by central banks in an environment with endogenous information acquisition. Information acquisition by private investors lowers sovereign bond yields by reducing uncertainty, and makes prices more responsive to new information. I show that asset purchases by the central bank discourage information acqui- sition. Using the case of Italian bonds and the start of ECB purchases in 2015, I document through various measures that price informativeness indeed sig- nificantly declined with purchases. When the sovereign can be subject to self- fulfilling debt crises, however, this reduction in information acquisition can be beneficial. I show that by impairing price informativeness, asset purchases can avoid the occurrence of roll-over crises, generating large welfare gains. A key property of the model is that substantial purchases may be required, while small interventions have ambiguous welfare consequences. When the sovereign expects the central bank to carry such programs, it leads to exces- sive indebtedness, forcing the central bank to run an inflated balance sheet to avoid roll-over crises.

This article summarizes empirical research on the interaction between monetarypolicy and asset markets, and reviews our previous theoretical work that capturesthese interactions. We present a concise model in which monetary policy impactsthe aggregate asset price, which in turn ináuences economic activity with lags. Inthis context: (i) the central bank (the Fed, for short) stabilizes the aggregate assetprice in response to Önancial shocks, using large-scale asset purchases if needed(ìthe Fed putî); (ii) when the Fed is constrained, negative Önancial shocks causedemand recessions, (iii) the Fedís response to aggregate demand shocks increasesasset price volatility, but this volatility plays a useful macroeconomic stabilizationrole; (iv) the Fedís beliefs about the future aggregate demand and supply drivethe aggregate asset price; (v) macroeconomic news ináuences the Fedís beliefs andasset prices; (vi) more precise news reduces output volatility but heightens assetmarket volatility; (vii) disagreements between the market and the Fed microfoundmonetary policy shocks, and generate a policy risk premium.

The Chicago Fire is a Major League Soccer (MLS) team acquired by Andell Holdings, an investment firm led by Andrew Hauptman. Purchased for $35 million in 2007, the Fire experienced significant struggles with its home venue, Toyota Park in Bridgeview Illinois, due to poor public transport access and suboptimal maintenance. Despite growing league fortunes and increased sponsorships, the team’s location in suburban Bridgeview posed a significant strain on the popularity of the club.

To effectuate its expansion plans and address these challenges, Andell Holdings must make two critical decisions regarding its ownership of the Chicago Fire. First, Hauptman needs to evaluate the financial and operational ramifications of relocating the team to Soldier Field in downtown Chicago despite the large payments the village of Bridgeview was demanding to break the team’s long-term lease on Toyota Park. This decision hinges on calculating the required increase in attendance to offset the financial burden and considering other non-economic benefits such as brand visibility and fan engagement. Second, Hauptman must determine the optimal timing and strategy for Andell’s exit from Fire ownership. The sale of Andell’s stake required assessing when the team’s valuation would peak and the impact of any decisions regarding the team’s home venue. 

Health centers are vital primary care safety nets for underserved populations, but optimal clinician staffing associated with quality care is unclear. Understanding the association of clinician staffing patterns with quality of care may inform care delivery, scope-of-practice policy, and resource allocation.

When consumers encounter unfamiliar products, they often face difficulty in understanding
which attributes are crucial, leading to challenges in product comparison and potential di-
minished interest in the category. This study examines how firms strategically communicate
the importance of product attributes in a competitive environment. Despite consumer aware-
ness of attributes and their levels, ambiguity regarding their relative importance remains.
We analyze a situation where two firms each receive a noisy signal about the true attribute
importance and convey this information to consumers through cheap-talk messages. Follow-
ing these communications, consumers decide whether to incur a cost to further explore the
category by visiting stores. Our findings reveal a truthful equilibrium where firms honestly
report their received signals. In this equilibrium, when both firms’ messages align, their
collective messages can credibly convey information about the more important attribute,
thereby encouraging store visits and purchase. Interestingly, firms may still find it advan-
tageous to truthfully highlight an attribute, even if it doesn’t align with their competitive
advantage. Moreover, we show that without competition (i.e., a single firm communicating),
this truthful equilibrium does not exist. Thus, the presence of the competition enables the
credible communication of information about attribute importance, benefiting both firms
by enhancing consumer engagement with the product category

We study regressions with multiple treatments and a set of controls that is flexible enough to purge omitted variable bias. We show that these regressions generally fail to estimate convex averages of heterogeneous treatment effects—instead, estimates of each treatment’s effect are contaminated by non-convex averages of the effects of other treatments. We discuss three estimation approaches that avoid such contamination bias, including the targeting of easiest-to-estimate weighted average effects. A re-analysis of nine empirical applications finds economically and statistically meaningful contamina- tion bias in observational studies; contamination bias in experimental studies is more limited due to idiosyncratic effect heterogeneity

This paper examines the current state of social innovation and entrepreneurship programming, courses, and centers within schools of public health through a survey data analysis. This report presents a cross-sectional survey conducted among faculty members of public health schools in the United States. The survey aims to determine the availability and current state of student-centered programs and courses centered around social innovation and entrepreneurship within schools of public health. Insights were drawn from 19 professionals across 15 schools of public health. Uncertainties surround the sustainability of current programs, with insufficient funding, human resources, and the need to teach more pressing topics identified as the most significant obstacles. Key areas identified as opportunities for growth were faculty engagement, expertise, and funding to expand more structured programming.

Using data from 15 countries, this article investigates whether descriptive and prescriptive gender norms concerning housework and child care (domestic work) changed after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Results of a total of 8,343 participants (M = 19.95, SD = 1.68) from two comparable student samples suggest that descriptive norms about unpaid domestic work have been affected by the pandemic, with individuals seeing mothers’ relative to fathers’ share of housework and child care as even larger. Moderation analyses revealed that the effect of the pandemic on descriptive norms about child care decreased with countries’ increasing levels of gender equality; countries with stronger gender inequality showed a larger difference between pre- and post-pandemic. This study documents a shift in descriptive norms and discusses implications for gender equality—emphasizing the importance of addressing the additional challenges that mothers face during health-related crises.

n response to intense pressure from policy makers and the public, technology companies have enacted a range of policies aimed at reducing the spread of misinformation online 1 - 3 . The enforcement of these policies has , however, led to technology companies being regularly accused of political bias 4 - 6 . W e argue that even under politically neutral anti - misinformation policies, such political asymmetries in enforcement should be expected , as there is a political asymmetry in the sharing of misinformation 7 - 12 . We support this argument with an analysis of Twitter data from 9,000 politically active users during the U.S. 2020 presidential election . While users on the political right were indeed substantially more likely to be suspended than those on the left , users on the right also shared far more links to low quality news sites – even when news quality was determined by politically - balanced groups of laypeople , or groups of only Republicans – and were estimated to have a far higher likelihood of being bots. We find similar associations between conservatism and low quality news sharing (based on both expert and politically - balanced layperson ratings) in seven other dat asets of sharing from Twitter, Facebook, and survey experiments, spanning 2016 to 2023 . These results demonstrat e that political im balance in enforcement need not imply bias, and should not dissuade technology companies from taking action against the spread of misinformation

This paper provides a framework in which a multiproduct ecosystem competes with small single-product firms in both price and innovation. The ecosystem is able to use data collected on one product to improve the quality of its other products. We study the impact of regulation which either restricts the use of data across the ecosystem’s business units, or which requires the ecosystem to share data with small firms. This regulation induces small firms to innovate more and set higher prices; it also dampens data spillovers within the ecosystem, reduces the ecosystem’s incentive to innovate, and potentially increases its prices. As a result, the impact of data regulation on consumers is ambiguous. Small firms do not necessarily benefit from sharing data with each other via a data cooperative, because doing so triggers more aggressive pricing by the ecosystem. A data cooperative can also harm consumers by inducing the ecosystem to innovate less.

We provide large-sample evidence on whether U.S. publicly traded corporations opportunistically use voluntary disclosures about their commitments to employee diversity. We document significant discrepancies between companies' disclosed commitments and their hiring practices and classify firms that discuss diversity more than their actual employee gender and racial diversity warrants as “diversity washers." We find diversity-washing firms obtain superior scores from environmental, social, and governance (ESG) rating organizations and attract investment from institutional investors with an ESG focus. These outcomes occur even though diversity-washing firms are more likely to incur discrimination violations and pay larger fines for these actions. Our study highlights the consequences of selective ESG disclosures on an important social dimension of employee diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Several firms claim to be socially responsible. We confront these claims with data using the most notable recent proclamation, the Business Roundtable’s (BRT) 2019 Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation. The BRT is a large, influential business group containing many of America’s largest firms; the Statement proclaimed a corporation’s purpose as delivering value to all stakeholders, rather than only shareholders. However, we find no evidence that signatories – who voluntarily signed – engaged in such stakeholder-centric practices before or after signing. Relative to peers, signatories violate environmental and labor laws more frequently, have higher carbon emissions, rely more on government subsidies, and are more likely to disagree with proxy recommendations on shareholder proposals. We also do not observe post-signing improvements along these dimensions, suggesting that the Statement was not a credible commitment to improve. Our results suggest that firms’ proclamations of stakeholder-centric behavior are not backed up by hard data.

This paper examines the effect of state-level monitoring on municipal governance, focusing on outcomes in financial reporting quality, local corruption, political entrenchment, and municipal financial soundness. I exploit the staggered adoption of fiscal monitoring policies that entail a regular review of municipal financial reports for signs of fiscal distress. I find that introducing these monitoring policies is associated with an increase in the proxies for reporting quality, a decrease in the number of corruption convictions, and a reduction in re-election likelihood for incumbent politicians. Consistent with the purpose of the policies, my evidence shows that fiscal health ratios of municipalities improve after initiating state monitoring. Collectively, my results are consistent with state fiscal monitoring improving several important aspects of municipal governance.

This paper proposes a tractable model of the Global Financial Cycle and study its welfare implications for emerging market economies (EMEs). When local firms issue debt denominated in dollars, central banks must increase their policy rate as the U.S. tightens in order to offset balance sheet effects stemming from the depreciation of their currency. When global financial mar- kets are imperfect, this synchronized policy response has negative spillovers: all individual countries seek to attract capital inflows at the expense of one another, exacerbating the Global Financial Cycle. This congestion externality requires further tightening and results in inefficiently low levels of output and employment in EMEs, and generates gains from coordination. On the con- trary, discouraging debt issuance in dollars through macroprudential policy has positive spillovers, and does not necessarily require coordination between EMEs. Its optimal use dampens the Global Financial Cycle and its inefficien- cies.

We introduce a model of dynamic pricing in perishable goods markets with competition and provide conditions for equilibrium uniqueness. Pricing dynamics are rich because both own and competitor scarcity affect future profits. We identify new competitive forces that can lead to misallocation due to selling units too quickly: the Bertrand scarcity trap. We empirically estimate our model using daily prices and bookings for competing U.S. airlines. We compare competitive equilibrium outcomes to those where firms use pricing heuristics based on observed internal pricing rules at a large airline. We find that pricing heuristics increase revenues (4-5%) and consumer surplus (3%).

We investigate an unexplored mechanism of earnings management: income shifting from not-wholly-owned subsidiaries to help the parent company avoid losses at the expense of subsidiaries. Consolidated net income attributable to the parent company (i.e., net income) increases through this mechanism, as the parent company enjoys the full amount of the shifted earnings rather than sharing them with minority investors. We design an empirical model to directly estimate the amount of income shifted from subsidiaries to parent firms. Employing this measure, we find that firms opportunistically decrease earnings of their not-wholly-owned subsidiaries to manage net income upward to avoid losses. The results are stronger for firms with high noncontrolling ownership, firms with large subsidiaries, firms with strong influence over not-wholly-owned subsidiaries, and firms with a high level of related-party transactions. Our results are robust to alternative research designs, including controls for within-firm variations, alternative earnings thresholds, propensity score matching, and entropy balancing techniques. Our mechanism of earnings management is generalizable to other earnings management scenarios, such as share pledging.

Violence against civilians has killed nearly one million people worldwide and displaced
millions more over the past three decades. This paper examines the economic forces driving
civilian persecution in Myanmar. Using a difference-in-differences approach, we show that
violence against civilians increases in rice-suitable townships when rice prices rise, the op-
posite pattern of that documented in the literature on two-sided conflicts. We argue that
large power asymmetries inherent in civilian persecution explain this difference. Higher re-
turns from expropriating rice harvests and rice-growing inputs during these periods drive
the pattern we observe in Myanmar, which we corroborate with an original survey of Ro-
hingya refugees forcibly displaced to Bangladesh. Our work demonstrates how to generate
systematic and representative evidence on civilian persecution in politically sensitive and
data-poor contexts.