Publications

There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the... View Details

15 May 2009
Working Paper Summaries

Money or Knowledge? What Drives Demand for Financial Services in Emerging Markets?

Keywords: by Shawn Cole, Thomas Sampson & Bilal Zia; Financial Services

Article

Optimal Taxation When Children's Abilities Depend on Parents' Resources

By: Alexander Gelber and Matthew Weinzierl

Empirical research suggests that parents' economic resources affect their children's future earnings abilities. Optimal tax policy therefore treats future ability distributions as endogenous to current taxes. We model this endogeneity, calibrate the model to match... View Details

Keywords: Taxation; Family and Family Relationships; Welfare

2009
Other Unpublished Work

Choice-based Measures of Conflict in Preferences

By: Katherine Baldiga and Jerry R. Green

We propose a family of measures of difference between ordinal preference relations. The difference between two preferences is the probability that they would disagree about the optimal choice from a random available set. It is in this sense that these measures are... View Details

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Measurement and Metrics; Mathematical Methods; Conflict of Interests; Welfare

Research Summary

Bricks and Clicks: The Effect of Store Assortment on E-tail Format (with R. Lal and E. Ofek)

An often neglected aspect in existing studies of the Internet selling process is the high volume of product returns. Such returns reflect a major logistic expenditure on behalf of companies that sell over the net. The problem is reduced when consumers shop in physical... View Details

April 1995 (Revised July 1997)
Case

General Instrument (A)

A manufacturer of cable TV transmission equipment is faced with redesigning its network of international plants that make set-top converters and decoders. One possibility is to have each plant dedicated to manufacturing and engineering support for different product... View Details

Keywords: Technology; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Manufacturing Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry

Purchase

July 2024
Article

Buying the Verdict

By: Lauren Cohen and Umit Gurun

We document evidence that firms systematically increase specialized, locally targeted advertising following the firm being taken to trial in that given location, precisely following initiation of the suit. In particular, we use legal actions brought against publicly... View Details

Keywords: Lawsuits and Litigation; Advertising; Marketing Strategy

Article

Memory and Representativeness

By: Pedro Bordalo, Katherine Baldiga Coffman, Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Andrei Shleifer

We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i)... View Details

Keywords: Cued Recall; Interference; Similarity; Probabilistic Judgments; Heuristics And Biases

10 Aug 2017
News

Ideal Beauty: An Imagined State of Mind

02 Nov 2016
News

When You Feel Pressured to Do the Wrong Thing at Work

September 2016 (Revised October 2018)
Case

LabCDMX: Experiment 50

By: Mitchell Weiss and Maria Fernanda Miguel

There were probably 30,000 public buses, minibuses, and vans in Mexico City. Though, in 2015, no one knew for certain since no comprehensive schedule existed. This was why el Laboratorio para la Ciudad (or LabCDMX) had spawned an effort to generate a map of the... View Details

Keywords: Public Entrepreneurship; Experimentation; Lean Startup; Government; Innovation; Crowdsourcing; Open Data; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Innovation and Invention; Innovation Leadership; Government Administration; Transportation; Transportation Industry; Mexico City; Mexico

Purchase

2016
Working Paper

Bias in Official Fiscal Forecasts: Can Private Forecasts Help?

By: Jeffrey A. Frankel and Jesse Schreger

Government forecasts of GDP growth and budget balances are generally more over optimistic than private sector forecasts. When official forecasts are especially optimistic relative to private forecasts ex ante, they are more likely also to be over optimistic relative to... View Details

Keywords: Forecasting and Prediction; Macroeconomics

September 2004 (Revised January 2006)
Case

Catastrophe Bonds at Swiss Re

In 2002, Swiss Re, the world's second--largest insurance company, is considering securitizing parts of its risk portfolio in the capital markets. This would be a first for the company that, until then, had never transferred risk off its balance sheet. Peter Giessmann,... View Details

Keywords: Risk Management; Bonds; Natural Disasters; Insurance; Capital Markets; Banks and Banking; Banking Industry; Insurance Industry; Switzerland

Purchase

January 2021
Case

The FIRE Savings Calculator

By: Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton

This case follows Carol Muñoz, a member of the Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) lifestyle movement. At the age of 45, Carol is considering retiring and living off the $1 million she has accumulated. Using Monte Carlo simulation, Carol forecasts the... View Details

Keywords: Analysis; Forecasting and Prediction; Financial Strategy; Investment Portfolio; Investment Return; Personal Finance; Saving; Risk and Uncertainty; Diversification; Theory; Personal Development and Career; Financial Services Industry

2021
Working Paper

Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data

By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael

We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to... View Details

Keywords: Fintech Lending; Alternative Data; Machine Learning; Algorithm Bias; Finance; Information Technology; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Credit

May 28, 2018
Article

How Companies Can Identify Racial and Gender Bias in Their Customer Service

By: Alexandra C. Feldberg and Tami Kim

Research shows that minority customers — blacks and Asians — regularly receive worse customer service than whites in ways that are not immediately obvious to onlookers (or even managers). These results prompt a couple of questions for executives and managers. One, does... View Details

Keywords: Internal Audit; Customers; Service Delivery; Prejudice and Bias; Race; Gender; Organizational Change and Adaptation

Article

Risk and the Cross-Section of Stock Returns

By: Mark Seasholes, Radu Burlacu, Patrice Fontaine and Sonia Jimenez-Garces

This paper mathematically transforms unobservable rational expectation equilibrium model parameters (information precision and supply uncertainty) into a single variable that is correlated with expected returns and that can be estimated with recently observed data. Our... View Details

Keywords: Risk Premiums; Cross-sectional Asset Pricing; REE Models; Risk and Uncertainty; Asset Pricing; Investment Return

2022
Working Paper

The Transformation of Self Employment

By: Innessa Colaiacovo, Margaret Dalton, Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

Over the past half-century, while self-employment has consistently accounted for around one in ten of the United States workforce, its composition has changed. Since 1970, industries with high startup capital requirements have declined from 53% of self-employment to... View Details

Keywords: Self-employment; Startup Investment; Occupational Choice; Financing; Small Business; Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Financing and Loans

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