Publications

2015
Working Paper

The Probability of Rare Disasters: Estimation and Implications

By: Emil Siriwardane

I analyze a rare disasters economy that yields a measure of the risk neutral probability of a macroeconomic disaster, p*t. A large panel of options data provides strong evidence that p*t is the single factor driving option-implied jump risk measures in the cross... View Details

Keywords: Financial Markets; Forecasting and Prediction; Financial Crisis; Macroeconomics

SSRN

Article

Online and Official Price Indexes: Measuring Argentina's Inflation

By: Alberto Cavallo

Prices collected from online retailers can be used to construct daily price indexes that complement official statistics. This paper studies their ability to match official inflation estimates in five Latin American countries, with a focus on Argentina, where official... View Details

Keywords: Inflation; Online Price Index; Economics; Macroeconomics; Inflation and Deflation; Price; Latin America; Argentina

November 2012
Article

The Variance of Non-Parametric Treatment Effect Estimators in the Presence of Clustering

By: Samuel G. Hanson and Adi Sunderam

Non-parametric estimators of treatment effects are often applied in settings where clustering may be important. We provide a general methodology for consistently estimating the variance of a large class of non-parametric estimators, including the simple matching... View Details

Keywords: Treatment Effects; Matching Estimators; Clustering; Applications and Software; Mathematical Methods

Article

Advertising, the Matchmaker

By: Bharat N. Anand and Ron Shachar

We empirically study the informational role of advertising in matching consumers with products when consumers are uncertain about both observable and unobserved program attributes. Our focus is on the network television industry, in which the products are television... View Details

Keywords: Advertising; Information; Consumer Behavior; Television Entertainment; Risk and Uncertainty; Product; Decision Choices and Conditions; Advertising Industry

2010
Chapter

The Impact of Employer Matching on Savings Plan Participation under Automatic Enrollment

By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian

Existing research has documented the large impact that automatic enrollment has on savings plan participation. All the companies examined in these studies, however, have combined automatic enrollment with an employer match. This raises a question about how effective... View Details

Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Consumer Behavior; Personal Finance; Investment Funds; Microeconomics; Compensation and Benefits

2008
Working Paper

A Replication Study of Alan Blinder's 'How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?'

By: Troy Smith and Jan W. Rivkin

In a 2007 working paper, Alan Blinder assessed the "offshorability" of hundreds of U.S. occupations and estimated that between 22% and 29% of all U.S. jobs were potentially offshorable. This note reports the results of an exercise in which members of Harvard Business... View Details

Keywords: Job Cuts and Outsourcing; Wages; Research; United States

Research Summary

Credit Supply Shocks, Network Effects, and the Real Economy

By: Laura Alfaro

We consider the real effects of bank lending shocks and how they permeate the economy through buyer-supplier linkages. We combine administrative data on all firms in Spain with a matched bank-firm-loan dataset with information on the universe of corporate loans for... View Details

Forthcoming
Article

No Line Left Behind: Assortative Matching Inside the Firm

By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Vittorio Bassi, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo

How do firms pair workers with managers, and which constraints affect the allocation of labor within the firm? We characterize the sorting pattern of managers to workers in a large readymade garment manufacturer in India and then explore potential drivers of the... View Details

Keywords: Assortative Matching; Productivity; Global Buyers; Readymade Garments; Labor; Organizational Design; Performance Productivity; Fashion Industry