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- 2024
- Working Paper
Behavioral Attenuation
By: Thomas Graeber, Benjamin Enke, Ryan Oprea and Jeffrey Yang
We report a large-scale examination of behavioral attenuation: due to information-processing constraints, the elasticity of people’s decisions with respect to economic fundamentals is generally too small. We implement more than 30 experiments, 20 of which were... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Learning Under Random Distributional Shifts
By: Kirk Bansak, Elisabeth Paulson and Dominik Rothenhäusler
Algorithmic assignment of refugees and asylum seekers to locations within host
countries has gained attention in recent years, with implementations in the U.S.
and Switzerland. These approaches use data on past arrivals to generate machine
learning models that can... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
Political Elite Cues and Attitude Formation in Post-Conflict Contexts
By: Natalia Garbiras-Díaz, Miguel Garcia-Sanchez and Aila M. Matanock
Civil conflicts typically end with negotiated settlements, but many settlements fail, often during the implementation stage when average citizens have increasing influence. Citizens sometimes evaluate peace agreements by voting on referendums or the negotiating... View Details
Keywords: Civil Unrest; Peace Process; Political Leadership; Peace; Politics; Policy Change; Policy; Government and Politics; Government Administration; Governance; Political Elections; Civil Society or Community; Negotiation; Negotiation Participants; Public Relations Industry; Colombia; Latin America; South America
- 2024
- Working Paper
Voting Rules, Turnout, and Economic Policies
By: Enrico Cantoni, Vincent Pons and Jérôme Schäfer
In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Smaller than We Thought? The Effect of Automatic Savings Policies
By: James J. Choi, David Laibson, Jordan Cammarota, Richard Lombardo and John Beshears
Medium- and long-run dynamics undermine the effect of automatic enrollment and default savings-rate auto-escalation on retirement savings. Our analysis of 401(k) plans incorporates the facts that employees frequently leave firms (often before matching contributions... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Consequences of Export Controls in Target Countries
By: Xueyue Liu, Yu Liu and Jaya Y. Wen
Export controls are a common instrument of national security, but their economic consequences
are not well understood. This paper evaluates how these controls affect firm performance
and adaptation in targeted countries. We use variation in a 2007 US policy,... View Details
- August 2024
- Article
The Labor Market Effects of Loan Guarantee Programs
By: Jean-Noël Barrot, Thorsten Martin, Julien Sauvagnat and Boris Vallée
We investigate the labor market effects of a loan guarantee program targeting French SMEs during the financial crisis. Exploiting differences in regional treatment intensity in a border discontinuity design, we uncover a central trade-off for such interventions. While... View Details
- July 2024 (Revised January 2025)
- Case
Dynamic Pricing at Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef?
By: Elie Ofek, Alicia Dadlani and Martha Hostetter
In early 2024, Wendy’s new CEO announced on an earnings call that the company would install digital menus in its US locations so it could begin testing dynamic pricing—changing prices up or down in response to shifts in supply and demand – as well as allow engaging in... View Details
- 2024
- Chapter
Broadening Ownership for a Responsible Digital Revolution
By: Nien-hê Hsieh
The chapter explores how broadening ownership of business enterprises provides a response to three concerns raised by the digital revolution. The first is the potential for widespread job displacement and unemployment due to automation. The second relates to the harms... View Details
- July–August 2024
- Article
Doing More with Less: Overcoming Ineffective Long-Term Targeting Using Short-Term Signals
By: Ta-Wei Huang and Eva Ascarza
Firms are increasingly interested in developing targeted interventions for customers with the best response,
which requires identifying differences in customer sensitivity, typically through the conditional average treatment
effect (CATE) estimation. In theory, to... View Details
- July 2024
- Article
The Home State Effect: How Subnational Governments Shape Climate Coalitions
By: Jonas Meckling and Samuel Trachtman
Organized business interests often seek to block public interest regulations. But whether firms oppose regulation depends on institutional context. We argue that, in federal systems, sub-national policies and politics can have a home state effect on firms' national... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Webmunk: A New Tool for Studying Online Behavior and Digital Platforms
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin and Chris Karr
Understanding the behavior of users online is important for researchers, policymakers, and private companies alike. But observing online behavior and conducting experiments is difficult without direct access to the user base and software of technology companies. We... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
What Makes Players Pay? An Empirical Investigation of In-Game Lotteries
By: Tomomichi Amano and Andrey Simonov
In 2020, gamers spent more than $15 billion on loot boxes, lotteries of virtual items in video
games. Paid loot boxes are contentious. Game producers argue that loot boxes complement
the gameplay and expenditures on loot boxes reflect players’ enjoyment of the game.... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Personalization and Targeting: How to Experiment, Learn & Optimize
By: Aurelie Lemmens, Jason M.T. Roos, Sebastian Gabel, Eva Ascarza, Hernan Bruno, Elea McDonnell Feit, Brett Gordon, Ayelet Israeli, Carl F. Mela and Oded Netzer
Personalization has become the heartbeat of modern marketing. Advances in causal inference and machine learning enable companies to understand how the same marketing action can impact the choices of individual customers differently. This article provides an academic... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
The Value of AI Innovations
By: Wilbur Xinyuan Chen, Terrence Tianshuo Shi and Suraj Srinivasan
We study the value of AI innovations as it diffuses across general and application sectors, using the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) AI patent dataset. Investors value these innovations more than others, as AI patents exhibit a 9% value premium,... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
LASH Risk and Interest Rates
By: Laura Alfaro, Saleem Bahaj, Robert Czech, Jonathan Hazell and Ioana Neamtu
We introduce a framework to understand and quantify a form of liquidity risk that we dub Liquidity After Solvency Hedging or “LASH” risk. Financial institutions take LASH risk when they hedge against losses, using strategies that lead to liquidity needs when the value... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Immigrant Entrepreneurship: New Estimates and a Research Agenda
By: Saheel Chodavadia, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr and Louis Maiden
Immigrants contribute disproportionately to entrepreneurship in many countries, accounting for a quarter of new employer businesses in the US. We review recent research on the measurement of immigrant entrepreneurship, the traits of immigrant founders, their economic... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Old Moats for New Models: Openness, Control, and Competition in Generative AI
By: Pierre Azoulay, Joshua L. Krieger and Abhishek Nagaraj
Drawing insights from the field of innovation economics, we discuss the likely competitive environment shaping generative AI advances. Central to our analysis are the concepts of appropriability—whether firms in the industry are able to control the knowledge generated... View Details
- 18 Apr 2024
- Lecture
Innovation Opportunities Created by COVID-19 Can Help: And How to Make Them Happen
The crush of patients created by COVID enabled the creation of sites for care outside the traditional hospital, such as retail pharmacies, ambulatory surgery centers, urgent care centers, telemedicine, and wireless sensors. Public policy mirrored these changes by... View Details
- Spring 2024
- Other Article
Introduction: International Innovation & American Challenges
By: William C. Kirby
While the United States remains a leader in higher education, the largest systems of higher education today are in India and China, and new colleges and universities spread across the world have become the leading sites of ambitious experimentation.
What are... View Details
What are... View Details