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- April 2025
- Article
Serving with a Smile on Airbnb: Analyzing the Economic Returns and Behavioral Underpinnings of the Host’s Smile
By: Shunyuan Zhang, Elizabeth Friedman, Kannan Srinivasan, Ravi Dhar and Xupin Zhang
Non-informational cues, such as facial expressions, can significantly influence judgments and interpersonal impressions. While past research has explored how smiling affects business outcomes in offline or in-store contexts, relatively less is known about how smiling... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Blockchain Adoption and Audit Quality
By: Mei Luo, Daniel Rabetti and Shuangchen Yu
This study examines the impact of blockchain adoption in the corporate setting. Specifically, we provide comprehensive empirical support to recent theory (Cao, Cong, and Young, 2024) proposing that blockchain adoption positively affects endogenous audit quality and... View Details
- February 2025
- Article
Sale of Private Equity–Owned Physician Practices and Physician Turnover
By: Victoria Berquist, Lev Klarnet and Leemore Dafny
Private equity (PE) ownership of physician practices is increasing, with owners targeting sales, or exits, in 3 to 7 years. Little is known about the association of exit with physician retention and subsequent employment. Using panel data over the period 2014-2020, we... View Details
- November–December 2024
- Article
Loss of Peers and Individual Worker Performance: Evidence From H-1B Visa Denials
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Kirk Doran, Astrid Marinoni and Chungeun Yoon
We study how restrictive immigration policies that result in the unexpected loss of co-workers affect the performance of skilled migrants employed in organizations. Specifically, we examine the impact of the loss of team members on their co-workers’ performance in... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
How Do Global Portfolio Investors Hedge Currency Risk?
By: Robin Greenwood and Alex Cheema-Fox
We use monthly portfolio data from one of the world’s largest custodian banks, with over $40 trillion assets under custody, to study how global portfolio investors hedge foreign exchange risk in their equity and fixed income portfolios over the past 25 years. The data... View Details
- October 2024 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
SWEN Blue Ocean: Impact Investing Goes to Sea
By: Vikram S Gandhi and David Allen
In August 2023, SWEN Blue Ocean, a €170 million impact fund that invested in startups contributing to ocean sustainability, faced a critical investment decision. Part of SWEN Capital Partners, an €8 billion, Paris-based private equity fund, Blue Ocean was co-founded in... View Details
- September–October 2024
- Article
Where Data-Driven Decision-Making Can Go Wrong
By: Michael Luca and Amy C. Edmondson
When considering internal data or the results of a study, often business leaders either take the evidence presented as gospel or dismiss it altogether. Both approaches are misguided. What leaders need to do instead is conduct rigorous discussions that assess any... View Details
- July, 2024
- Article
Consumer Protection in an Online World: An Analysis of Occupational Licensing
By: Chiara Farronato, Andrey Fradkin, Bradley Larsen and Erik Brynjolfsson
We study the demand and supply implications of occupational licensing using transaction-level data from a large online platform for home improvement services. We find that demand is more responsive to a professional's reviews than to the professional's... 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
- April 2024
- Article
A Machine Learning Algorithm Predicting Risk of Dilating VUR among Infants with Hydronephrosis Using UTD Classification
By: Hsin-Hsiao Scott Wang, Michael Lingzhi Li, Dylan Cahill, John Panagides, Tanya Logvinenko, Jeanne Chow and Caleb Nelson
Backgrounds: Urinary Tract Dilation (UTD) classification has been designed to be a more objective grading system to evaluate antenatal and post-natal UTD. Due to unclear association between UTD classifications to specific anomalies such as vesico-ureteral reflux (VUR),... View Details
- Working Paper
Visual Uniqueness in Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: Machine Learning Model Development, Validation, and Application
By: Flora Feng, Charis Li and Shunyuan Zhang
Peer-to-peer (P2P) marketplaces have seen exponential growth in recent years featured by unique offerings from individual providers. Despite the perceived value of uniqueness, scalable quantification of visual uniqueness in P2P platforms like Airbnb has been largely... View Details
- November 2023
- Article
Algorithmic Mechanism Design with Investment
By: Mohammad Akbarpour, Scott Duke Kominers, Kevin Michael Li, Shengwu Li and Paul Milgrom
We study the investment incentives created by truthful mechanisms that allocate resources using approximation algorithms. Some approximation algorithms guarantee nearly 100% of the optimal welfare, but have only a zero guarantee when one bidder can invest before... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Which Models Have Perceptually-Aligned Gradients? An Explanation via Off-Manifold Robustness
By: Suraj Srinivas, Sebastian Bordt and Himabindu Lakkaraju
One of the remarkable properties of robust computer vision models is that their input-gradients are often aligned with human perception, referred to in the literature as perceptually-aligned gradients (PAGs). Despite only being trained for classification, PAGs cause... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Healthcare Provider Bankruptcies
By: Samuel Antill, Ashvin Gandhi, Jessica Bai and Adrienne Sabety
Healthcare firms are filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy at record rates. We find that bankruptcies increase healthcare staff turnover, worsen care, and harm patients. Using a difference-in-differences design, we estimate that a bankruptcy filing immediately increases... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
Words Can Hurt: How Political Communication Can Change the Pace of an Epidemic
By: Jessica Gagete-Miranda, Lucas Argentieri Mariani and Paula Rettl
While elite-cue effects on public opinion are well-documented, questions remain as
to when and why voters use elite cues to inform their opinions and behaviors. Using
experimental and observational data from Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic, we
study how leader... View Details
Keywords: Elites; Public Engagement; Politics; Political Affiliation; Political Campaigns; Political Influence; Political Leadership; Political Economy; Survey Research; COVID-19; COVID-19 Pandemic; COVID; Cognitive Psychology; Cognitive Biases; Political Elections; Voting; Power and Influence; Identity; Behavior; Latin America; Brazil
- August 2023
- Article
Formal Employment and Organized Crime: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Colombia
By: Gaurav Khanna, Carlos Medina, Anant Nyshadham, Jorge Tamayo and Nicolas Torres
Safety net programs, common in settings with high informality like Latin America, often use a means test to establish eligibility. We ask: in settings in which organised crime provides lucrative opportunities in the informal market, will discouraging formal employment... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
How People Use Statistics
By: Pedro Bordalo, John J. Conlon, Nicola Gennaioli, Spencer Yongwook Kwon and Andrei Shleifer
We document two new facts about the distributions of answers in famous statistical problems: they are i) multi-modal and ii) unstable with respect to irrelevant changes in the problem. We offer a model in which, when solving a problem, people represent each hypothesis... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Complexity of Economic Decisions
By: Xavier Gabaix and Thomas Graeber
We propose a theory of the complexity of economic decisions. Leveraging a macroeconomic framework of production functions, we conceptualize the mind as a cognitive economy, where a task’s complexity is determined by its composition of cognitive operations. Complexity... View Details
- February 2023
- Article
Disruption and Credit Markets
By: Bo Becker and Victoria Ivashina
We show that over the past half century innovative disruptions were central to understanding corporate defaults. In a given year, industries experiencing abnormally high VC or IPO activity subsequently see higher default rates, higher segment exits by conglomerates,... View Details
- 2022
- Article
The Pricing and Ownership of U.S. Green Bonds
By: Malcolm Baker, Daniel Bergstresser, George Serafeim and Jeffrey Wurgler
We study green bonds, which are bonds whose proceeds are used for environmentally sensitive purposes. After an overview of the U.S. corporate and municipal green bonds markets, we study pricing and ownership patterns using a simple framework that incorporates assets... View Details
Keywords: Green Bond; Pricing; Climate Finance; ESG; SRI; Sustainable; Municipal; Bonds; Environmental Sustainability; Financial Markets; Price; Ownership; United States