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- 2025
- Working Paper
Extractive Taxation and the French Revolution
By: Tommaso Giommoni, Gabriel Loumeau and Marco Tabellini
We study the fiscal determinants of the French Revolution, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the salt tax—a large source of royal revenues and one of the most extractive forms of taxation of the Ancien Régime. Implementing a Regression Discontinuity... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Generative AI and the Nature of Work
By: Manuel Hoffmann, Sam Boysel, Frank Nagle, Sida Peng and Kevin Xu
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) technology demonstrate a considerable potential
to complement human capital intensive activities. While an emerging literature documents wide-ranging
productivity effects of AI, relatively little attention has been paid... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Anytime-Valid Inference in Linear Models and Regression-Adjusted Causal Inference
By: Michael Lindon, Dae Woong Ham, Martin Tingley and Iavor I. Bojinov
Linear regression adjustment is commonly used to analyze randomized controlled experiments due to its efficiency and robustness against model misspecification. Current testing and interval estimation procedures leverage the asymptotic distribution of such estimators to... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Coordination and Bandwagon Effects: How Past Rankings Shape the Behavior of Voters and Candidates
By: Riako Granzier, Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
Candidates’ placements in polls or past elections can be powerful coordination devices for both parties and voters. Using a regression discontinuity design in French elections, we show that candidates who place first by only a small margin in the first round are more... View Details
- October 2023
- Article
Innovation on Wings: When Do Nonstop Flights Matter for Global Innovation?
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Do Yoon Kim and Wesley Koo
We study whether, when, and how better connectivity through nonstop flights leads to positive innovation outcomes for firms in the global context. Using unique data of all flights emanating from 5,015 airports around the globe from 2005 to 2015 and exploiting a... View Details
- 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
Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during U.S. and French Elections
By: Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons
A key tenet of representative democracy is that politicians' discourse and policies should follow voters' preferences. In the median voter theorem, this outcome emerges as candidates strategically adjust their platform to get closer to their opponent. Despite its... View Details
- 2023
- Article
Exploiting Discovered Regression Discontinuities to Debias Conditioned-on-observable Estimators
By: Benjamin Jakubowski, Siram Somanchi, Edward McFowland III and Daniel B. Neill
Regression discontinuity (RD) designs are widely used to estimate causal effects in the absence of a randomized experiment. However, standard approaches to RD analysis face two significant limitations. First, they require a priori knowledge of discontinuities in... View Details
- May–June 2023
- Article
Need for Speed: The Impact of In-Process Delays on Customer Behavior in Online Retail
By: Santiago Gallino, Nil Karacaoglu and Antonio Moreno
The impact of delays has been widely studied in various offline services. The focus of this study is online services, and we explore the impact of in-process delays—measured by website speed—on customer behavior. We leverage novel retail and website speed data to... View Details
- March–April 2023
- Article
Market Segmentation Trees
By: Ali Aouad, Adam Elmachtoub, Kris J. Ferreira and Ryan McNellis
Problem definition: We seek to provide an interpretable framework for segmenting users in a population for personalized decision making. Methodology/results: We propose a general methodology, market segmentation trees (MSTs), for learning market... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Coordination and Incumbency Advantage in Multi-Party Systems: Evidence from French Elections
By: Kevin Dano, Francesco Ferlenga, Vincenzo Galasso, Caroline Le Pennec and Vincent Pons
In theory, free and fair elections can improve the selection of politicians and incentivize them to exert effort. In practice, incumbency advantage and coordination issues may lead to the (re)election of bad politicians. We ask whether these two forces compound each... View Details
- September 2022
- Article
The Impact of Financial Assistance Programs on Health Care Utilization: Evidence from Kaiser Permanente
By: Alyce S. Adams, Raymond Kluender, Neale Mahoney, Jinglin Wang, Francis Wong and Wesley Yin
Most hospitals have financial assistance programs for low-income patients. We use administrative data from Kaiser Permanente to study the effects of financial assistance on health care utilization. Using a regression discontinuity design based on an income threshold... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Innovation on Wings: Nonstop Flights and Firm Innovation in the Global Context
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, Do Yoon Kim and Wesley W. Koo
We study whether, when, and how better connectivity through nonstop flights leads to positive innovation outcomes for firms in the global context. Using unique data of all flights emanating from 5,015 airports around the globe from 2005 to 2015 and exploiting a... View Details
- Article
How Much Should We Trust Staggered Difference-In-Differences Estimates?
By: Andrew C. Baker, David F. Larcker and Charles C.Y. Wang
We explain when and how staggered difference-in-differences regression estimators, commonly applied to assess the impact of policy changes, are biased. These biases are likely to be relevant for a large portion of research settings in finance, accounting, and law that... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
Electoral Turnovers
By: Benjamin Marx, Vincent Pons and Vincent Rollet
In most national elections, voters face a key choice between continuity and change. Electoral turnovers occur when the incumbent candidate or party fails to win reelection. To understand how turnovers affect national outcomes, we study the universe of presidential and... View Details
- 2022
- Working Paper
The Impact of Campaign Finance Rules on Candidate Selection and Electoral Outcomes: Evidence from France
By: Nikolaj Broberg, Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
This paper investigates the effects of campaign finance rules on electoral outcomes. In French departmental and municipal elections, candidates competing in districts above 9,000 inhabitants face spending limits and are eligible for public reimbursement if they obtain... View Details
- 2019
- Article
Big Data
By: John A. Deighton
Big data is defined and distinguished from a mere moment in the “ancient quest to measure.” Specific discontinuities in the practice of information science are identified that, the paper argues, have large consequences for the social order. The infrastructure that runs... View Details
- September 2018
- Article
Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence from Runoffs with Two or Three Candidates
By: Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence from Runoffs with Two or Three Candidates
By: Vincent Pons and Clémence Tricaud
In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD... View Details
- March 2017
- Article
Institutional Ownership and Corporate Tax Avoidance: New Evidence
By: Mozaffar N. Khan, Suraj Srinivasan and Liang Tan
We provide new evidence on the agency theory of corporate tax avoidance (Slemrod, 2004; Crocker and Slemrod, 2005; Chen and Chu, 2005) by showing that increases in institutional ownership are associated with increases in tax avoidance. Using the Russell index... View Details