Publications
Publications
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- Faculty Publications (179)
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- 2025
- Working Paper
The Limits of Insurance Demand and the Growing Protection Gap
By: Parinitha Sastry, Tess Scharlemann, Ishita Sen and Ana-Maria Tenekedjieva
In a world with rising risk, how much are U.S. households willing to pay for homeowners insurance, and what does their demand imply for the future of insurance markets? We provide the first estimates of household willingness to pay for homeowners insurance and the... View Details
- March 2025
- Case
Silicon Valley Bank: Gone in 36 Hours
This case examines factors contributing to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in March 2023, an event as unpredicted as it was quick. SVB funded nearly half of all U.S. venture-backed startups and at the end of 2022 held $173 billion in deposits, largely... View Details
Keywords: Accounting Standards; Bank Runs; Financial Accounting; Financial Reporting; Social Media; Banks and Banking; Financing and Loans; Investment Portfolio; Interest Rates; Debt Securities; Risk and Uncertainty; Financial Statements; Risk Management; Failure; Fair Value Accounting; Credit; Corporate Governance; Financial Services Industry; Banking Industry; United States
- March 2025
- Article
Optimal Illiquidity
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, Christopher Clayton, Christopher Harris, David Laibson and Brigitte C. Madrian
We study the socially optimal level of illiquidity in an economy populated by households with taste shocks and present bias with naive beliefs. The government chooses mandatory contributions to accounts, each with a different pre-retirement withdrawal penalty.... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Turning Away from the State: Trade Shocks and Informal Insurance in Brazil
By: Paula Rettl
How does economic globalization affect vote choices? Conventional wisdom holds that voters who lose from economic integration support parties that propose expanding the welfare state. However, in the Global South, where the state is frequently weak or under-resourced,... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Tax Planning, Illiquidity, and Credit Risks: Evidence from DeFi Lending
By: Lisa De Simone, Peiyi Jin and Daniel Rabetti
This study establishes a plausible causal link between tax-planning-induced illiquidity and credit risks in lending markets. Exploiting an exogenous tax shock imposed by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on cryptocurrency gains, along with millions of transactions in... View Details
- December 2024
- Article
Large Shocks Travel Fast
By: Alberto Cavallo, Francesco Lippi and Ken Miyahara
We document a sizeable increase in the frequency of price adjustments following the large energy shocks of 2022. We use a tractable New Keynesian model, calibrated to the pre-shock data, to interpret such a pattern. The calibration highlights the state-dependence of... View Details
- 2024
- Article
Supply and Demand and the Term Structure of Interest Rates
By: Robin Greenwood, Samuel Hanson and Dimitri Vayanos
We survey the growing literature emphasizing the role that supply-and-demand forces play in shaping the term structure of interest rates. Our starting point is the Vayanos and Vila (2009, 2021) model of the term structure of default-free bond yields, which we present... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Foreign Influence in U.S. Politics
By: Marco Grotteria, Max Miller and S. Lakshmi Naaraayanan
This paper investigates the informational role of lobbyists in the context of foreign lobbying in the United States. Using Department of Justice data on contacts between foreign governments and US legislators, we show that exogenous shocks to these connections... View Details
- October 2024
- Article
Founder-CEO Compensation and Selection into Venture Capital-Backed Entrepreneurship
By: Michael Ewens, Ramana Nanda and Christopher Stanton
We show theoretically that a critical determinant of the attractiveness of VC-backed entrepreneurship for high-earning potential founders is the expected time to develop a startup’s initial product. This is because founder-CEOs’ cash compensation increases... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Markups and Cost Pass-through Along the Supply Chain
By: Santiago Alvarez-Blaser, Alberto Cavallo, Alexander MacKay and Paolo Mengano
We study markups and pricing strategies along the supply chain. Our unique dataset combines detailed price and cost information from a large global manufacturer with matched retail prices collected online for the period July 2018 through June 2023. We show that total... View Details
- September 2024
- Article
Investing in the Next Generation: The Long-Run Impacts of a Liquidity Shock
By: Patrick Agte, Arielle Bernhardt, Erica M. Field, Rohini Pande and Natalia Rigol
How do poor entrepreneurs trade off investments in business enterprises versus children's human capital, and how do these choices influence intergenerational socio-economic mobility? To examine this, we exploit experimental variation in household income resulting from... View Details
- August 2024 (Revised November 2024)
- Case
No Labels and the 2024 Presidential Insurance Plan
By: Robert F. White and Tom Quinn
After observing record voter dissatisfaction with the choices in the 2024 U.S. presidential election—Democratic nominee President Joe Biden and Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump—the bipartisan nonprofit No Labels decided to reserve ballot access in... View Details
- August, 2024
- Article
Absenteeism, Productivity, and Relational Contracts Inside the Firm
By: Achyuta Adhvaryu, Jean-François Gauthier, Anant Nyshadham and Jorge Tamayo
We study relational contracts among managers using a unique dataset that tracks transfers of workers across teams in Indian ready-made garment factories. We focus on how relational contracts help managers cope with worker absenteeism shocks, which are frequent, often... View Details
- Working Paper
The Returns to Skills During the Pandemic: Experimental Evidence from Uganda
By: Livia Alfonsi, Vittorio Bassi, Imran Rasul and Elena Spadini
The Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most significant labor market shocks to the world economy in recent times. We present evidence from a field experiment to understand whether and why skilled and unskilled workers were differentially impacted by the shock, in... View Details
- June 2024
- Case
SnapTravel: Betting on 'Super.com'
By: Reza Satchu and Tom Quinn
This case explores SnapTravel, a travel startup offering discounted hotel rooms, and its founders’ desire to pivot to a “super app” that saved customers money across many different purchase types. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hussein Fazal and Henry Shi saw SnapTravel... View Details
Keywords: Business Growth and Maturation; Business Plan; Business Startups; Change Management; Disruption; Transformation; Volatility; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Decisions; Income; Entrepreneurship; Geographic Scope; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Health Pandemics; Surveys; Knowledge Acquisition; Knowledge Use and Leverage; Leading Change; Crisis Management; Goals and Objectives; Risk Management; Consumer Behavior; Game Theory; Risk and Uncertainty; Adaptation; Diversification; Expansion; System Shocks; Accommodations Industry; Technology Industry; Canada; United States; Las Vegas
- 2024
- Working Paper
Dusting Off the Old Ones: Drug Licensing to Startups, Innovation Success and Efficiency
By: Mosab Hammoudeh, Joshua Lev Krieger and Jiajie Xu
This paper investigates whether moving R&D from incumbents to startups can increase innovation. Using comprehensive drug development data, we examine the outcomes of drug projects licensed from large firms to startups. We find that these projects licensed to startups... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Does the Case for Private Equity Still Hold?
By: Nori Gerardo Lietz and Philipp Chvanov
Private Equity (“PE”) received a 10-fold increase in capital flows since the Great Financial Crisis (“GFC”) Investors sought higher nominal returns relative to those they could obtain in the public capital markets. This paper questions the fundamental assumptions... View Details
- April–May 2024
- Article
Gone with the Big Data: Institutional Lender Demand for Private Information
By: Jung Koo Kang
I explore whether big-data sources can crowd out the value of private information acquired through lending relationships. Institutional lenders have been shown to exploit their access to borrowers’ private information by trading on it in financial markets. As a shock... View Details
- 2025
- Working Paper
Precautionary Debt Capacity
By: Deniz Aydin and Olivia S. Kim
The determinants of debt capacity are a central theme in finance and macroeconomics, yet it remains unclear why firms leave some of their debt capacity unused and whether this affects investment and growth. Textbook theory suggests that firms should not leave their... View Details
- January 2024
- Case
Flashfood: The Magic of Commitment
By: Reza Satchu and Patrick Sanguineti
Josh Domingues had accomplished what countless young entrepreneurs long to achieve: founding a promising company that aspires to make the world a tangibly better place. Shocked to learn that international food waste cumulatively amounted to the world’s third largest... View Details