Economics Publications
Recent Submissions
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Cheap Money, Geopolitics and Supernormal Backwardation of the WTI Forward Curve
(2023)Financial speculators frequently trade in the most liquid short-tenor contracts. We study repeating patterns of sharply steepening slopes in the WTI forward curve to investigate whether, after controlling for macroeconomic variables, physical market fundamentals, and basic arbitrage, calendar spread behavior is partly explained by speculation related ... -
Information acquisition and provision in school choice: a theoretical investigation
(2022)When participating in school choice, students may incur information acquisition costs to learn about school quality. This paper investigates how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Specifically, we show that only the Immediate Acceptance ... -
Preference Discovery in University Admissions: The Case for Dynamic Multioffer Mechanisms
(2022)We document quasi-experimental evidence against the common assumption in the matching literature that agents have full information on their own preferences. In Germany’s university admissions, the first stages of the Gale-Shapley algorithm are implemented in real time, allowing for multiple offers per student. We demonstrate that nonexploding early ... -
Information acquisition and provision in school choice: a theoretical investigation
(2022)When participating in school choice, students may incur information acquisition costs to learn about school quality. This paper investigates how two popular school choice mechanisms, the (Boston) Immediate Acceptance and the Deferred Acceptance, incentivize students’ information acquisition. Specifically, we show that only the Immediate Acceptance ... -
(Bad) reputation in relational contracting
(2022)Motivated by markets for “expertise,” we study a bandit model where a principal chooses between a safe and risky arm. A strategic agent controls the risky arm and privately knows whether its type is high or low. Irrespective of type, the agent wants to maximize duration of experimentation with the risky arm. However, only the high type arm can generate ... -
Continuous implementation with direct revelation mechanisms
(2022)We investigate how a principal's knowledge of agents' higher-order beliefs impacts their ability to robustly implement a given social choice function. We adapt a formulation of Oury and Tercieux (2012): a social choice function is continuously implementable if it is partially implementable for types in an initial model and “nearby” types. We characterize ... -
Online Multivalid Learning: Means, Moments, and Prediction Intervals
(2022)We present a general, efficient technique for providing contextual predictions that are “multivalid” in various senses, against an online sequence of adversarially chosen examples (x, y). This means that the resulting estimates correctly predict various statistics of the labels y not just marginally –as averaged over the sequence of examples – but ... -
A wavelet method for panel models with jump discontinuities in the parameters
(2022)While a substantial literature on structural break change point analysis exists for univariate time series, research on large panel data models has not been as extensive. In this paper, a novel method for estimating panel models with multiple structural changes is proposed. The breaks are allowed to occur at unknown points in time and may affect the ... -
Race and ethnic minority, local pollution, and COVID-19 deaths in Texas
(2022)The costs of COVID-19 are extensive, and, like the fallout of most health and environmental crises in the US, there is growing evidence that these costs weigh disproportionately on communities of color. We investigated whether county-level racial composition and fine particulate pollution (PM2.5) are indicators for COVID-19 incidence and death rates ... -
Information acquisition and provision in school choice: An experimental study
(2021)When participating in school choice, students often spend substantial effort acquiring information about schools. We investigate how two popular mechanisms incentivize students' information acquisition in the laboratory. While students' willingness to pay for information is significantly greater under the Immediate than the Deferred Acceptance ... -
Conservation, risk aversion, and livestock insurance: The case of the snow leopard
(2021)Livestock insurance consists of livestock owners pooling resources together in order to hedge against the risk of attacks by predators on their individual herds. We use an economic model to study optimal livestock insurance and to discuss its viability in improving outcomes for livestock owners. The benefit from insurance depends on the livestock ... -
The optimal use of management
(2021)We analyze the management input from the perspective of shadow cost minimization. Using Bloom and Van Reenen's management measure, we estimate management's shadow price, dual Morishima elasticities of substitution, and relative price efficiencies. We find that the shadow price of management is about 1.3 million US dollars. Management is a weak dual ... -
Impact of air pollution on human activities: Evidence from nine million mobile phone users
(2021)To measure the effects of air pollution on human activities, this study applies statistical/econometric modeling to hourly data of 9 million mobile phone users from six cities in China’s Zhejiang Province from December 18 to 21, 2013. Under a change in air quality from “Good” (Air Quality Index, or AQI, between 51 and 100) to “Heavily Polluted” (AQI ... -
Private Equity Investments In Health Care: An Overview Of Hospital And Health System Leveraged Buyouts, 2003-17
(2021)Private equity firms have increased their participation in the US health care system, raising questions about incentive alignment and downstream effects on patients. However, there is a lack of systematic characterization of private equity acquisition of short-term acute care hospitals. We present an overview of the scope of private equity–backed ... -
A double-slit experiment with human subjects
(2021)We study a sequence of “double-slit” experiments designed to perform repeated measurements of an attribute in a large pool of subjects using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Our findings contrast the prescriptions of decision theory in novel and interesting ways. The response to an identical sequel measurement of the same attribute can be at significant ... -
Frontiers: Algorithmic Collusion: Supra-competitive Prices via Independent Algorithms
(2021)Motivated by their increasing prevalence, we study outcomes when competing sellers use machine learning algorithms to run real-time dynamic price experiments. These algorithms are often misspecified, ignoring the effect of factors outside their control, for example, competitors’ prices. We show that the long-run prices depend on the informational ... -
Hurricane Risk Assessment of Petroleum Infrastructure in a Changing Climate
(2020)Hurricanes threaten the petroleum industry in the United States and are expected to be influenced by climate change. This study presents an integrated framework for hurricane risk assessment of petroleum infrastructure under changing climatic conditions, calculating risk in terms of monetary loss. Variants of two synthetic probabilistic storms and ... -
Frontier efficiency, capital structure, and portfolio risk: An empirical analysis of U.S. banks
(2018)Firm’ ability to effectively allocate capital and manage risks is the essence of their production and performance. This study investigated the relationship between capital structure, portfolio risk levels and firm performance using a large sample of U.S. banks from 2001 to 2016. Stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) was used to construct a frontier to ...
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