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  • September 16, 2022
  • Article

A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties
By: Karthik Rajkumar, Guillaume Saint-Jacques, Iavor I. Bojinov, Erik Brynjolfsson and Sinan Aral
The authors analyzed data from multiple large-scale randomized experiments on LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to LinkedIn members, to test the extent to which weak ties increased job mobility in the world’s largest...  View Details
Keywords: Job Mobility; Social Networks; Social Ties; Networks; Personal Development and Career
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Human Capital and the Managerial Revolution in the United States
By: Tom Nicholas
This paper estimates the returns to human capital accumulation during the first era of megafirms in the United States by linking employees at General Electric—a canonical enterprise associated with the “visible hand” of managerial hierarchies—to data from the 1940...  View Details
Keywords: Returns To Education; Management Practices; Hierarchies; Human Capital; Management; Training; Higher Education; Government and Politics; United States
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Product2Vec: Leveraging Representation Learning to Model Consumer Product Choice in Large Assortments
By: Fanglin Chen, Xiao Liu, Davide Proserpio and Isamar Troncoso
We propose a method, Product2Vec, based on representation learning, that can automatically learn latent product attributes that drive consumer choices, to study product-level competition when the number of products is large. We demonstrate Product2Vec’s...  View Details
Keywords: Consumer Choice; Consumer Behavior; Competition; Product Marketing
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  • June 2022 (Revised July 2022)
  • Module Note

Causal Inference
By: Iavor Bojinov, Michael Parzen and Paul Hamilton
This note provides an overview of causal inference for an introductory data science course. First, the note discusses observational studies and confounding variables. Next the note describes how randomized experiments can be used to account for the effect of...  View Details
Keywords: Causal Inference; Causality; Experiment; Experimental Design; Data Science; Analytics and Data Science
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  • June 2022
  • Article

Conservatism Gets Funded? A Field Experiment on the Role of Negative Information in Novel Project Evaluation
By: Jacqueline N. Lane, Misha Teplitskiy, Gary Gray, Hardeep Ranu, Michael Menietti, Eva C. Guinan and Karim R. Lakhani
The evaluation and selection of novel projects lies at the heart of scientific and technological innovation, and yet there are persistent concerns about bias, such as conservatism. This paper investigates the role that the format of evaluation, specifically information...  View Details
Keywords: Project Evaluation; Innovation; Knowledge Frontier; Information Sharing; Negativity Bias; Projects; Innovation and Invention; Information; Knowledge Sharing
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  • May 2022
  • Article

Can Gambling Increase Savings? Empirical Evidence on Prize-Linked Savings Accounts
By: Shawn A. Cole, Benjamin Iverson and P. Tufano
This paper studies the adoption and impact of prize-linked savings (PLS) accounts, which offer lottery-like payouts to individual account holders in lieu of interest. Using microlevel data from a bank in South Africa, we show that PLS is attractive to a broad group of...  View Details
Keywords: Household Finance; Banking; Savings; Prize-linked Savings; Lottery; Household; Personal Finance; Saving; Banks and Banking
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Causal Inference During A Pandemic: Evidence on the Effectiveness of Nebulized Ibuprofen as an Unproven Treatment for COVID-19 in Argentina
By: Sebastian Calonico, Rafael Di Tella and Juan Cruz Lopez Del Valle
Many medical decisions during the pandemic were made without the support of causal evidence obtained in clinical trials. We study the case of nebulized ibuprofen (NaIHS), a drug that was extensively used on COVID-19 patients in Argentina amidst wild claims about its...  View Details
Keywords: COVID-19; Drug Treatment; Health Pandemics; Health Care and Treatment; Decision Making; Outcome or Result; Argentina
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann
Hybrid work is emerging as a novel form of organizing work globally. This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from the office—affects work outcomes. Collaborating with an...  View Details
Keywords: Hybrid Work; Remote Work; Work-from-home; Field Experiment; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance; Work-Life Balance
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  • March 2022
  • Article

Estimating the Effectiveness of Permanent Price Reductions for Competing Products Using Multivariate Bayesian Structural Time Series Models
By: Fiammetta Menchetti and Iavor Bojinov
Researchers regularly use synthetic control methods for estimating causal effects when a sub-set of units receive a single persistent treatment, and the rest are unaffected by the change. In many applications, however, units not assigned to treatment are nevertheless...  View Details
Keywords: Causal Inference; Partial Interference; Synthetic Controls; Bayesian Structural Time Series; Mathematical Methods
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Fintech to the (Worker) Rescue: Earned Wage Access and Employee Retention
By: Jose Murillo, Boris Vallee and Dolly Yu
Using novel data from a Mexican FinTech firm, we study the usage by workers of earned wages access, an innovative financial service offered by firms to their employees as a benefit. We find usage to be significant and concentrated towards the end of the pay cycle. We...  View Details
Keywords: Fintech; Present Bias; Earned Wage Access; Wages; Employees; Retention; Well-being; Mexico
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  • March 2022
  • Article

How Much Does Your Boss Make? The Effects of Salary Comparisons
By: Zoë B. Cullen and Ricardo Perez-Truglia
The vast majority of the pay inequality in an organization comes from differences in pay between employees and their bosses. But are employees aware of these pay disparities? Are employees demotivated by this inequality? To address these questions, we conducted a...  View Details
Keywords: Salary; Inequality; Managers; Career Concerns; Pay Transparency; Wages; Equality and Inequality; Perception; Behavior
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Consumer Reviews and Regulation: Evidence from NYC Restaurants: Evidence from NYC Restaurants
By: Chiara Farronato and Georgios Zervas
We investigate the informativeness of hygiene signals in online reviews, and their effect on consumer choice and restaurant hygiene. We first extract signals of hygiene from Yelp. Among all dimensions that regulators monitor through mandated restaurant inspections, we...  View Details
Keywords: Restaurants; Reviews; Hygiene; Yelp; Regulation; Food; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Consumer Behavior
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

How Do Copayment Coupons Affect Branded Drug Prices and Quantities Purchased?
By: Leemore S. Dafny, Kate Ho and Edward Kong
Drug copayment coupons to reduce patient cost-sharing have become nearly ubiquitous for high-priced brand-name prescription drugs. Medicare bans such coupons on the grounds that they are kickbacks that induce utilization, but they are commonly used by...  View Details
Keywords: Prescription Drugs; Coupons; Impact; Health Care and Treatment; Markets; Price; Spending; Pharmaceutical Industry; United States
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  • 2022
  • Article

Alleviating Time Poverty Among the Working Poor: A Pre-Registered Longitudinal Field Experiment
By: A.V. Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal feld experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of...  View Details
Keywords: Time; Subjective Well Being; Administrative Costs; Friction; Poverty; Well-being; Money; Perception; Kenya
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  • 2022
  • Working Paper

Human Mobility and the Globalization of Knowledge Production: Causal Evidence from Multinational Enterprises
By: Dany Bahar, Prithwiraj Choudhury, James M. Sappenfield and Sara Signorelli
We investigate how reforms that ease or restrict human mobility affect global innovation. We leverage a unique dataset merging patent data with exhaustive information on business-related migration reforms that take place in 15 countries over 26 years, and employ a...  View Details
Keywords: Migration; Technology; Policy Evaluation; Patents; Information Technology; Immigration; Policy; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Globalization
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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Limits to Bank Deposit Market Power
By: Juliane Begenau and Erik Stafford
Claims about the market power of bank deposits in the banking literature are numerous and far reaching. Recently, a causal narrative has emerged in the banking literature: market power in bank deposits, measured as imperfect pass-through of short-term market rates on...  View Details
Keywords: Bank Deposits; Market Power; Net Interest Margin (NIM); Banks and Banking; Interest Rates; Risk and Uncertainty
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  • Article

A Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Optimal Policy Deployment Using Heterogeneous Treatment Effects
By: Edward McFowland III, Sandeep Gangarapu, Ravi Bapna and Tianshu Sun
We define a prescriptive analytics framework that addresses the needs of a constrained decision-maker facing, ex ante, unknown costs and benefits of multiple policy levers. The framework is general in nature and can be deployed in any utility maximizing context, public...  View Details
Keywords: Prescriptive Analytics; Heterogeneous Treatment Effects; Optimization; Observed Rank Utility Condition (OUR); Between-treatment Heterogeneity; Machine Learning; Decision Making; Analysis; Mathematical Methods
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  • Winter 2021
  • Article

Can Staggered Boards Improve Value? Causal Evidence from Massachusetts
By: Robert Daines, Shelley Xin Li and Charles C.Y. Wang
We study the effect of staggered boards (SBs) using a quasi-experiment: a 1990 law that imposed an SB on all Massachusetts-incorporated firms. The law led to an increase in Tobin's Q, investment in CAPEX and R&D, patents, higher-quality patented innovations, and...  View Details
Keywords: Staggered Board; Entrenchment; Life-cycle; Tobin's Q; Innovation; Profitability; Investor Composition; Governing and Advisory Boards; Investment; Innovation and Invention; Institutional Investing; Value
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  • December 2021
  • Article

Seeing Oneself as a Valued Contributor: Social Worth Affirmation Improves Team Information Sharing
By: Julia Lee Cunningham, Francesca Gino, Dan Cable and Bradley Staats
Teams often fail to reach their potential because members’ concerns about being socially accepted prevent them from offering their unique perspectives to the team. Drawing on relational self and self-affirmation theory, we argue that affirmation of team members’ social...  View Details
Keywords: Social Worth Affirmation; Relational Identity; Self-affirmation; Information Sharing In Teams; Concerns About Social Acceptance; Groups and Teams; Identity; Relationships; Knowledge Sharing
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  • 2021
  • Working Paper

Alleviating Time Poverty among the Working Poor
By: Ashley Whillans and Colin West
Poverty entails more than a scarcity of material resources—it also involves a shortage of time. To examine the causal benefits of reducing time poverty, we conducted a longitudinal field experiment over six consecutive weeks in an urban slum in Kenya with a sample of...  View Details
Keywords: Time-saving Services; Subjective Well-being; Time Use; Cash Transfers; Poverty; Time Management; Well-being
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