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- February 2022
- Article
Borrowing to Save? The Impact of Automatic Enrollment on Debt
By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson, Brigitte C. Madrian and William L. Skimmyhorn
Does automatic enrollment into a retirement plan increase financial distress due to increased borrowing outside the plan? We study a natural experiment created when the U.S. Army began automatically enrolling newly hired civilian employees into the Thrift Savings Plan....
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- January 2022
- Article
Replicating Private Equity with Value Investing, Homemade Leverage, and Hold-to-Maturity Accounting
By: Erik Stafford
The contributions of asset selection and incremental leverage to buyout investment performance are more important than typically assumed or estimated to be. Buyout funds select small firms with distinct value characteristics. Public equities with these characteristics...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Stock Investors' Returns Are Exaggerated
By: Jesse M. Fried, Paul Ma and Charles C.Y. Wang
The stock market generates less wealth than it appears. We show that total shareholder return (TSR), the standard measure of stock investor performance, substantially exaggerates returns earned by these investors in aggregate, and thus by most investors. The main...
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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...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
What Drives Variation in Investor Portfolios? Evidence from Retirement Plans
We study empirical patterns in investment behavior using a comprehensive data set of defined contribution plans. Using plan-level portfolio allocation data for the near universe of 401(k) plans over the period 2009–2019, we document substantial differences in...
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- Article
Accounting for Climate Change
By: Robert S. Kaplan and Karthik Ramanna
Corporations are facing growing pressure—from investors, advocacy groups, politicians, and even business leaders themselves—to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from their operations and their supply and distribution chains. About 90% of the companies in the S&P...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
COVID-19, Government Performance, and Democracy: Survey Experimental Evidence from 12 Countries
By: Michael Becher, Nicholas Longuet Marx, Vincent Pons, Sylvain Brouard, Martial Foucault, Vincenzo Galasso, Eric Kerrouche, Sandra León Alfonso and Daniel Stegmueller
Beyond its immediate impact on public health and the economy, the COVID-19 pandemic has put democracy under stress. While a common view is that people should blame the government rather than the political system for bad crisis management, an opposing view is that...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Pandemic Schooling Mode and Student Test Scores: Evidence from U.S. States
By: Clare Halloran, Rebecca Jack, James C. Okun and Emily Oster
We estimate the impact of district-level schooling mode (in-person versus hybrid or distance learning) on test scores. We combine Spring 2021 state standardized test score data with comprehensive data on schooling in the 2020-21 school year across 12 states. We find...
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- November 2021
- Article
Panel Experiments and Dynamic Causal Effects: A Finite Population Perspective
By: Iavor Bojinov, Ashesh Rambachan and Neil Shephard
In panel experiments, we randomly assign units to different interventions, measuring their outcomes, and repeating the procedure in several periods. Using the potential outcomes framework, we define finite population dynamic causal effects that capture the relative...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Who Benefits from Online Gig Economy Platforms?
By: Christopher Stanton and Catherine Thomas
This paper estimates the magnitude and distribution of surplus from the knowledge worker gig economy using data from an online labor market. Labor demand elasticities determine workers’ wages, and buyers’ past market experience shapes both their job posting frequency...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Rising Markups and the Role of Consumer Preferences
By: Hendrik Döpper, Alexander MacKay, Nathan H. Miller and Joel Stiebale
We characterize the evolution of markups for consumer products in the United States from 2006 to 2019. We use detailed data on prices and quantities for products in more than 100 distinct product categories to estimate demand systems with flexible consumer preferences....
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- 2021
- Working Paper
The Luck of the Draw: The Causal Effect of Physicians on Birth Outcomes
By: Arlen Guarin, Christian Posso, Estefania Saravia and Jorge Tamayo
Identifying the effect of physicians’ skills on health outcomes is a challenging task due to the nonrandom sorting between physicians and hospitals. We overcome this challenge by exploiting a Colombian government program that randomly assigned 2,126 physicians to 618...
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- 2021
- Other Unpublished Work
Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2
By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland
An interrelated set of tools and methods is disclosed for: (1) measuring the relationship between software source code attributes (such as code quality, design quality, test quality, and complexity metrics) and software economics outcome metrics (such as...
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- Article
Measuring the Scientific Effectiveness of Contact Tracing: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
By: Thiemo Fetzer and Thomas Graeber
Contact tracing has for decades been a cornerstone of the public health approach to epidemics, including Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, and now COVID-19. It has not yet been possible, however, to causally assess the method’s effectiveness using a randomized...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
'Just Letting You Know…': Underestimating Others' Desire for Constructive Feedback
People often avoid giving feedback to others even when it would help fix a problem immediately. Indeed, in a pilot field study (N=155), only 2.6% of individuals provided feedback to survey administrators that the administrators had food or marker on their faces....
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Keywords:
Feedback;
Helping;
Prosocial Behavior;
Relationships;
Social Psychology;
Theory;
Perception
- 2021
- Working Paper
The Asymmetric Mispricing Information in Analysts’ Target Prices
By: Jeremiah Green, John R. M. Hand and Anywhere Sikochi
We study the mispricing information in U.S. and international analysts’ target prices. We hypothesize that asymmetry in the value-relevance of information that firms supply to analysts, and asymmetry in how analysts convert such information into their target prices,...
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Keywords:
Analysts;
Target Prices;
Mispricing;
Cost Of Equity;
Valuation;
Price;
Cost;
Analysis;
Theory
- 2021
- Working Paper
Going to Extremes: Crucibles, Multiple Sensitive Periods, and Career Progression
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Sunasir Dutta, Hise O. Gibson and Eric Lin
We study the effects of crucible experiences along multiple sensitive periods on career progression. While prior literature has hinted that individuals can be imprinted during multiple sensitive periods, not just during the early career, there has been scant attention...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Consumer Choice and Corporate Bankruptcy
By: Samuel Antill and Megan Hunter
Using an incentivized randomized experiment, we estimate the causal effect of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on consumer demand for the bankrupt firm's products. Knowledge of Hertz's Chapter 11 bankruptcy reduces consumers' willingness-to-pay for Hertz by 35%. We show...
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- August 2021
- Article
Multiple Imputation Using Gaussian Copulas
By: F.M. Hollenbach, I. Bojinov, S. Minhas, N.W. Metternich, M.D. Ward and A. Volfovsky
Missing observations are pervasive throughout empirical research, especially in the social sciences. Despite multiple approaches to dealing adequately with missing data, many scholars still fail to address this vital issue. In this paper, we present a simple-to-use...
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- 2021
- Working Paper
Beefing IT Up for Your Investor? Open Sourcing and Startup Funding: Evidence from GitHub
By: Annamaria Conti, Christian Peukert and Maria Roche
We study the participation of nascent firms in open-source communities and its implications for attracting VC funding. To do so, we exploit unique data on 160,065 US startups linking information from Crunchbase to firms' GitHub accounts. Estimating a within-startup...
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