We extend recent studies on how gender shapes subordinate-supervisor interactions by documenting that employees may, under some conditions, negatively stereotype female supervisors in ways that make them more risk averse when choosing the form of compensation. we use employer-employee matched data from Sweden for the period 1991-2021 to assess whether an employee’s chosen compensation in the form of equity (at a given pay) varies with its founder’s gender.…Read More
Asymmetric information about quality characterizes many important markets, including in healthcare, banking, real estate, and used goods. Without intervention, quality in these markets can easily deteriorate. Vertical intermediaries, such as distributors and retailers, may play a powerful role in disciplining quality when consumers are difficult to inform. I study the effects of informed intermediaries on quality and welfare in the context of US generic pharmaceuticals. This market is economically important, characterized by extreme levels of asymmetric information, and experienced a sharp increase in recalls and shortages after 2009. …Read More
How does the stock market react to competitive actions by firms and their rivals? In this study we empirically explore capability-seeking investments by firms from different strategic groups within an industry and examine their impact on rival firms in the competitive context of global software services.…Read More
In explaining variation in productivity in microenterprise, research has focused primarily on the adoption of effective business practices and access to capital, with little focus on strategic positioning. In archival evidence, we find that offering a differentiated product or service is strongly correlated with firm performance. Using a combined sample of nearly 10,000 microenterprises across eight developing countries, we estimated that a standard deviation increase in differentiation is associated with approximately an 11 percent increase in revenues and an eight percent increase in profit…Read More
In this project, we adapt a classic philosophical method (Nozick’ 1974 “experience machine”) to understand the ways in which people think about the types of alternate realities presented by the metaverse, and with it, the type of value it may offer in the marketplace.…Read More
The main goal of this project is to enhance our understanding of the role that exclusive contracts play in shaping market structure, consumer demand, and innovation. The effect of exclusivity on consumer welfare is ambiguous.…Read More
Private equity (PE) investment in US healthcare has increased dramatically in recent years. On one hand, widespread PE participation may be one avenue to stem rising costs and increase productivity, which have been elusive objects in US healthcare. Research from other sectors has shown that PE firms apply best-in-class management practices to improve productivity and firm value. On the other hand, high powered financial incentives for PE managers may create conflicts with the interests of consumers and of taxpayers, who finance about 45% of healthcare spending. This project aims to study how PE investment affects quality and productivity of healthcare delivery in the US, issues of first order importance for both policy and business. We have assembled the most comprehensive set of data resources used to study this question – confidential micro data on PE investments in healthcare firms, and national data on services, spending, and outcomes for about 30 million Medicare beneficiaries over 2000–17. We will deploy a differences-in differences research design, exploiting variation in the timing of PE acquisitions across firms over this long panel. We will examine effects on 1) growth 2) operating efficiency, and 3) quality of care delivered, over the short and long-run.…Read More
In recent years, the number of workers in the US who show up to work by turning on an app on their smartphone has dramatically increased. Dubbed on-demand or “gig” workers, these individuals log onto digital platforms and depend on algorithms, rather than managers, to set pay rate, segment work tasks, and supervise and evaluate their actions while on the job. Researchers have sounded alarms about the “encompassing, instantaneous, interactive, and opaque” (Kellogg et al., 2020) nature of such algorithmic management, concluding that it traps workers in an “invisible cage” (Rahman 2021). And yet, many on-demand workers report enjoying management by algorithms, enthusiastically noting the freedom that comes with this type of app-based work. Indeed, data from the Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labor from the past five years indicate a tight labor market alongside an increase in the number of workers in the on-demand economy (Kaplan et al., 2021; Katz & Krueger, 2016; 2019), suggesting that on-demand workers may not experience the work to be as oppressive as some scholars have suggested (Rosenblat, 2018; Ravenelle, 2019; Shapiro, 2018). Moving beyond money as the sole explanatory mechanism of why individuals work hard at their jobs, especially under less-than-ideal conditions, this study takes seriously how on-demand workers describe and value finding freedom and choice in their jobs. In doing so, I identify the limitations of the “carrots and sticks” metaphor that scholars have long used to describe the production of consent in the traditional workplace. Instead, I examine how algorithmic management, in conjunction with the new work arrangements of the gig economy, creates consent through the notion of workers having increased choices—a form of consent that, I argue, is more pervasive, but also more fragile.…Read More
Algorithms control pricing and match customers and workers in the gig economy. However, algorithms face several critiques: they lack transparency, can be biased, and can be inefficient. We empirically analyze these issues and show that algorithms lose efficiency from two sources: competition between platforms and misaligned worker incentives. We model workers’ strategic responses to variation in pricing and estimate counterfactuals on the effects of minimum wage and transparent pricing policies.…Read More
We have obtained data from Digital Commerce 360 which publishes pertinent statistics on top 1000 internet retail sites. One interesting aspect of this data is detailed information regarding outsourcing/insourcing decisions including web hosting, search engine optimization services, product delivery etc. This is a pretty unique data spanning hundreds of companies and a last decade. We wish to use this data to analyze outsourcing decisions of internet retailers and how these choices affect their performance. The data shows variation across time and industries, and it is supplemented with many quantitative metrics for internet retailers including number of visitors, conversion rate and basket size etc. We believe this unique data will allow us to gain unique insights into make vs buy decisions by internet retailers.…Read More
The main goal of this project is to enhance our understanding of what drives firm decisions in discovery-stage drug development, when risk of failure and variance in outcomes are highest. Specifically, this project contributes to existing literature on biopharmaceutical innovation, by testing whether the theory that larger firms pursue novel drugs is valid in the earliest phase of the drug development pipeline. Using data on early-stage VC funding and FOIA’ed biopharmaceutical alliances across thirty years, I use data-driven methods to examine the relationship between the novelty of biotech innovation and investor decisions at the earliest stage of drug development and contextualize its magnitude against other innovation characteristics. In doing so, I resolve a potential discrepancy between academic findings and industry observations.…Read More
This project aims to quantify the effect of innovation on commodity price reversions. Commodity prices tend to be stationary with occasional deviations and then revert to their mean prices. There are two big forces behind this reversion. First, there are firms that invest in research that allows them to substitute away from the expensive commodity. Secondly, the commodity producers will expand extraction capacity in response to increased profitability. The former affects the demand side and the latter the supply side. The goal of this project is to estimate the magnitude of the effect of price reversion due to innovation.…Read More
We conduct an audit study to measure the prevalence and impact of AI hiring applications on job applicants. We apply to thousands of jobs, treating half of our application resumes by embedding the job posting within the resume such that machines have access to the job posting text when screening candidates, but human evaluators would not. We can then evaluate if algorithmic resume screening is more likely to select resumes that are a closer match to postings. By also varying applicant race and gender, we can determine if these algorithmic selection algorithms have a differential impact on candidates from underrepresented backgrounds.…Read More
In this study, considering the benefits and costs of WFM, we consider two questions: (1) who has an incentive to work from home, (2) how is team coherence and work performance impacted when individuals work from home?…Read More
Using data over the period 2000-2020 for all seven wholesale power markets in the United States, we show that time-of-use electricity pricing schemes are poorly correlated with real-time wholesale market prices and that this phenomenon is widespread across space and time.…Read More
In this research project, we study how the human resource (HR) practices firms use affect how much value they capture from this innovation. Specifically, we analyze how employers and their technology workers divide the value generated when firms invest in new technologies that require workers to invest in new human capital. …Read More
Across three proposed studies, we aim to investigate 1) whether employees view colleagues/employers who disagree with them as bad listeners, despite objective signs of attentive listening; and 2) whether users are more satisfied with chatbots that signal a high level of attitude agreement with the user.…Read More
I will explore whether job-seekers use these signals in a sophisticated or naïve fashion with respect to the political information that leaks through. I will also examine how employers respond to job-seekers who include such signals in their applications.…Read More
Are private and social incentives for medical innovation aligned? This question is important because improvements in health have been a major source of increases in human well-being.…Read More
In this project, we examine the conditions under which such ICOs are optimal and provide guidance for their design. Despite their popularity in practice, uncapped ICOs are understudied and not as well understood as their capped counterparts.…Read More
