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
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
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
Pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities is characterized by high uncertainty because entrepreneurs look to find unsatisfied demand with their new products or services. In an attempt to reduce uncertainty, entrepreneurs experiment with potential customers, seeking feedback through interviews or prototypes. It allows the entrepreneurs to learn about the targeted market and whether their idea can satisfy that demand.…Read More
Value-based health insurance plans have been introduced as an innovative policy to improve health as well as manage health care expenditures – generally through promoting high-value care and reducing low-value care. Standard theory would suggest that the more elastic the demand is for a particular medical service, cost-sharing should be set higher to curb overconsumption due to moral hazard.…Read More
This project examines the downstream consequences, both intended and unintended, of the “play to earn” experience. As the global pandemic was ravaging jobs around the world, blockchain-based “play to earn” games offered people in developing countries the opportunity to earn extra income and even make a living from playing these games.…Read More
This paper’s main contributions are to use a novel data set, introduce a new natural experiment, and exploit a quasi-random shock to show that patenting choices affect three important dimensions of innovation outcomes: the patent quantity, the patent quality, and the firm-level inputs (R&D, investment, and employees).…Read More
This research project aims to understand how innovation propagates through the reallocation of talents, and how this innovation diffusion process is shaped by the competition structure of talent labor markets. Specifically, we exploit various heterogenous shocks to firms, including credit supply shocks, financial constraints shocks, innovation shocks, to examine how firms react in their hiring and firing decisions under different competition structures of talent labor markets.…Read More
This study aims to highlight the generalization problem as a core challenge in organizational learning and strategic decision-making and explore how decision-makers may address this problem via different learning and choice strategies.…Read More
Using a structural model, we show that workers are highly heterogenous in their preferences for both multihoming and repositioning. We provide counterfactual estimates on the effects of proposed firm and regulatory policies aimed at multihoming and repositioning.…Read More
This project aims to estimate the welfare effects of this strategy in the biotechnology industry, using a structural model of the investment decisions of VCs during the drug development process and the product market for the successful drugs.…Read More
