Most digital communication platforms store content and allow users to see it multiple times. Despite the benefits that recording content holds for both users and companies, many applications delete it after it was seen by the receiver (i.e., ephemeral communication channels). …Read More
Identifying whether newspaper editors focus on what is newsworthy or what is trendy when choosing stories is important for the design of media regulation. This column shows how the popularity of an article, reflected by online clicks, influences the coverage of the story.…Read More
This paper develops a theoretical model to study the economic incentives for a social media platform to moderate user-generated content. We show that a self-interested platform can use content moderation as an effective marketing tool to expand its installed user base, to increase the utility of its users, and to achieve its positioning as a moderate or extreme content platform. …Read More
A fundamental question remains unanswered which I seek to address in this research: What is the actual value of novelty in pharmaceuticals to consumers?…Read More
We assemble original data on cryptocurrency regulations worldwide and use them to empirically examine movement in trading activity at a number of exchanges following key regulatory announcements. …Read More
I quantify the impact of trade secret protection on labor outsourcing, and consequently, on aggregate productivity.…Read More
This study aims to measure the impact of General Data Protection Regulations on firms and consumers. Specifically, we plan to document GDPR’s impact on consumers search and discovery of products, and firm’s ability to reach out and sell to a broad set of consumers.…Read More
Advances in intelligent technologies change the way consumers search and shop for products. Emerging is the trend of home-shopping devices such as Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, which allow consumers to search or order products using voice commands.…Read More
A recent rapid-automation movement has been displacing routine labor and has sparked a series of discussions about taxation on automation such as a robot tax. However, the government’s dilemma is that the planner may want to tax such physical capital that displaces routine labor for redistributive motives but does not want to tax other physical capital that increases such workers’ productivities.…Read More
Commuting is costly for employees, but is it costly for employers in terms of lost productivity? We study the causal effects of commuting distance on inventor productivity. Specifically, we estimate how inventor productivity changes when their employer relocates.…Read More
This study examines the tension between learning and appropriability in the experimentation process of early-stage ventures. I build a stylized model to argue that, when formal intellectual property is weak, the learning benefit of experimentation may be offset by its imitation risk. …Read More
Across three studies, we examine how disparities in funding outcomes may be due to differences in how entrepreneurs communicate their ventures, whereby female entrepreneurs have a tendency to use more concrete language when describing their ventures than do their male counterparts.…Read More
Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms are often the drivers of innovation, and success for entrepreneurial firms often means development and introduction of innovative products and services. This project examines the role that having a partner plays in early-stage entrepreneurial firm performance.…Read More
Uber. Upwork. TaskRabbit. The world of work is transforming and my research agenda attempts to identify and explain 1) how work is changing and 2) how these changes affect workers, especially those who are marginalized or vulnerable.…Read More
This paper addresses the recent trend of offering unlimited vacation to employees. While potentially useful for acquiring human capital benefits, unlimited vacation is a risky perk for firms due to the possibility of abuse.…Read More
We investigate whether the effect of network position on innovation is causal or spurious. Although empirical evidence demonstrates that certain structural positions in alliance networks (e.g. structural holes) affect firm innovation, it is hard to disentangle the factors allowing a firm to put itself in a certain position from the innovation outcomes that stem from being in that position.…Read More
This paper studies the strategy of entrepreneurs to finance their experimentation given the presence of adverse selection in capital markets. …Read More
Organizational sponsors foster young entrepreneurial firms by providing resources to increase survival rates. Sponsorship can be financial, as with tax incentive structures, public and private grant programs, or early stage private investment. …Read More
We investigate the impact of several different recommender algorithms (e.g., Amazon.com’s “Consumers who bought this item also bought”), commonly used in ecommerce and online services, on sales volume and diversity, using field experiment data on movie sales from a top retailer in North America. …Read More
Empirical analysis of a sample of companies with private equity (PE) ownership in the UK shows that PE firms act as deep-pocket investors for their portfolio companies, rescuing them if they fall in financial distress.…Read More
