Randomized controlled trials—often called A/B tests in industrial settings—are an increasingly important element in the management many organizations. Such experiments are meant to bring the benefits of scientific rigor and statistical measurement to the domain of managerial decision making. …Read More
In this proposal, we argue that support of populism can be explained by the interaction between individual economic and social experiences and aggregate economic shocks. We test empirically if personal experiences, information environment, and their interaction with aggregate economic shocks shape people’s political decisions. …Read More
The idea that source code for computer software be accessible to anyone has gained increasing popularity among software developers, fueling the rapid growth of the open source software (OSS) movement. Platforms for OSS development currently host incredibly valuable projects like the Linux kernel, TensorFlow and various blockchain software projects.…Read More
As VC firms have an acute interest in high-tech companies, they potentially bear substantial risk of patent litigation. In this project, we aim at looking into the following questions: how do ex-ante and ex-post patent litigation risks affect VC firms’ investment strategies and how those risks is propagated among all portfolio companies they have invested?…Read More
In this project, we attempt to provide a rigorous, empirical study of e-commerce A/B testing strategies. We perform a meta-analysis on 2,732 A/B tests conducted by 252 ecommerce companies across seven industries over the course of three years.…Read More
The impostor phenomenon is the individual proclivity to believe that one has fooled those around them into adopting an overly positive view of oneself. Studies have shown that at least two out of five successful people have this proclivity. …Read More
We examine how wealth windfalls affect self-employment decisions using data on cash payments from claims on Texas shale drilling to people throughout the United States. Individuals who receive large wealth shocks (greater than $50,000) have 51% higher self-employment rates.…Read More
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is playing an increasingly important role in the global economy and has transformed many business practices. As AI has advanced beyond the conventionally narrow domains, it is starting to exhibit characteristics of “general purpose technologies (GPT)” that are expected to change the nature of more business innovations and reduce their associated financial costs and time.…Read More
High skill labor demand is infrequent but firms cannot adjust perfectly due to several adjustment costs. Professional Business Services (PBS) sector help alleviate this problem by allowing high skill labor to move across firms, reducing idiosyncratic part of labor demand risk.…Read More
Traditional online platforms (e.g., Amazon Marketplace) use Unilateral Rating System (URS), where customers rate sellers. However, sharing economy platforms (e.g., Uber, Airbnb) have adopted Bilateral Rating System (BRS) that also allows service providers to rate customers, and even selects customers based on their ratings.…Read More
In this paper, we explore how an industry’s watershed moments – vivid, publically salient, emotionally resonant events – can drive the emergence of a new market. Our empirical context is the New Space market, a growing number of new, private companies developing and using spaceflight-access technologies. …Read More
This paper investigates whether firms donate to political campaigns in order to influence supply in local housing markets. Using new data on campaign donors of U.S. mayoral candidates and a regression discontinuity design, I uncover three findings. Consistent with political favors, connection to the mayor causes residential development firms to sell more new housing units.…Read More
I exploit unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing techniques to elicit the risk factors that firms themselves identify in their annual reports. I quantify the firms’ exposure to each identified risk, design an econometric test to classify them as either systematic or idiosyncratic, and construct factor mimicking portfolios that proxy for each undiversifiable source of risk.…Read More
The clinical-trial data used to make approval decisions for medical therapies are collected from a relatively small patient sub-populations. Given small sample sizes, trial data may suggest that treatments are medically or economically nonviable, even though they ultimately may be, or vice versa. …Read More
Gig economy firms benefit from labor flexibility by hiring independent self-scheduling workers. Such flexibility poses a great challenge in terms of planning and committing to a service capacity. Understanding the motivations that drive gig economy workers is thus of great importance.…Read More
Understanding how firms learn to make better strategic decisions and achieve superior performance is a question of significant concern to managers and scholars, especially in the context of mergers and acquisitions (M&A).…Read More
We study the association of spending per employee with startup firm survival. Our theory model posits that entrepreneur’s knowledge defines the complex decision process of combining human and non-human inputs to increase firm value. …Read More
As a new general-purpose technology, robots have the potential to radically transform industries and affect employment. Preliminary empirical studies using industry and geographic region-level data have shown that robots differ from prior general-purpose technologies and predict substantial negative effects on employment.…Read More
The extent to which local incentive policies (such as subsidies and tax credits) are effective at spurring new centers of innovation, and whether these incentives induce overall productivity growth or just a shift of production from one region to another, is the subject of this proposal.…Read More
In 2011, California Governor Jerry Brown recognized several of the state’s existing firm incentive policies aimed at catalyzing innovative activity in the state, to be ineffectual, citing poor incentive design.…Read More
