Funded Research Proposals

What is a feasible and efficient policy to regulate air pollution from vehicles? A Pigouvian tax is technologically infeasible. Most countries instead rely on exhaust standards that limit air pollution emissions per mile for new vehicles. We assess the effectiveness and efficiency of these standards, which are the centerpiece of US Clean Air Act regulation ...Read More

The goal of the project is to identify cheap talk and faithful signaling in environmental reports issued by the U.S. largest firms and understand the determinants and consequences of cheap talk about firms’ climate responsibility. Read More

We show that bank credit affects entrepreneurship, but only in low-income regions. We use a novel methodology to identify credit supply shock from regional demand shock using comprehensive data on small business loans between pairs of banks and counties in the US. Read More

Entrepreneurial strategies to cope with dynamic environments are becoming increasingly important globally with the heightened technological and institutional disruptions in the recent and coming years. These dynamic environments are usually characterized by high velocity, complexity, ambiguity and unpredictability, creating additional challenges for entrepreneurs to find and realize opportunities Read More

Supervised machine learning algorithms fail to perform well in the presence of endogeneity in the explanatory variables. In this paper, we borrow from literature on partial identification to propose deep causal inequalities that overcomes this issue. Read More

Providing access to cleaner and cheaper lighting solutions is necessary to lift people out of poverty. The magnitude of the economic, health, and educational impacts created by these lighting solutions as we move up the energy ladder, however, is not clear. Read More

People are frequently asked to engage in collective action—voting, protesting, signing petitions, donating—to uplift members of traditionally marginalized groups and encourage social change. Prior research suggests that minority group members who advocate for collective action are penalized for doing so, while majority group members are not. In this work, I shift focus from perceptions of ...Read More

The goal of this project is to study how mutual funds and ETFs compete for investors’ capital. The current mainstream view appears to be that ETFs are cheaper, more tax-efficient, transparent and easier to trade than mutual funds, hence better for investors. Is this universally true for different investor types, and are mutual funds simply ...Read More

This project examines destigmatization, or “the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth.” Destigmatization of identity is a central goal of egalitarian social movements. Yet destigmatization represents a paradox because while destigmatization benefits identity groups as a whole and creates opportunities for many individual members, organizations perceived as belonging that identity group may ...Read More

We propose to develop and validate a model that uses automatically extracted, high-dimensional sentence embeddings to predict the likeability and memorability of new and existing slogans. Read More