Innovation Opportunities and Risks

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 ...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 ...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