Its applications in financial reporting, audit and supply chain will have vast implications for business operations and organization, capital markets and beyond. By authenticating and recording immutable transactions, a decentralized blockchain performs the same function as many intermediaries in our society that establish trust and maintain integrity between transacting parties. In this project, Kimberlyn is exploring the ways in which blockchain technology will eliminate barriers in various aspects of business operations, allowing for continuous assurance, integrated supply chains, real time financial reporting, and fraud detection.

Recent research has demonstrated that one of the reasons why health care costs have continued to rise steeply over the past decade is that patients receive care that adds little or no value. Prior work has shown that the duplication of services is more likely in settings where PCP and specialist are part of different organizations and therefore have no access to a shared IT system. Prior work has also shown that part of the gender pay gap among specialists is caused by the fact that male PCPs have a strong preference to refer to male specialists. Likewise, male PCPs are less forgiving when their patient experiences an adverse health event on the watch of a female specialist than when the specialist is male. Both studies suggest that friction in the referral process is more common if the PCP and the specialist do not match on gender. This project therefore examines whether the duplication of health services is more prevalent when PCP and specialists are of different genders. To study this question Gauri leverages the Massachusetts All Payers Claims Database (MA APCD). The MA APCD contains more than one billion medical claims for every patient in Massachusetts between 2010 and 2016. These claims also contain detailed information on the diagnoses, services provided, and whether the patient was referred and by whom.

For this purpose, Troup has collected a unique dataset that allows him to observe, for a large subset of houses in the US, the house value as assessed by the local government assessor, as well as the transaction value of the house in the same year. Troup finds that in Census tracts with a larger share of the African-American population, the gap between assessed and market value is significantly larger. What is unique to this setting relative to standard settings in the economics of discrimination is that Troup observes a very precise measure of the fundamental value of the house — its transaction value. Howard. Troup is also working on extending his dataset to obtain information about race at the house level (as opposed to using Census-tract level information on race).

Electric vehicles are typically priced higher than comparable gas-powered cars but less costly to operate, which makes them financially most appealing for high-mileage drivers. Environment conscious drivers may also be willing to pay a price premium for an electric car although they do not necessarily drive a lot of miles per year. On the one hand, environmental consciousness among all drivers improves adoption of the “green” technology, but, on the other hand, demand from eco-conscious drivers drives prices for electric cars up and makes them less appealing for consumers who care only about financial benefits. As a result, total miles traveled substituted by “green” vehicles for gas-powered vehicles could be lower in the presence of environmental consciousness. First, this means lower instantaneous environmental effect of electric vehicles, and, second, this means lower demand for charging infrastructure, which, in its turn, means slower subsequent adoption. The paper builds a structural model to estimate a price premium that environment conscious drivers pay for electric vehicles, its environmental effects and effects on demand and adoption of electric vehicles.

Despite detailed standards on the content of medical education, physicians exhibit wide variation in the way they provide medical care, which has an impact on the costs of care sand health outcomes of patients. Research on the sources of variation is scant. Matteo examines the introduction of a drug to treat blood clots with less side effects, and the release of a new guideline regarding the optimal (lower) frequency of pap smears. He also examines which physicians adopt these new perspectives on treatment by focusing specifically on the organizational structure in which physicians are embedded. The project uses the Massachusetts All Payers Claims Database to test whether physicians in large practices are more likely to incorporate new insights into their medical decision making while accounting for selection issues by exploiting acquisitions of small physician practices by larger health care systems.

Advertisers usually use more than one publisher to deliver ads. Traditionally, advertisers only compensate the last publisher who showed the ad to the customers before the conversion. This method, however, will lead to some undesired behavior of the publisher such as free-riding, which might harm the advertiser.

Contrary to expectations, actively-managed ETFs have also gained popularity since the SEC’s approval of such ETFs in March 2008. As of today, 223 actively- managed ETFs are registered with the SEC, totaling $51.7 billion of assets under management with smart beta ETFs being one of the fastest growing investment instruments. Hyung will contribute to the literature by analyzing the performance actively-managed ETFs, their management fee structure, and investor base characteristics, as well as the interplay with passive strategies and alternative active strategies. Hyung will examine the implications of the growth in actively-managed ETFs on the underlying constituents’ security lending conditions to gain insights about the interplay of limits to arbitrage with stock market pricing efficiency.

In a world of complex choices, consumers may make uninformed decisions even when all relevant information is readily available. A common policy suggestion is to aid consumers by making information more accessible, simple, and standardized. The goal of this project is to study the general equilibrium effects of the provision of simple information. Specifically, the focus is on a nationwide, mandatory labeling policy, advocated by the Israeli Ministry of Health, to promote healthy nutrition. Oren Reshef develops a simple conceptual framework to formalize the mechanisms governing consumers’ and firms’ behavior examining consumers’ understanding and usage of the simplified labels and whether demand for healthier products changes as a result. Oren focuses on the unintended consequences of the policy, especially those affecting individual information acquisition and demand for nutritional dimensions not explicitly included in the labeling. Additionally, he studies the supply side response by examining how the shift in incentives drives product innovation, reformulation, and readjustment of pricing strategies. Finally, he derives the aggregated welfare implications.

This paper examines the effects of bundling social incentives with promotions. When using these “social promotions,” a firm must decide whether or not to require customers to share the promotion on social media with friends. On the one hand, this requirement may make it easier for the firm to get the word out. On the other hand, this requirement may inconvenience customers and lower their propensity to purchase. To conduct valid inference on this trade-off between the costs and benefits, I devise novel empirical strategies that flexibly accommodate the amount of information available to a firm. Through a field experiment on a Chinese online grocery site, randomized both at the city and individual level, I find that social promotions can serve as an effective growth strategy. The social obligation can benefit a firm through two channels. First, the customers who do share add additional value through both new customer acquisition and existing customer retention. Second, the firm does not lose profit from the customers who choose not to purchase the promoted products when forced to share (but would otherwise purchase the promoted products without mandatory sharing); they contribute instead by purchasing other substitutes from the same site. Furthermore, exploiting customer heterogeneity and targeting mandatory sharing to certain types of customers can further improve the efficacy of social promotions.

Using survey data and email data from a mid-sized organization, he is establishing the linkages between the cognitive manifestations of cultural fit– that is, how someone thinks about how they fit into an organization based on self-reports- -and the behavioral manifestations– based on linguistic similarity between a person and her interlocutors in internal email communications. He is using the tools of computational linguistics and machine learning to identify the “linguistic signature” of cognitive cultural fit so that we can impute self-reported cultural fit for people and time periods where these data are not available. This will enable him to transform a one-time survey into a longitudinal assessment, which will in turn enable him to examine the dynamic interplay between cognitive and behavioral cultural fit and its consequences for individual performance.

This is a project that aims to account for a complex empirical pattern within a unified framework that can speak to the data. The pattern involves cross-city differentials: vast inequality in wages and property prices, and differences in the human capital that on average flocks to different cities. But in addition, individual human capital and wages differ within cities. The understanding of these patterns require a general equilibrium framework, which Santiago has developed, and one that is estimable. In order to estimate the role of the key forces at play in driving the various inequalities in the U.S., Santiago has launched into fascinating data work. On the one hand, he has collected data on wages, city amenities, and property values in 50 metropolitan areas in the U.S., and analyzed those data to first describe the overall patterns, and then used the data to estimate his model. In addition, Santiago has worked with a leading online brain training company (Lumosity) to obtain from them their user data. Santiago has succeeded and is now in the process of analyzing it. These data are exciting because they include millions of observations of users all over the country, that among other things allow us to produce an “IQ map” that helps us better understand the distribution of talent over space. These data complement his analysis of the human capital distribution across cities, but they have great additional potential. An obvious challenge in using these data is the fact that they reflect self-selection into using a brain-training service. Santiago has deployed state-of- the-art selection techniques to undo these selection effects, which tells me there is truly fantastic potential for the use of these data.