"The Leading Premium"

"Sequential Information Design"

"Achievement Rank Affects Perfomance and Major Choices in College" abstract We study how students' performance and educational choices are affected by their relative academic ability among direct peers. In a quasi-experimental setting we show that students perform better when they rank highly in randomly assigned peer groups. We reject that effects operate through an adjustments of…

"Communication in a Complicated World" Abstract A layperson seeks advice from an expert about a decision he has to make.  The expert is privately informed about the mapping from feasible decisions to outcomes, which takes the form of a realization of a Brownian motion with drift.  For each decision, the expert has a hard piece…

"Echoes of Rising Tuition in Students’ Borrowing, Educational Attainment, and Homeownership in Post-Recession America" Abstract State average enrollment-weighted public college tuition and fees per school year rose by $3,843 (or 81 percent) between 2001 and 2009. How are recent cohorts absorbing this surge in college costs, and what effect is it having on their post-schooling…

"Robust predictions in dynamic screening" Abstract We characterize properties of optimal dynamic mechanisms using a variational approach thatpermits us to tackle directly the full program. This allows us to make predictions for a considerably broader class of stochastic processes than can be handled by the first order, Myersonian,approach", which focuses on local incentive compatibility constraints…

"Advertising Spending and Media Bias: Evidence from news Coverage of Car Safety Recalls"

"Regulation of Charlatans in High-Skill Professions"

"Blurred boundaries: a flexible approach for segmentation applied to the car market" Abstract Prominent features of differentiated product markets are segmentation and product proliferation that blurs the boundaries between segments. I develop a tractable demand model, the Ordered Nested Logit, which allows for overlap between neighboring segments. I apply the model to the automobile market…

"Carbon is Forever: a Climate Change Experiment on Cooperation"

"Using Response Time Data from Social Science Surveys to Model Cognition and Cognitive Decline"

"Consumers' Costly Responses to Product-Harm Crises"

"Leader Identity and Coordination Failure" Abstract This paper investigates the role of leader identity in addressing coordination failure. It uses data from an artefactual field experiment and survey conducted in 44 towns in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, sampling individuals from among the minority Muslim and the majority Hindu communities. We find that Muslim leaders…

"A Model of Focusing in Political Choice"

"Bilateral Communication and Matching/Partnership Formation" Abstract We consider match formation between two parties, such as marriage, merger or partnership formation. Each party has private information about the value of the match, which creates friction in the matching process. We focus on the role of bilateral communication in this setting and investigate how such communication should…

"Diverted dreams: Estimating the effect of assignment to Higher Education institutions"