Faculty Research Groups - All Research Seminars

Generative AI in Action: Field Experimental Evidence on Worker Performance in E-Commerce Customer Service Operations

Jan 09 2025

Speaker: Lauren Lu: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

When do women present themselves as leaders?

Jan 15 2025

Speaker: Alan Benson: University of Minnesota

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Opinion Shopping and Auditor Demand: A Novel Framework

Jan 22 2025

Speaker: Aiyong Zhu: Dartmouth College - Visitor

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Semi-Personalized Pricing: Algorithms and Implications

Jan 23 2025

Speaker: Michael Hamilton: Katz School of Science and Health

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Corporate Cash Flow Outcomes Across Presidencies: Still a Presidential Puzzle

Feb 04 2025

Speaker: Kateryna Holland

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Finance Brown Bag

Synthetic Potential Outcomes and Causal Mixture Identifiability

Feb 04 2025

Speaker: Bijan H. Mazaheri: Thayer

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations

Feb 05 2025

Speaker: Emilio Castilla: MIT

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Operationalizing Emotional Load: The Human Side of Queueing Systems

Feb 06 2025

Speaker: Galit Yom-Tov: Technion

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Feb 07 2025

Speaker: Emily Blanchard: Tuck School of Business,
Hart Posen: Tuck School of Business

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Come join us for the winter quarter rapid research event. Emily Blanchard (Economics) and Hart Posen (Strategy) will each give short talks about their research, with drinks and snacks available courtesy of the Dean’s Office. This is a great opportunity to learn about the research that our colleagues in different academic areas are working on.

Justice for Sale: Explaining the Rise in Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Feb 10 2025

Speaker: Emily Blanchard: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

Wage Income and Profits, Workers and Owners

Feb 18 2025

Speaker: Peter Morrow: University of Toronto

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Setting the Stage: The Interplay of Firm Boundary and Learning at the Opera

Feb 21 2025

Speaker: Carolyn Fu: Harvard Business School

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Feb 24 2025

Speaker: Simon Fuchs: Visiting Lecturer, Dartmouth Economics

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Advertising Securities

Feb 26 2025

Speaker: Alexander Ljungqvist: Stockholm School of Economics

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

U.S. companies are prohibited from advertising their securities under Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. To investigate what might happen if issuers were allowed to market their securities to the public, we study Singapore, a jurisdiction that permits the use of advertising to solicit interest in initial public offerings (IPOs). Using proprietary data on a representative sample of individuals, we show that advertising strongly influences retail investors to apply. IPOs with weaker institutional demand are advertised more heavily to retail investors. Investors who are more responsive to advertising earn significantly lower risk-adjusted returns compared to other IPO investors. Overall, we provide new evidence on the costs and benefits of regulatory limitations placed on issuers of securities.

How independent creative workers experience the pressures of widespread appeal on digital platforms

Mar 05 2025

Speaker: Julianna Pillemer: NYU Stern School of Business

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Creative workers often seek a substantial audience for their work. Our findings reveal a new struggle begins once they attain one. Existing theory fails to account for how creators conceive of and manage the relationship with their audience once their work has gained widespread appeal. In an inductive study of independent creative workers using digital platforms to share their work, we discovered that after attaining a substantial audience, creators experience audience entanglement – a perceived sense of deep interrelatedness between an individual and the audience for their work such that this relationship becomes a persistent consideration in their approach to creating. This entanglement typically begins as dysfunctional entanglement, characterized by oppressive dependence on audience reactions, distressing emotions, and struggling with platform volatility. In this state, creators often question the meaning of their work and deprioritize platform engagement. However, some creators develop audience management strategies – restricting audience access, reinterpreting audience reactions, and reorienting toward personal standards – to effectively shift their interrelatedness with the audience to functional entanglement, characterized by a balanced dependence on audience reactions, uplifting emotions, and accepting platform volatility. Functional entanglement allows creators to capture meaning in their audience interactions and prioritize their work on the platform.

Teaching Business School Students in the 21st Century: data, coding, AI, and more

Mar 06 2025

Speaker: Daniel Guetta: Columbia University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

The world is changing exponentially faster than it once was, and topics that used to be the preserve of engineers alone are now central to many businesses' core strategy. How should we change the way we teach technical topics in business schools in response? In this talk, I will begin by briefly sharing some lessons I have learned in my seven years at Columbia, during which I have had the privilege of teaching 10 distinct classes, with just under 7,000 students enrolled from Columbia Business School's MBA and EMBA programs, and from our joint programs with the engineering school. The bulk of my talk will then focus on five case studies, time permitting, in which I will discuss the tools and cases I use to teach five specific topics: the Lasso, fundamentals of deep learning, coding in Python, large language model embeddings, and market design. I will end with a discussion of what comes next for us as educators in business schools.

Revolving Credit to SMEs: The Role of Business Credit Cards

Mar 06 2025

Speaker: Greg Buchak: Stanford Graduate School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

We document that small businesses in the US are frequently excluded from borrowing through traditional term loans or credit lines and rely instead on standardized, high-interest rate business credit cards to meet their financing needs. We develop and estimate a structural model of firms’ card demand, utilization, and default choice, accounting for imperfect competition among lenders and the correlation between utilization and default. We find that high rates are primarily explained by markups rather than lender costs. In counterfactual analyses we study the impact of correlated lender cost shocks as well as proposed capital surcharges on undrawn credit limits.

Import Price Shocks and Heterogeneous Innovation Responses

Mar 31 2025

Speaker: Deniz Atalar: Cambridge

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

AI/ML Seminar

Apr 01 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market

Apr 02 2025

Speaker: Lawrence Schmidt: MIT

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

We leverage recent advances in NLP to construct measures of workers’ task exposure to AI and machine learning technologies over the 2010 to 2023 period, varying across firms and time. Using a theoretical framework that allows for labor-saving technology to affect worker productivity both directly and indirectly, we show that the impact on wage earnings and employment can be summarized by two statistics. First, labor demand decreases in the average exposure of workers’ tasks to AI technologies; second, holding the average exposure constant, labor demand increases in the dispersion of task exposures to AI as workers shift effort to tasks not displaced by AI. Exploiting exogenous variation in our measures based on pre-existing hiring practices across firms, we find empirical support for these predictions, together with a lower demand for skills affected by AI. Overall, we find muted effects of AI on employment due to offsetting effects: occupations high exposed to AI experience relatively lower demand compared to less exposed occupations, but the resulting increase in firm productivity increases overall employment across all occupations.

Dynamic Matching for Refugee Resettlement: A Case Study

Apr 03 2025

Speaker: Rad Niazadeh: University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Refugee resettlement is an international effort that aims to provide a durable solution for the current global refugee crisis. The goal is to help refugee families to find a new home in a host country and eventually find a new job to get “resettled”. In this seminar, I will talk about a recent paper in partnership with a major national agency working on refugee resettlement in the United States. In this work, we re-design the core dynamic matching algorithm used by our partner, for sequential yearly assignment of refugee cases to our partner's affiliate locations. These localities should be thought of as service centers providing vocational services or assistance with job search, and many times are short in staff. I discuss various operational intricacies in this dynamic matching problem, such as lack of reliable arrival prior data, predicting employment outcomes of each match, and controlling backlogs in those service centers. I also discuss regulatory constraints imposed on the problem, such as family re-unification ties for refugees and their implications on our algorithm. Then I will introduce a new algorithmic framework to study this problem, through which I show how to design and analyze near-optimal learning-based primal-dual algorithms that aim to maximize employment outcomes while respecting operational and regulatory constraints in this problem. Time permits, I'll discuss a case study for evaluating the empirical performance of our algorithms using our partner's data and discuss some details of our collaboration.

International Cooperation, Trade, and Common-Pool Resources

Apr 07 2025

Speaker: Aaron Berman: MIT

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

The Power of the Common Task Framework

Apr 09 2025

Speaker: Theis Jensen: Yale University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

The “Common Task Framework” (CTF) is a collaborative and competitive process in which researchers solve a task using shared data, a predefined success metric, and a leaderboard. Using an economic model, we show that the CTF incentivizes effort, increases innovation, and curbs misrepresentation by reducing research costs and improving comparability. Historical examples from computer science underscore its effectiveness. To demonstrate its broader applicability, we propose a CTF for financial economics: a platform open to all researchers designed to identify the pricing kernel and systematically evaluate asset pricing models, from traditional factor-based approaches to modern machine learning techniques.

The Discovery of Doubt: A Framework for Organizational Learning from Questionable Ideas

Apr 14 2025

Speaker: David Maslach: Florida State University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Abstract: Organizational life is filled with questionable ideas—beliefs that invoke doubt about whether they will be productive or useful. These ideas are necessary to organizational knowledge and learning. Despite their importance, research on questionable ideas is dispersed across organizational literatures and often lacks depth. This paper consolidates past research to explain why questionable ideas exist, persist, and evolve. Doubt arises about whether outcomes will be positive either based of reason or adherence to doctrine. We introduce the FAIL framework (Flawed, Ambitious, Ignorant, Lurid) to provide a structured understanding of questionable ideas. Questionable ideas are either evaluated positively (because of flaws or being too ambitious) or negatively (because of ignorance or being lurid) based on organizational ideologies of reason or doctrine. Ideologies develop in response to evaluator proximity and perceived social costs off endorsing similar ideas in the past. We discuss when adopting questionable ideas can be beneficial and highlight common SPREAD enablers that moderate the dissemination of questionable ideas: Stories and Gossip, Peer Influence, Reputation and Endorsements, Authority and Institutions, and Digital Platforms and Technologies. This paper advances understanding of organizational learning, creativity and innovation, and addresses some challenges posed by misdirected efforts in organizational science.

TBD

Apr 21 2025

Speaker: Yulu Tang: Dartmouth College

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

When You Say It: How the Timing of LGBTQ+ Allyship Displays Shapes Evaluations of Organizations

Apr 29 2025

Speaker: James Carter: Cornell University

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Organizations frequently aim to display their allyship with the LGBTQ+ community, often through campaigns, advertisements, and statements—particularly during Pride Month. While existing research typically focuses on the content of such allyship displays, we integrate theories of attribution and identity safety in order to demonstrate how the timing of these allyship displays shapes the evaluations observers form about an organization’s authenticity in these efforts. Across field, laboratory, and online samples, five preregistered experiments reveal that both LGBTQ+ observers (Experiment 1) and LGBTQ+ employees (Experiment 2) perceive organizational allyship displays as less authentic when displayed during Pride Month as opposed to other times—even when the content of the allyship display is held constant. We further find that the timing of organizational allyship displays influences perceived authenticity by shaping the extent to which LGBTQ+ evaluators attribute values-driven and strategic-driven motives as underlying the organization’s allyship (Experiment 3). Critically, we find that this effect is unique to LGBTQ+ individuals: non-target groups, such as cis-straight observers, evaluate the authenticity of allyship displays similarly, regardless of timing (Studies 4 and 5). This work makes important and timely contributions to research on allyship and has implications for how perceptions of allyship are influenced by social identity. To be an authentic ally, it is not just what an organization says, but also when an organization says it.

Making Talk Cheap: LLMs and Signaling on Digital Labor Platforms

Apr 29 2025

Speaker: Anais Galdin: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Common Investors Across the Capital Structure: Private Debt Funds as Dual Holders

Apr 30 2025

Speaker: Isil Erel: Ohio State University Fisher College of Business

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

This paper examines the dual role of Business Development Companies (BDCs) as both creditors and shareholders in funding middle-market firms. We first show that BDCs, especially dual holders, serve a distinct market segment typically avoided by traditional bank lenders: mid-sized firms with low (or even negative) cash flows, limited collateral, but high growth potential. Our key finding is that dual-holder BDCs charge loan spreads that are 45 basis points higher than comparable loans extended by pure creditors, controlling for loan characteristics as well as (borrower × quarter) and (BDC × quarter) fixed effects, which account for unobserved and time-varying heterogeneity in both firm credit quality and lender funding conditions. We examine three mechanisms: enhanced monitoring through information access and governance rights of dual-holders; capital injections by dual-holders as a “public good” benefiting all creditors; and hold-up behavior by dual-holders as dominant financiers of their portfolio firms. Differentiating tests indicate that enhanced monitoring is the primary channel driving the loan pricing differential. Our study highlights the real economic impact of private credit, beyond merely filling gaps left by regulation- constrained banks.

Uncertainty Quantification in Digital Twin Simulations

May 01 2025

Speaker: Canan Gunes Corlu: Boston University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

One of the challenges of developing digital twin simulations stems from lacking full information about business process flows and characterizations of their input distributions. This chapter describes how this challenge arises in different phases of digital twin development. We present practitioners an overview of solutions to use for correctly quantifying the overall uncertainty in digital twin simulation development. We accompany the presentation with a supply chain use case.

Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas

May 05 2025

Speaker: Teresa Fort: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Relatively flat US output growth versus rising numbers of US researchers is often interpreted as evidence that “ideas are getting harder to find.” We build a new 46-year panel tracking the universe of US firms’ patenting to investigate the micro underpinnings of this claim, separately examining the relationships between research inputs and ideas (patents) versus ideas and growth. Over our sample period, we find that researchers’ patenting productivity is increasing, there is little evidence of any secular decline in high-quality patenting common to all firms, and the link between patents and growth is present, differs by type of idea, and is fairly stable. On the other hand, we find strong evidence of secular decreases in output unrelated to patenting, suggesting an important role for other factors. Together, these results invite renewed empirical and theoretical attention to the impact of ideas on growth. To that end, our patent-firm bridge, which will be available to researchers with approved access, is used to produce new, public-use statistics on the Business Dynamics of Patenting Firms (BDS-PF).

Looking the Part? How Candidates’ Race and Attire Shape Employer Hiring Decisions in a Low-Wage Labor Market

May 06 2025

Speaker: Tiantian Yang: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Racial disparities in employment persist in the United States, particularly in low-wage labor markets. While employers often attribute these disparities to differences in job seekers’ self- presentation—particularly attire—we argue that this explanation obscures demand-side biases. Drawing on labor market discrimination and status characteristics theories, we argue that professional attire acts as a proxy for unobservable worker qualities and that racial stereotypes distort how these signals are interpreted. White candidates might benefit more from professional attire, whereas Black candidates receive weaker returns from employers. To test this argument, we conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of candidates’ attire and hiring outcomes using a mobile gig-staffing platform (Jobmate), which includes 1,032,496 job applications for 60,636 job seekers, along with their profile photos. Our findings reveal that although professional attire improves hiring outcomes for both Black and White candidates, the effect is significantly weaker for Black job seekers, exacerbating racial hiring disparities. A controlled experiment further demonstrates that professional attire disproportionately benefits White candidates. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that self-presentation strategies can mitigate racial disparities. Our findings suggest that closing racial hiring gaps in low-wage labor markets requires cultural changes in hiring practices rather than individual-level adjustments by job seekers.

The Welfare Benefits of Pay-As-You-Go Financing

May 07 2025

Speaker: David Sraer: UC Berkeley

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Pay-as-you-go (PAYGo) financing is a novel contract that has recently become a popular form of credit, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). PAYGo financing relies on lockout technology that enables the lender to remotely disable the flow benefits of collateral when the borrower misses payments. This paper quantifies the welfare implications of PAYGo financing. We develop a dynamic structural model of consumers and estimate the model using a multi-arm, large scale pricing experiment conducted by a fintech lender that offers PAYGo financing for smartphones. We find that the welfare gains from access to PAYGo financing are equivalent to a 3.4% increase in income while remaining highly profitable for the lender. The welfare gains are larger for low-risk consumers and consumers in the middle of the income distribution. Under reasonable assumptions, PAYGo financing outperforms traditional secured loans for all but the riskiest consumers. We explore contract design and identify variations of the PAYGo contract that further improve welfare.

TBD

May 12 2025

Speaker: Deniz Atalar: Cambridge

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Security Losses, Interbank Markets, and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from the Eurozone

May 14 2025

Speaker: Mariassunta Giannetti: Stockholm School of Economics

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Banks that experienced larger losses in their pledgeable securities portfolios following the July 2022 monetary policy tightening became less able to borrow through the inter- bank market and subsequently reduced their corporate lending, regardless of whether the securities were booked at market or historical value. These effects were less pronounced for banks with abundant collateral and for domestic subsidiaries of banking groups, which received liquidity through their group’s internal capital market. Our results highlight a collateral channel in the bank-based transmission of monetary policy and show how differences in banking structure can contribute to an uneven transmission of monetary policy.

Learning about contingencies: The power of initial simplicity

May 16 2025

Speaker: Nicolaj Siggelkow: Wharton

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

This paper investigates the performance consequences of how managers update their contingency beliefs in response to feedback, emphasizing the interaction between first-order learning (updating performance expectations) and second-order learning (updating contingency beliefs). Managers often begin tasks with inaccurate contingency assumptions—either overly simple or overly complex—which shape their initial decisions. Our research explores whether starting with simple or complex contingency beliefs is more advantageous when learning occurs in environments characterized by varying degrees of true contingencies. Employing a contextual multi-arm bandit simulation, we reveal nuanced learning dynamics: without second-order learning, complex initial beliefs consistently outperform simpler ones. However, when second-order learning is enabled, initially simple beliefs significantly enhance managerial decision-making over time, even potentially surpassing the performance of managers with initially accurate beliefs. Conversely, those with overly complex initial beliefs demonstrate limited improvement through second-order learning alone. Importantly, this pattern changes substantially when managers have considerable prior information about action outcomes across contexts; under these conditions, complex initial beliefs become advantageous. Thus, the benefits of simplicity versus complexity in contingency beliefs critically depend on the interplay between first- and second-order learning and the availability of prior information, offering actionable insights for managerial decision-making in uncertain environments.

TBD

May 19 2025

Speaker: Aaron Berman: MIT

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

May 21 2025

Speaker: Constantine Yannelis: University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: TBD

Operations Spring Conference

May 22 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Operations Seminar Conference

May 23 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 8:00 AM - 1:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

May 29 2025

Speaker: Christine Laudenbach: Goethe University, Leibniz Institute SAFE

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Marketing Camp

May 30 2025

Speaker: TBD

Time: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Alperin

Lightening Talks - End of year celebration!

May 30 2025

Speaker: Raghav Singal,
Michelle Kinch,
Julia Melin,
Giovanni Gavetti,
Emily Blanchard

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Come join us for an end-of-year celebration featuring lightening talks (2-3 minutes each) by Raghav Singal, Michelle Kinch, Laurens Debo, Julia Melin, and hopefully Giovanni Gavetti and Emily Blanchard. Drinks and snacks will be provided courtesy of the Dean’s Office.

Junior Faculty Strategy Research Summer Camp

Aug 04 2025

Speaker: Connie Helfat: Tuck School of Business

Time: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Hanover Inn & DOC House

Junior Faculty Strategy Research Summer Camp

Aug 05 2025

Speaker: Connie Helfat: Tuck School of Business

Time: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Hanover Inn & DOC House

Explaining the Compensation of Superstar CEOs

Aug 29 2025

Speaker: Ivan Marinovic: Stanford University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

While agency theory has greatly influenced the narrative around real-world compensation plans, boards rarely make the quantitative assumptions underlying executive contracts fully explicit. We develop a tractable methodology to invert the primitives of the agency problem from observed contract shapes, and obtain in closed-form the implied incentive misalignment, the contribution of managerial actions to firm value, and the agent’s outside option - allowing monitors and outsiders to understand what they are voting on. Under a plausible restriction on likelihood ratios, a simple test identifies settings in which only preferences near risk-neutrality can be rationalized and, in this case, the primitives can be recovered from a linear regression of realized performance on pay. Applying the method to Tesla’s controversial 2018 package for Elon Musk, we find that (i) Musk enjoyed little bargaining power, (ii) the contract embedded extreme incentive misalignment, (iii) the board expected him to generate far less value than the firm ultimately produced, and (iv) without performance-vesting options, eliciting effort would have been prohibitively costly. The framework therefore provides a transparent lens on the economics of “superstar” CEOs and answers calls for clearer explanations of high-powered incentive plans.

The Debt Ceiling’s Disruptive Impact: Evidence from Many Markets

Sep 03 2025

Speaker: William Cassidy: Washington University Olin Business School

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We show that the debt ceiling significantly impacts the duration of government liabilities through an unintended interaction of the Treasury’s issuance rules and the debt ceiling constraint. During debt ceiling episodes, the Treasury systematically allows more bills to mature than it issues. In recent years, this force has induced fluctuations in bill supply greater than one percent of GDP. Exploiting this, we devise an instrument for the supply of bills and show that the debt ceiling has distorted convenience premia and the price of short-term investment-grade corporate credit. We attribute the Treasury’s implicit decision to lengthen the duration of its liabilities as a response to an intermediation constraint.

The Effects of Cryptocurrency Wealth on Household Consumption

Sep 10 2025

Speaker: Tetyana Balyuk: Emory University

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We use transaction-level bank and credit card data to examine how cryptocurrency wealth affects household consumption. We estimate a marginal propensity to consume (MPC) of 9.7% from crypto gains---roughly twice most previous estimates from unrealized equity gains. This higher MPC primarily reflects investor characteristics rather than asset type, as crypto investors also exhibit greater MPCs from equity gains. Consumption responses are symmetric for gains and losses and concentrated in discretionary spending. Our findings suggest that crypto wealth meaningfully influences the real economy, with households broadly treating crypto and equity wealth in similar ways.

Mechanism Design under Costly Signaling: the Value of Non-Coordination

Sep 11 2025

Speaker: Xiaoyun Qiu: Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We study optimal allocation mechanisms that rely on costly signals as screening devices. A social planner seeks to maximize welfare while ensuring the implementation of a given allocation rule. Allowing signal recommendations to depend on all agents’ reports (i.e., enabling information leakage) can improve coordination and lower the signaling costs for losers. However, this comes at the expense of inducing excessive effort from winners. We show that when higher types generate higher certainty-equivalent signals, the incentive cost of coordination outweighs its benefit. In this case, the optimal design is zero coordination, where signals are recommended solely based on each agent’s own report. We demonstrate that such non-coordination mechanisms can be implemented through coarse-ranking contests.

Export Restrictions as Industrial Policy

Sep 15 2025

Speaker: Patrick Farrell

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

Export restrictions are increasingly popular instruments of industrial policy, adopted by both developing and developed countries in various forms and for differing rationales. Despite their growing prevalence and importance these export restrictions are understudied in the trade and industrial policy literatures. A simple model of costly trade in both intermediates inputs and final goods, with increasing returns to scale in the more "advanced" final goods sector, demonstrates the potential for welfare gains from restricting the export of intermediates.

Losing Liberals without Convincing Conservatives? How Organizations’ Removal of DEI Policies Influences External Stakeholders’ Perceptions

Sep 17 2025

Speaker: Michael Rosenblum: University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

As debates over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies intensify in the United States, organizations are grappling with whether to roll back or retain their DEI policies, raising questions about how such decisions might impact perceptions of organizations. These decisions take on added significance in contexts of organizational misconduct, where public trust and reputational standing are already at risk. Across four preregistered studies (N = 3,256), we draw from signaling theory to highlight how the removal of DEI policies (vs. the presence) leads organizations to incur greater penalties from external stakeholders amidst organizational misconduct. These effects are driven primarily by liberal participants and are mediated by their perceived value misalignment and reduced perceptions of organizations’ support of employees. By contrast, conservatives do not differ in their ratings of organizations that remove, possess, or omit DEI policies (Study 1). These patterns are exacerbated in the absence of organizational misconduct: liberals penalize organizations that remove DEI policies more than those that possess them, while conservatives again show no differentiation between DEI policy conditions (Study 2). However, when liberal participants learn of the low diversity of the organization’s leaders, these effects are attenuated (Study 3). Finally, participants preferred to shop at an organization that retained its DEI policy (i.e., Costco) over one that removed it (i.e., Target), highlighting downstream consequences for consumer behavior (Study 4). Our findings reveal that walking back DEI policies may heighten organizations’ reputational and financial risk, as such decisions alienate liberal stakeholders without gaining favor among conservatives.

TBD

Sep 22 2025

Speaker: Xiang Zhang

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Factor Investing with Delays

Sep 24 2025

Speaker: Yoshio Nozawa: University of Toronto

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We present a tractable framework for evaluating the cost of delays induced by infrequent trading in the corporate bond market. Using 341 corporate bond factors from OpenBondAssetPricing.com and machine learning models trained on their underlying signals, we demonstrate that, before transaction costs, 51 factors outperform the bond market. However, this number drops to nearly zero after accounting for trading frictions because the cost of delay is amplified for highly profitable factors. Trading a subset of liquid bonds does not eliminate this cost because liquidity is hard to predict and sales delays cannot be avoided, underscoring the critical impact of delay costs.

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Sep 29 2025

Speaker: Prakash Mishra

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

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Industrial Policy in the Global Semiconductor Sector

Sep 30 2025

Speaker: Penny Goldberg: Yale School of Management

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

The resurgence of subsidies and industrial policies has raised concerns about their potential inefficiency and alignment with multilateral principles. Critics warn that such policies may divert resources to less efficient firms and provoke retaliatory measures from other countries, leading to a wasteful “subsidy race.” However, subsidies for sectors with inherent cross-border externalities can have positive global effects. This paper examines these issues within the semiconductor industry: a key driver of economic growth and innovation with potentially significant learning-by-doing and strategic importance due to its dual-use applications. Our analysis employs a combination of historical analysis, natural language processing, and a model-based approach to measure government support and its impacts. Our findings indicate that government support has been vital for the industry’s growth, with subsidies being the primary form of support. They also highlight the importance of cross-border technology transfers through FDI, business and research collaborations, and technology licensing. China, despite significant subsidies, does not stand out as an outlier compared to other countries, given its market size. Model estimates indicate the presence of learning-by-doing with significant international spillovers. These spillovers likely reflect cross-country technology transfers and the role of fabless clients in disseminating knowledge globally through their interactions with foundries. Such cross-border spillovers are not merely accidental but result from deliberate actions by market participants that cannot be taken for granted. Firms may choose to share knowledge across borders or restrict access to frontier technology, thereby excluding certain countries. Future research will use model estimates to simulate the quantitative implications of subsidies and to explore the dynamics of a “subsidy race” in the semiconductor industry.

A Tale of Two Anomalies: Value, Momentum, and Risk Sentiment

Oct 01 2025

Speaker: Alexei Zhdanov

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We uncover a fundamental divide in how asset pricing anomalies respond to shifts in investor risk sentiment: build-up anomalies thrive in risk-off periods, while resolution anomalies collapse. Using momentum and value as representative cases, we show that value stocks and past losers experience sharp underperformance precisely when risk appetite deteriorates. Trading data offer an additional perspective: during risk-off episodes, retail investors flee value stocks, while short sellers double down, intensifying the drawdown. In contrast, momentum stocks evade similar selling pressure, reinforcing their resilience. Specifically, we distinguish between build-up and resolution anomalies, providing new evidence on the resilience of some anomalies in the face of deteriorating risk sentiment while others unravel. These differences in both returns and investor flows between anomaly types are difficult to coherently reconcile with a comprehensive theoretical explanation.

How Visual Designs Drive Success: Interpretable Generative AI for Data-Driven Design

Oct 02 2025

Speaker: Lan Luo: Columbia University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Visual designs are often used in marketing (e.g., packaging, ads, media covers) to achieve a variety of business outcomes, like improved sales, click-through rates, and brand attitudes. Since designs are complex, unstructured data, it is difficult to determine what features drive their success in a way that is interpretable and managerially actionable. To address this challenge, I develop a novel methodological framework to automatically discover what interpretable features make visual designs in a given domain successful. I first leverage a deep generative text-to-image AI model (by fine-tuning Stable Diffusion 3.5 in my application) that adopts the role of designer and enables visual designs to be described by low-dimensional design representations. Then, I apply a novel adaptation of cutting-edge "mechanistic interpretability" methods—specifically "sparse autoencoders" typically applied to large language models—to scalably discover a taxonomy of interpretable and managerially relevant features predictive of success from these design representations. Finally, I generate image redesigns by manipulating features of interest to help managers scalably pilot data-driven design changes. I apply this framework to discover how book cover redesigns predict sales on Amazon.com using a unique dataset I collected of over 160,000 books. I discover a diverse set of interpretable features related to illustration, typography, composition, and layout. I then create realistic cover redesigns predicted to improve sales by manipulating those features (e.g., redesigns with lower contrast and less separation of text and graphical elements). In a holdout analysis with a rich set of control variables, including just 30 of these discovered features (out of 9,728) improves variation explained in sales by nearly as much as prices and by more than reviews. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that a large publisher could leverage this subset of features to increase annual revenue by over $9.1 million, reflecting a change in sales equivalent to introducing an 8.5% price discount.

Does Politics Matter in Entrepreneurship? Political Polarization, Nonpartisans, and Entrepreneurial Team Performance

Oct 03 2025

Speaker: John de Figueiredo: Duke Univeristy Fuqua School of Business

Time: 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Social homophily has been shown to be a feature of entrepreneurial team formation, but its performance implications remain unclear. This paper examines the recent rise of a new source of social homophily—political homophily—and its relationship to the performance of entrepreneurial founding teams. We construct a dataset linking over 13,000 founders of 3,700 California-based startups to their voter registration records from 2007 to 2019. We first document substantial and rising levels of political homophily. We then analyze how team political composition relates to fundraising outcomes, focusing on the likelihood and speed of raising subsequent funding. We find that teams composed entirely of similar political partisans underperform relative to politically mixed teams. The highest-performing teams include substantial political heterogeneity, encompassing Democrats, Republicans, and Nonpartisan founders. These results remain qualitatively consistent in two-stage estimations using time-varying measures of negative and positive political advertising in each of California’s 14 media markets as instrumental variables. These findings suggest that Nonpartisan founders may serve a cross-cutting or boundary-spanning role, helping teams navigate the coordination challenges of ideological diversity.

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Oct 06 2025

Speaker: Myeongwan Kim

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Alperin

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The Limits of “Unlimited” Offers: How Quantifying Constraints Can Increase Valuation

Oct 06 2025

Speaker: Amanda Geiser: UC Berkeley

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Consumers are often drawn to offers that promise unlimited access to a product or service (e.g., unlimited monthly mobile plans). Because actual consumption opportunities are typically finite, most explicitly unlimited offers (e.g., “unlimited minutes per month”) could be reframed as superficially limited (e.g., “44,640 minutes per month”). Although explicitly unlimited offers are seen as more subjectively valuable (i.e., attractive), superficially limited offers win out on monetary valuation (i.e., willingness to pay, estimated price). Two processes explain why superficially limited frames—despite imposing superficial constraints—elevate valuation. First, their high discrete usage limits serve as anchors that increase anticipated usage. Second, these limits permit comparisons with other (necessarily smaller) finite offers that are simpler to price. Consumers spontaneously recruit and scale up from these reference prices when assessing a superficially limited offer’s monetary value. The extent to which a consumer’s interest in or preference for an offer is predicted by subjective versus monetary valuation—and thus which offer frame dominates—depends on how preferences are elicited and what information consumers have access to (e.g., prices). This work moves research on unlimited offers in a qualitatively new direction and illustrates the theoretical and practical importance of distinguishing between subjective and monetary valuation.

Treasury Auctions and Long-Term Bond Yields

Oct 06 2025

Speaker: Fabricius Somogyi: Northeastern University

Time: 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM

Location:

We study investor demand for Treasuries at auction. We document that from 1992 to 2010, global long-term bond markets have been positively surprised by demand at auctions of long-term US Treasuries. On average, global long-term yields have declined by 0.75 basis points per auction and these declines have been concentrated in auctions with strong investor demand. However, since 2010, this trend has reversed. Investor demand for Treasuries at auction has become more inelastic, while the supply of Treasuries has increased. This weaker demand for Treasuries has coincided with less foreign investor demand and a more illiquid secondary market.

Sustainable Investing in Practice: Objectives, Beliefs, and Limits to Impact

Oct 08 2025

Speaker: Dirk Jenter: London School of Economics

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We survey 509 equity portfolio managers from both traditional and sustainable funds on whether, why, and how they consider firms’ environmental and social (“ES”) performance. ES performance influences stock selection, engagement, and voting for over three quarters of investors, including nearly two thirds of traditional ones. The primary motivation is financial, even among sustainable funds, with few willing to sacrifice financial returns for ES performance. A second driver is constraints, such as fund mandates, firmwide policies, and client wishes, which affect 72% of investors (62% from traditional funds). ES impact is seen as much less important, even for sustainable investors.

Data as a Networked Asset

Oct 10 2025

Speaker: Bo Bian: University of British Columbia

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location: Zoom

Data is non-rival: a firm's customer data informs other firms about their customers. We uncover a network of inter-firm data conduits embedded in mobile applications. Data sharing induces comovement in firms' operational, financial, and stock-market performances, propagates shocks (e.g., cyberattacks), and induces herding in product design. Apple's privacy policy---a shock to inter-firm data flows---weakened these patterns. We develop a dynamic network model, where firms' performance and growth are interconnected through a data-sharing network. A network-augmented Gordon growth formula emerges for valuing data-generated cash flows. Our valuation metrics incorporate high-order and long-term spillovers and reveal systemically important firms.

Treasury Auctions and Long-Term Bond Yields

Oct 13 2025

Speaker: Fabricius Somogyi: Northeastern University

Time: 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM

Location:

We study investor demand for Treasuries at auction. We document that from 1992 to 2010, global long-term bond markets have been positively surprised by demand at auctions of long-term US Treasuries. On average, global long-term yields have declined by 0.75 basis points per auction and these declines have been concentrated in auctions with strong investor demand. However, since 2010, this trend has reversed. Investor demand for Treasuries at auction has become more inelastic, while the supply of Treasuries has increased. This weaker demand for Treasuries has coincided with less foreign investor demand and a more illiquid secondary market.

Free Markets No More? How to Ensure a Successful Return for Industrial Policy

Oct 14 2025

Speaker: Ann Harrison: Berkeley Haas

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Tseng

History is full of examples of successful and unsuccessful industrial policies. The critical question is not whether to engage in such policies but how they are designed and implemented. Industrial policy can work, but only with strict adherence to sensible guidelines based on sound economic practice, political economy considerations, and historical context. In this lecture I review the necessary foundation for a successful industrial policy. We incorporate both recent theory and evidence, as well as country-specific examples drawn from China, India, and the United States. About the speaker: Ann E. Harrison is a renowned economist and one of the most highly cited scholars on foreign investment and multinational firms. She served as the 15th dean of the Haas School of Business and was the second woman to lead the school since its founding in 1898. Harrison is a Life Member of the Council of Foreign Relations, as well as a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She serves on a number of Boards, including UNPRME, the Berkeley Haas Advisory Board, and the board of the French business school EDHEC.

Hedging and Healing: How Business Cycle Exposure Affects the Safety Net

Oct 15 2025

Speaker: Xuelin Li: Columbia University

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

Tax exemption and government support are intended to insulate non-profit hospitals from business cycles, who are expected to provide stable community benefits. This paper documents erosion in the stability of this social safety net. The rising popularity of high-deductible health plans (HDHPs) reduces insurance risk sharing and increases the cyclicality of hospital operations. Hospital cash flows and utilization comove more strongly with local income shocks in high-HDHP areas. Claims data confirm that HDHP enrollees reduce inpatient visits in downturns, while hospitals cross-subsidize by raising prices for all patients. Over the longer run, hospitals hedge this risk by cutting staff, investment, uncompensated care, and Medicare admissions. Surprisingly, mission-driven non-profit hospitals hedge more aggressively, reflecting their lack of geographic diversification and internal capital markets compared to large for-profit systems.

TBD

Oct 16 2025

Speaker: Dominik Supera: Columbia University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Blind Targeting: Personalization under Third-Party Privacy Constraints

Oct 17 2025

Speaker: Anya Shchetkina: University of Pennsylvania

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Major advertising platforms have recently increased privacy protections by limiting advertisers’ access to individual-level data. Instead of providing access to the granular raw data, the platforms only allow a limited number of aggregate queries to a dataset, which is further protected by adding differentially private noise. This paper studies whether and how advertisers can design effective targeting policies within these restrictive privacy preserving data environments. To achieve this, I develop a method based on Bayesian optimization that includes two innovations over the classic setup: (i) integral updating of posterior which allows to select best regions to query rather than points and (ii) targeting-aware acquisition function that dynamically selects regions most informative for the targeting task. I identify the conditions of the dataset and privacy environment that necessitate the use of such a “smart” querying strategy. I also show when a simple strategy, such as uniform binning, is sufficient. Finally, I apply the strategy to the Criteo AI Labs dataset for uplift modeling. I show that a simple benchmark strategy fails under differential privacy requirement in some settings. However, the strategic querying method delivers a robust performance that achieves the same level as a non-privacy-protected state-of-the-art machine learning method.

Rapid Research

Oct 17 2025

Speaker: Bryan Bollinger: Tuck School of Business,
Brian Tomlin: Tuck School of Business

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:30 PM

Location: Volanakis

Automation Under Constraints: Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and Firm Investment

Oct 17 2025

Speaker: Meghana Ayyagari: George Washington

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location: Zoom

A 33% depreciation of the yen from 2012–2015 made imported industrial robots cheaper for U.S. firms. Surprisingly, adoption surged among financially constrained firms - those with high leverage, low cash, or debt-constraint language in 10-Ks - while unconstrained firms barely responded. We rationalize this with a collateral model in which robots are pledgeable but also require non-pledgeable setup costs, so constrained firms face a higher effective cash “invoice” per robot and display stronger investment elasticities to both capital prices and borrowing rates. Using automation machinery import records, including robots, linked to Compustat, we find that constrained firms are about 1.5-1.7 × more responsive to exchange rate shocks and roughly 5 × more responsive to interest rate shocks than unconstrained firms. At the same time, exchange rate shocks have 2-9 × larger effects on automation adoption than interest rate shocks, underscoring that capital-input prices dominate borrowing conditions in shaping investment. Cross-sectional patterns are consistent with financing frictions, rather than risk or intangible setup costs, driving these differences. These results highlight a collateral channel through which macro shocks reallocate technology adoption toward constrained incumbents, with implications for diffusion, competitiveness, and inequality.

Tariffs and State Capacity: A Specific Example

Oct 21 2025

Speaker: Martin Rotemberg: New York University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

Evasion is a key obstacle to raising customs revenue. We study how improved administrative capacity enables governments to combat evasion by redesigning tariff codes. Using newly compiled historical records from the Early American Republic, we show that as Customs administration matured, the tariff code became more complex and more reliant on specific (quantity-based) tariffs in preference to ad valorem (value-based) ones. We develop an equilibrium model of tariff administration with costly verification of declared values that explains these twin trends: Administrative capacity allows Customs officials to disaggregate goods and assess tailored specific tariffs, obviating misvaluation while minimizing price distortions. The model successfully predicts several additional empirical patterns: Specific tariffs tend to be assessed on goods that are homogeneous, cheap, or lightly taxed.

The impostor phenomenon as a double-edged sword: An intrainidividual attribute framing theory of workplace impostor thoughts and creativity

Oct 22 2025

Speaker: Basima Tewfik: MIT

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

Existing research on the impostor phenomenon—or ‘workplace impostor thoughts’—typically portrays such thoughts as undermining creativity: Individuals who believe that others overestimate their capabilities are assumed to be less creative. Initial theorizing, however, hints at a more complex reality: Workplace impostor thoughts sometimes precede creative highs, and at other times creative lows. Despite these allusions, prior work has not elaborated them into a coherent theory or identified the mechanisms that explain them, leaving open the critical question of how and when workplace impostor thoughts enable and inhibit creativity. Accordingly, we build a theory of workplace impostor thoughts and creativity that looks within a given individual. We theorize that workplace impostor thoughts have opposing effects. When construed positively—as signals to rise to the occasion—they foster task-focused attention that enhances creativity. When construed negatively—as reminders of not measuring up—they fuel rumination-based distraction that impairs creativity. We test this model in two experiments and two experience sampling studies across diverse samples of comedians, executive MBAs, and full-time employees (n = 3748 observations from 1062 individuals). We conclude with contributions to theory on workplace impostor thoughts and creativity.

Collateralized Loan Obligations as Fire-Sale Insulation

Oct 22 2025

Speaker: William Diamond: University of Pennsylvania

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We develop a model where CLOs are the optimal financial structure for securitizing assets that trade in illiquid markets. CLOs hold portfolios of risky loans, sell low-quality loans during crises, and finance themselves with safe, long-maturity debt. Banks that invest in CLOs’ safe debt are insulated from loan fire sales that could trigger a run if banks held risky loans directly. Unlike banks, CLOs with long-term financing can hold underperforming loans during a fire sale without triggering a run. Introducing CLOs to a bank-only financial system improves welfare and financial stability, but macroprudential regulation should also constrain CLOs’ leverage.

Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs

Oct 23 2025

Speaker: Magie Cheng

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

We study how media firms can use LLMs to generate news content that aligns with multiple objectives – making content more engaging while maintaining a preferred level of polarization/slant consistent with the firm’s editorial policy. Using news articles from The New York Times, we first show that more engaging human-written content tends to be more polarizing. Further, naively employing LLMs (with prompts or standard Direct Preference Optimization approaches) to generate more engaging content can also increase polarization. This has an important managerial and policy implication: using LLMs without building in controls for limiting slant can exacerbate news media polarization. We present a constructive solution to this problem based on the Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO) algorithm, a novel approach that integrates Direct Preference Optimization with multi-objective optimization techniques. We build on open-source LLMs and develop a new language model that simultaneously makes content more engaging while maintaining a preferred editorial stance. Our model achieves this by modifying content characteristics strongly associated with polarization but that have a relatively smaller impact on engagement. Our approach and findings apply to other settings where firms seek to use LLMs for content creation to achieve multiple objectives, e.g., advertising and social media.

Transportation Disruptions and Prices

Oct 28 2025

Speaker: Giulia Brancaccio: New York University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

Do transportation disruptions have significant impact on prices? If so, in what ways? And, what can we do about it? This paper aims to address these questions by focusing on maritime transportation (ports, and ships), which moves more than 80% of international trade. We use granular data to measure port activity and disruptions, and quantify their impact on commodity price increases, while addressing a first-order endogeneity problem. We illustrate that port congestion is a composite of different terms (service time, capacity, and demand) that give rise to different kinds of disruptions, which in turn need different types of policy interventions (e.g. automation vs. infrastructure investment). Motivated by our findings, we provide a stylized international trade model to investigate the impact of disruptions on macro outcomes. The model includes two key features of transportation: (i) infrastructure bottlenecks; and (ii) endogenous freight costs and showcases that transportation disruptions lead to shortages of goods, which in turn increase prices.

Long-Short Interest Rate Confusion

Oct 29 2025

Speaker: Chen Wang: University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

We identify a common misconception that expected future changes in the policy rate predict corresponding future changes in long-term interest rates. People forecast similar shapes for the paths of policy and long rates over the next four quarters. This is a mistake because long rates should already incorporate public information about future policy rates and do not positively co-move with expected changes in policy rates. We show that this long-short rate confusion persists even among professional forecasters and distorts the real behavior of borrowers and investors. Our findings raise concerns about the efficacy of predictable monetary policy. When the central bank signals future policy rate increases, households and firms rush to lock in long-term debt before anticipated increases in long rates, undermining the intended contractionary effects of monetary tightening. These findings can help explain why forward guidance and gradual policy adjustment have often been less effective than standard macroeconomic models predict.

How Political Ideology Shapes Prosocial Consumer Behavior Research

Oct 30 2025

Speaker: Ethan Milne: Western University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

The current investigation suggests that a lack of political diversity exists in the stimuli used in prosocial consumer behavior research, which poses challenges for the reliability and generalizability of such work. We review prosocial consumer behavior research from the leading marketing journals across twenty years and show that the study stimuli therein exhibit a consistent liberal skew. In a survey of contemporary prosocial consumer behavior researchers, we identify that the political beliefs of researchers and bias against conservative cause areas likely explain the observed political skew of stimuli in prosocial consumer research. Finally, two primary and three supplementary experiments demonstrate that unacknowledged political leaning of prosocial stimuli, and the unmeasured political beliefs of participants, can distort estimates of prior findings and theory if not accounted for in a thoughtful manner. This work contributes to the literature on prosocial consumer behavior by identifying a bias in stimuli selection that has resulted in an incomplete and distorted understanding of important theoretical frameworks and thus has likely hampered our knowledge of the full nature of prosocial consumer behavior.

Fall Accounting Camp

Oct 31 2025

Speaker: Miao Liu: Boston College,
Rachel Geoffroy: Ohio State,
Stefan Huber: University of Pennsylvania,
Joaquin Peris: Purdue University,
Reining Pettachi: Georgetown University

Time: 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location: Uhrig

The Time-Unboundedness of Caregiving: Why Caregiving Responsibilities Decrease the Likelihood of Choosing Leisure

Oct 31 2025

Speaker: Ximena Garcia-Rada: Texas A&M University

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Many consumers have major time-consuming and oft-stressful responsibilities—such as caregiving, work, and school. The present research examines how caregiving responsibilities affect consumers’ choices, focusing on whether, why, and when caregiving responsibilities, compared to other major responsibilities (e.g., work and school), may uniquely discourage the choice of leisure consumption. Across a series of preregistered studies, primarily focused on working parents, reminding consumers of their caregiving responsibilities (vs. other major responsibilities) decreased their likelihood of choosing leisure. One key reason is that compared to other major responsibilities, consumers perceive caregiving responsibilities as more “time-unbounded” (i.e., as responsibilities that are more continuous over time, without well-defined limits, and unable to be checked off as completed for a given period of time), thereby decreasing the likelihood of choosing leisure. Therefore, process-consistent interventions that blur the boundaries between caregiving responsibilities and leisure consumption—such as leisure-bundling (i.e., solo leisure consumption at the same time as performing caregiving responsibilities) and co-leisure (i.e., engaging in leisure consumption together with the care-recipient)—can increase the likelihood of choosing leisure. Altogether, this research contributes to understanding and addressing the consumer well-being challenges that are uniquely associated with caregiving responsibilities.

Mental Models and Financial Forecasts

Oct 31 2025

Speaker: Paul Decaire: Arizona State University

Time: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Location: Zoom

We uncover financial professionals' mental models—the reasoning they use to explain their quantitative forecasts. We organize our analysis around a framework of top-down and bottom-up attention, where analysts endogenously choose both a valuation method and how to allocate attention across variables. Using the near-universe of 2.1 million equity analyst reports, we collect the valuation methods analysts adopt to compute their price targets. To measure attention, we then prompt large language models (LLMs) on a subset of over 300,000 reports to extract 11.8 million lines of reasoning—each combining a topic, valuation channel, time horizon, and sentiment. To validate the reliability of our output, we introduce a multi-step LLM prompting strategy and new diagnostic tools. We document five main findings. (1) Analysts exhibit sparse and rigid mental representations. (2) The choice of valuation methods and topic focus is closely linked. (3) Attention allocation across variables plays a bigger role than valuation methods in explaining both changes in valuations over time and disagreement across analysts. (4) Biases in analysts' forecasts are driven by over-reaction to firm-specific features and under-reaction to macro-related ones. (5) These biases translate into asset price patterns: topics analysts overreact (underreact) to predict lower (higher) realized returns.

TBD

Nov 03 2025

Speaker: Felipe Barbieri: Tuck School of Business

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Global Sourcing Flexibility: The Role of Contracts in LNG

Nov 04 2025

Speaker: Catherine Thomas: London School of Economics

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

This paper explores how firms design sourcing strategies that provide flexibility to adjust to demand shocks. We model buyers’ sourcing decisions in settings where goods are indivisible and trade can take place both within long-term relationships and in spot markets. Reduced-form evidence from the global LNG industry between 2009 and 2019 shows that larger buyers source from more suppliers and often from multiple suppliers within a given week. Shipments sourced through contractual relationships—which are more efficient on average—respond to buyer-specific demand shocks. Estimating the model for the same period indicates that maintaining several supplier relationships offers greater resilience to shocks than relying solely on spot markets. Counterfactual analysis suggests that adaptation within contracts contributes substantially to overall value creation in the global LNG industry.

Chronologically Consistent Large Language Models

Nov 05 2025

Speaker: Asaf Manela: Washington University

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

Large language models are increasingly used in social sciences, but their training data can introduce lookahead bias and training leakage. A good chronologically consistent language model requires efficient use of training data to maintain accuracy despite time-restricted data. Here, we overcome this challenge by training a suite of chronologically consistent large language models, ChronoBERT and ChronoGPT, which incorporate only the text data that would have been available at each point in time. Despite this strict temporal constraint, our models achieve strong performance on natural language processing benchmarks, outperforming or matching widely used models (e.g., BERT), and remain competitive with larger open-weight models. Lookahead bias is model and application-specific because even if a chronologically consistent language model has poorer language comprehension, a regression or prediction model applied on top of the language model can compensate. In an asset pricing application predicting next-day stock returns from financial news, we find that ChronoBERT and ChronoGPT’s real-time outputs achieve Sharpe ratios comparable to a much larger Llama model, indicating that lookahead bias is modest. Our results demonstrate a scalable, practical framework to mitigate training leakage, ensuring more credible backtests and predictions across finance and other social science domains.

Ambiguous Dynamic Treatment Regimes: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Nov 06 2025

Speaker: Soroush Saghafian: Harvard University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Alperin

A main research goal in various studies is to use an observational data set and provide a new set of counterfactual guidelines that can yield causal improvements. Dynamic Treatment Regimes (DTRs) are widely studied to formalize this process and enable researchers to find guidelines that are both personalized and dynamic. However, available methods in finding optimal DTRs often rely on assumptions that are violated in real-world applications (e.g., medical decision making or public policy), especially when (a) the existence of unobserved confounders cannot be ignored, and (b) the unobserved confounders are time varying (e.g., affected by previous actions). When such assumptions are violated, one often faces ambiguity regarding the underlying causal model that is needed to be assumed to obtain an optimal DTR. This ambiguity is inevitable because the dynamics of unobserved confounders and their causal impact on the observed part of the data cannot be understood from the observed data. Motivated by a case study of finding superior treatment regimes for patients who underwent transplantation in our partner hospital (Mayo Clinic) and faced a medical condition known as new-onset diabetes after transplantation, we extend DTRs to a new class termed Ambiguous Dynamic Treatment Regimes (ADTRs), in which the causal impact of treatment regimes is evaluated based on a “cloud” of potential causal models. We then connect ADTRs to Ambiguous Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (APOMDPs) proposed by Saghafian (2018), and consider unobserved confounders as latent variables but with ambiguous dynamics and causal effects on observed variables. Using this connection, we develop two reinforcement learning methods termed Direct Augmented V-Learning (DAV-Learning) and Safe Augmented V-Learning (SAV-Learning), which enable using the observed data to effectively learn an optimal treatment regime. We establish theoretical results for these learning methods, including (weak) consistency and asymptotic normality. We further evaluate the performance of these learning methods both in our case study (using clinical data) and in simulation experiments (using synthetic data). We find promising results for our proposed approaches, showing that they perform well even compared with an imaginary oracle who knows both the true causal model (of the data-generating process) and the optimal regime under that model. Finally, we highlight that our approach enables a two-way personalization; obtained treatment regimes can be personalized based on both patients’ characteristics and physicians’ preferences.

News Consumption, Recommender Systems, and Polarization

Nov 06 2025

Speaker: Mingduo Zhao: UC Berkeley

Time: 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM

Location: Volanakis

Recommender systems shape how people consume news, possibly reinforcing political polarization. We run two field experiments to identify how user preferences and algorithms interact to amplify partisan news consumption. In the first study, 2,065 U.S. participants use blank Google accounts and a browser extension to track users’ activities on Google News. The first-round recommendations are exogenous, allowing us to show that ideologically aligned content draws more clicks. A second experiment uses bots to randomly click on articles, revealing that each click leads to more aligned content. These two pieces of causal evidence establish a feedback loop between user preference and algorithmic recommendations. We also find in the field study that, after interacting with the recommender system, people’s level of polarization increases. A structural model combining a discrete choice model (demand side) with a multi-armed bandit algorithm (supply side) confirms this positive-feedback mechanism. The model is then used to simulate a counterfactual "ideology-blind" recommendation policy that ignores political slant when curating content. While this policy reduces polarization, it comes at the cost of likely lower engagement. Overall, the findings provide causal evidence that personalized algorithms reinforce partisan consumption and exacerbate polarization. They also uncover a fundamental trade-off between mitigating polarization and sustaining engagement, which offers important insights for both platform owners and policymakers.

Incumbent’s Advantage via Expertise Asymmetry: Revitalization of the Chinese Pearl Industry with Livestreaming

Nov 07 2025

Speaker: Rebecca Karp: Harvard Business School

Time: 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

TBD

Nov 10 2025

Speaker: Patrick Farrell

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Nov 11 2025

Speaker: Xiang Ding: Georgetown University

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Nov 12 2025

Speaker: Evan Apfelbaum: Boston University

Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Location: Buchanan 151

TBD

Nov 12 2025

Speaker: Suproteem Sarkar: University of Chicago

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Nov 17 2025

Speaker: Xiang Zhang

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Nov 18 2025

Speaker: Nate Baum-Snow: University of Toronto

Time: 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

Nov 19 2025

Speaker: Clifton Green: Emory University

Time: 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM

Location: Volanakis

TBD

All Research Seminars

All ResearchSeminars

Filter results | Clear Filters

Generative AI in Action: Field Experimental Evidence on Worker Performance in E-Commerce Customer Service Operations

When do women present themselves as leaders?

Opinion Shopping and Auditor Demand: A Novel Framework

Semi-Personalized Pricing: Algorithms and Implications

Corporate Cash Flow Outcomes Across Presidencies: Still a Presidential Puzzle

Synthetic Potential Outcomes and Causal Mixture Identifiability

The Unfulfilled Promise of Meritocracy in Organizations

Operationalizing Emotional Load: The Human Side of Queueing Systems

TBD

Justice for Sale: Explaining the Rise in Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Wage Income and Profits, Workers and Owners

Setting the Stage: The Interplay of Firm Boundary and Learning at the Opera

TBD

Advertising Securities

How independent creative workers experience the pressures of widespread appeal on digital platforms

Teaching Business School Students in the 21st Century: data, coding, AI, and more

Revolving Credit to SMEs: The Role of Business Credit Cards

Import Price Shocks and Heterogeneous Innovation Responses

AI/ML Seminar

Artificial Intelligence and the Labor Market

Dynamic Matching for Refugee Resettlement: A Case Study

International Cooperation, Trade, and Common-Pool Resources

The Power of the Common Task Framework

The Discovery of Doubt: A Framework for Organizational Learning from Questionable Ideas

TBD

When You Say It: How the Timing of LGBTQ+ Allyship Displays Shapes Evaluations of Organizations

Making Talk Cheap: LLMs and Signaling on Digital Labor Platforms

Common Investors Across the Capital Structure: Private Debt Funds as Dual Holders

Uncertainty Quantification in Digital Twin Simulations

Growth is Getting Harder to Find, Not Ideas

Looking the Part? How Candidates’ Race and Attire Shape Employer Hiring Decisions in a Low-Wage Labor Market

The Welfare Benefits of Pay-As-You-Go Financing

TBD

Security Losses, Interbank Markets, and Monetary Policy Transmission: Evidence from the Eurozone

Learning about contingencies: The power of initial simplicity

TBD

TBD

Operations Spring Conference

Operations Seminar Conference

TBD

Marketing Camp

Lightening Talks - End of year celebration!

Junior Faculty Strategy Research Summer Camp

Junior Faculty Strategy Research Summer Camp

Explaining the Compensation of Superstar CEOs

The Debt Ceiling’s Disruptive Impact: Evidence from Many Markets

The Effects of Cryptocurrency Wealth on Household Consumption

Mechanism Design under Costly Signaling: the Value of Non-Coordination

Export Restrictions as Industrial Policy

Losing Liberals without Convincing Conservatives? How Organizations’ Removal of DEI Policies Influences External Stakeholders’ Perceptions

TBD

Factor Investing with Delays

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Industrial Policy in the Global Semiconductor Sector

A Tale of Two Anomalies: Value, Momentum, and Risk Sentiment

How Visual Designs Drive Success: Interpretable Generative AI for Data-Driven Design

Does Politics Matter in Entrepreneurship? Political Polarization, Nonpartisans, and Entrepreneurial Team Performance

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The Limits of “Unlimited” Offers: How Quantifying Constraints Can Increase Valuation

Treasury Auctions and Long-Term Bond Yields

Sustainable Investing in Practice: Objectives, Beliefs, and Limits to Impact

Data as a Networked Asset

Treasury Auctions and Long-Term Bond Yields

Free Markets No More? How to Ensure a Successful Return for Industrial Policy

Hedging and Healing: How Business Cycle Exposure Affects the Safety Net

TBD

Blind Targeting: Personalization under Third-Party Privacy Constraints

Rapid Research

Automation Under Constraints: Exchange Rates, Interest Rates, and Firm Investment

Tariffs and State Capacity: A Specific Example

The impostor phenomenon as a double-edged sword: An intrainidividual attribute framing theory of workplace impostor thoughts and creativity

Collateralized Loan Obligations as Fire-Sale Insulation

Balancing Engagement and Polarization: Multi-Objective Alignment of News Content Using LLMs

Transportation Disruptions and Prices

Long-Short Interest Rate Confusion

How Political Ideology Shapes Prosocial Consumer Behavior Research

Fall Accounting Camp

All Research
Seminars