Research In Progress

Experiments in Choice (with Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir)

Although a large body of experimental evidence demonstrates deviations from full rationality in consumer decision making, it is unclear whether such irrationality generates economically meaningful effects outside of the laboratory.  In a series of field experiments conducted in a variety of retail settings, we directly test the fitness of strict rationality as an approximation of real world consumer behavior.  Our results indicate systematic and significant departures from strict rationality in consumer purchasing behavior that may lead to misleading estimates of key parameters.  These estimation errors do not appear to be driven by unobserved product attributes, consumer characteristics, or functional form assumptions.

How Many Pears Would a Pear Packer Pack if a Pear Packer Could Pack Pears at Quasi-Exogenously Varying Piece Rates?  An Empirical Evaluation of Inter-temporal Labor Supply (with Tal Gross)

Standard life-cycle models of labor supply predict a positive covariance between effort and temporary changes in wages.  In contrast, income targeting models predict a negative relationship, while models of reference-dependent preference predict a negative relationship only when such changes are unanticipated.  We exploit a unique dataset collected from a pear packing plant to empirically test the differential predictions of these three models.  These data consist of both worker-day level payroll data and data from a field collection effort that generated worker-minute level performance data.  We find evidence that is consistent with simple income targeting: workers reduce effort in response to both predicted and unpredicted transitory increases in piece rate pay.
   
One Law, One Justice?  An Empirical Analysis of the Behavior of U.S. Bankruptcy Judges (with Antoinette Schoar)

Scholars across disciplines agree the idea that the disposition of a case can be determined by the personality of individual judges is anathema to the rule of law. But, whether such arbitrary judicial discretion is exercised is the subject of much debate.  Using detailed data for approximately 20,000 bankruptcy cases, we examine the magnitude of the heterogeneity of behavior across bankruptcy judges.  We find significant and consistent differences in the likelihood of granting and denying key bankruptcy motions.  Instead of idiosyncratic tendencies, we find a strong systematic pattern in which judges tend to rule in favor of or against debtors across all types of motions; a bias that has a large, significant and consistent impact on the long run financial performance of these firms.  These findings suggest that the particular judge that a firm draws in Chapter 11 is an important determinant of how the governing law and procedures are applied. 
   
Leapfrogging Technology: Sequential Technology Adoption in the Case of Broadband Internet

One of the basic unanswered questions about technology diffusion is the extent to which adoption of an earlier technology impacts the adoption and diffusion of subsequent technologies.   In an effort to answer this question I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the cost of early dial-up internet adoption to examine whether adoption of dial-up internet access predicts the adoption and diffusion of broadband internet services.  When NSFNET served as the principal backbone for the internet, the availability and cost of internet access within the United States was directly related to proximity to the physical backbone.  In 1995 the NSFNET Backbone Service was retired and replaced by a network of private, commercial networks, leading to an excess of network capacity in all but the most rural areas.  I show that proximity to NSFNET affects early dial-up internet adoption, then trace out the impact of early adoption on the diffusion of broadband based technologies post-1995.

Golden Pigs and Fire Horses: Birth Cohorts, Capacity Constraints and Health Outcomes (with Srikanth Kadiyala and Mireille Jacobson)

Despite improvements in recent years, maternal and infant health outcomes in the developing countries of Asia still lag behind those in the developed world.  Moreover, significant disparities exist across urban and rural areas within these developing countries.  In this study, we take advantage of the fact that fertility in nations and amongst populations that follow the lunar calendar varies considerably according to whether a year is considered astrologically lucky or unlucky.  Our work assesses the impact of capacity constraints due to fluctuations in the number of children and mothers seeking medical care, birth frequency, and early teen pregnancy on child and maternal health.