Organizations & Markets

This paper estimates a structural model of unconventional monetary policy transmission through bank balance sheets using cross-sectional instruments for loan and deposit demand. We estimate the demand for banking at a branch-specific level from the response of a bank's quantities at one branch to interest rate changes caused by demand shocks at other branches. Depositors are considerably less sensitive to interest rates than corporate or mortgage borrowers.

Organizations regularly divide members in ways that maximize diversity, yet it is unclear whether efforts to induce diversity are effective in producing lasting ties. In this paper, we explore the extent to which an organization can induce diverse networks in small groups versus large groups, and in the short term (while induced contact persists) and in the long term (after induced contact ends). We evaluate this in an incoming MBA cohort as they are assigned to 70-person sections and five-person learning teams, both intended to maximize diversity and facilitate diverse ties.

We document that a large share of the gender pay gap in Brazil is due to women working at lower-paying employers. At the same time, women's revealed-preference ranking of employers is less increasing in pay compared to that of men. To interpret these facts, we develop an empirical equilibrium search model with endogenous gender differences in pay, amenities, and recruiting intensities across employers.

Technology is often embodied in expensive and indivisible capital goods. As a result, the small scale of firms in developing countries could hinder investment and productivity. This paper argues that market interactions between small firms can alleviate this concern. We design and implement a survey of manufacturing firms in Uganda, which uncovers an active rental market for large machines among small firms. We then build an equilibrium model of firm behavior and estimate it with our data.

We show that the global human capital increase during the 20th century contributed to structural transformation. We document that almost half of the decline in aggregate agricultural employment was driven by new birth cohorts entering the labor market. We use data on educational attainment and compile a comprehensive list of policy reforms to interpret the differences in agricultural employment across cohorts. We find that the increase in schooling led to a sharp reduction in the agricultural labor supply by equipping younger cohorts with skills more valued out of agriculture.

We extract aggregate demand and supply shocks for the US economy from real-time survey data on inflation and real GDP growth using a novel identification scheme. Our approach exploits non-Gaussian features of macroeconomic forecast revisions and imposes minimal theoretical assumptions. After verifying that our results for US post-war business cycle fluctuations are largely in line with the prevailing consensus, we proceed to study output and price fluctuations during COVID-19. We attribute two thirds of the decline in 2020:Q1 GDP to a negative shock to aggregate demand.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the National Quality Forum have endorsed the 30-day mortality rate as an important indicator of hospital quality. Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether post-discharge mortality rates are reasonable measures of hospital quality as they consider the frequency of an event that occurs after a patient is discharged and no longer under the watch and care of hospital staff. Estimating the causal effect of length-of-stay (LOS) on post-discharge mortality from retrospective data introduces a number of econometric challenges.

An information system is a primitive structure that defines which agents can initially get information and how such information is then distributed to others. From political and organizational economics to privacy, information systems arise in various contexts and, unlike information itself, can be easily observed empirically. We introduce a methodology to characterize how information systems affect strategic behavior. This involves proving a revelation principle result for a novel class of constrained information design problems.

We study how monetary policy and risk shocks affect major asset prices (interest rates, stocks, long-term bonds) in three large economies: the US, the euro area, and Japan. Using a high-frequency framework, we fail to find evidence in favor of monetary policy affecting foreign asset prices through a risk channel. There is however a strong global common component in risk shocks affecting asset prices in all three economies.