The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused huge disruptions to the world economy. As a number of countries make progress in containing this outbreak, some of them have started to reopen their economy. We study the curves of recovery after reopening the economy, using a unique real-time dataset of daily...

Car buying for more than 80% of consumers involves obtaining a loan at a dealership in the U.S. Many of these buyers unknowingly pay an undisclosed interest rate markup charged by car dealerships, i.e., a dealer markup. The opaqueness of the dealer markup practice and a regulatory vacuum have...

Governments worldwide have spent billions of dollars on monetary incentives for consumers,such as tax credits, to encourage the adoption of eco-friendly (“green”) products. However, thereis little consensus regarding the effectiveness of tax credit incentives in increasing green...

With the rapid growth of e-commerce, financial products are being brought onto online platforms. However, due to the scarcity of data in this new product domain, online platforms face challenges in predicting users' purchase behavior. In this paper, we study whether we can "transfer'' knowledge...

Despite the widespread adoption of recommender systems by online investment platforms, empirical research into their impact on online investors’ behaviors is scarce. Using data from a global e-commerce platform, the authors of this study adopt a regression discontinuity design and causally...

Most buyers are unaware that dealers can mark up interest rates for auto loans regardless of buyers' risk profiles, potentially leading to gender discrimination in the third most prevalent consumer debt category in the U.S. Using individual transaction-level data from a 20% random sample of U.S....