This study analyzes information production and trading behavior of banks with lending relationships. We combine trade-by-trade supervisory data and credit-registry data to examine banks' proprietary trading in borrower stocks around a large number of corporate events. We find that relationship...

What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations and oversight. Here, we introduce a new, overlooked perspective. We suggest that the cognitive demands inherent in...

We study the implications of police discretion for public safety. Highway patrol officers exercise discretion over fines by deviating from statutory fine rules. Relying on variation across officers in this discretionary behavior, we find that harsher sanctions reduce future traffic offending and...

This paper investigates how tax rates and tax enforcement jointly impact fiscal capacity in low-income countries. We study a policy experiment in the D.R. Congo that randomly assigned 38,028 property owners to the status quo tax rate or to a rate reduction. This variation in tax liabilities...

We conducted a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of an innovative police patrol program on sexual harassment in public spaces in Hyderabad, India. In collaboration with the Hyderabad City Police, we randomized both exposure to police patrols and the visibility of officers by...

Human decision-makers frequently override the recommendations generated by predictive algorithms, but it is unclear whether these discretionary overrides add valuable private information or reintroduce human biases and mistakes. We develop new quasi-experimental tools to measure the impact of...

Given the use of an individual's arrest history for many economic and social outcomes, reducing conviction-less arrests (arrests that result in no charges or where the defendant is found not guilty) is an important policy goal. This paper examines which officers are making conviction-less...

We examine empirically how legal origin, creditor rights, property rights, legal formalism, and financial development affect the design of price and non-price terms of bank loans in almost 60 countries. Our results support the law and finance view that private contracts reflect differences in...

This paper considers the use of outcomes-based tests for detecting racial bias in the context of police searches of motor vehicles. It shows that the test proposed in Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) can also be applied in a more general environment where police officers are heterogenous in...

This paper provides new evidence on the role of preference-based versus statistical discrimination in racial profiling using a unique data set that includes the race of both the driver and the officer. We first generalize the model presented in Knowles, Persico and Todd (2001) and show that the...