What is the role of startups within the innovation ecosystem? Since 2000, startups have grown in their share of commercializing research from top U.S. universities; however, prior work has little to say on the particular advantages of startup ventures in the innovation process relative to more...

Information technology (IT) can enhance firms' long-run performance but is also a risky investment, with high fixed costs and uncertain returns. Whether market events influence this tradeoff has received limited attention. We leverage the healthcare context to empirically examine hospitals' IT...

This study examines "tunneling" practices through which health care providers covertly extract profit by making inflated payments for goods and services to commonly-owned related parties. While incentives to tunnel exist across sectors, health care providers may find it uniquely advantageous to...

Good data on the size and composition of the independent contractor workforce are elusive, with household survey and administrative tax data often disagreeing on levels and trends. We carried out a series of focus groups to learn how self-employed independent contractors speak about their work....

Private equity (PE) plays an increasingly important role in the modern US economy. However, its impacts on owned-firms are incompletely understood. We exploit a historically large leveraged buyout of a national hospital chain to examine how the full life cycle of PE influences hospital-level...

Consumer reviews, especially those expressing concerns of product quality, are crucial for the credibility of online platforms. However, reviews that criticize a product or service may also dissuade buyers from using the platform, creating an incentive to blur the visibility of critical reviews....

Differentiated product consumption choices made without full information can lead to welfare losses from regret and missed opportunities, but a lack of post-purchase usage data has prevented their exploration. Using novel data on individual ownership and post-purchase usage of video games, we...

Using data on Software Development Kits (SDKs), we study SDKs in Android apps vis-à-vis the adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by the European Union in May 2018. Relative to US-only apps, the number of non-Google SDKs used per app in 5 major European countries (EU5)...

High-speed internet has increased the amount of information available in health care markets. Online information may improve health outcomes if it reduces information frictions and helps patients choose higher quality providers or causes providers to improve quality. We examine how health...

We develop a stylized model that allows us to estimate a value-added measure for nursing homes ("SNFs") which accounts for patient selection both into and out of a SNF. We use the model, together with detailed data on the physical and mental health of about 6 million Medicare SNF patients...