We investigate the informativeness of hygiene signals in online reviews, and their effect on consumer choice and restaurant hygiene. We first extract signals of hygiene from Yelp. Among all dimensions that regulators monitor through mandated restaurant inspections, we find that reviews are more...

Digitization has led to product proliferation, straining traditional institutions for product discovery; but digitization has also spawned crowd-based rating systems. We compare the relative impacts of professional critics and crowd-based Amazon star ratings on consumer welfare in book...

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in...

We examine how export expansion induced by the U.S-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement (BTA) affected migration, school enrollment, work and healthcare use of young children and adolescents in Vietnam. To do so, we exploit variation in tariff reductions across industries associated with the BTA...

Migration outflows, especially of young people, may deprive an economy of entrepreneurial energy and innovative ideas. We exploit exogenous variation in emigration from Italian local labor markets to show that between 2008 and 2015 larger emigration flows reduced firm creation. The decline...

We use panel U.S. tax data spanning 2008-2013 to study the impact of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) young adult provision on two important demographic outcomes--childbearing and marriage. The impact on childbearing is theoretically ambiguous, as gaining insurance may increase access to...

The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on. An instrumental variable technique is employed to estimate peer effects in opioid...

We study the long-run career mobility of young immigrants, mostly refugees, from Vietnam who moved to the United States during 1989-1995. This third and final migration wave of young Vietnamese immigrants was sparked by unexpected events that culminated in the Amerasian Homecoming Act....

We conduct an empirical case study of the U.S. beer industry to analyze the disruptive effects of locally-manufactured, craft brands on market structure, an increasingly common phenomenon in CPG industries typically attributed to the emerging generation of adult Millennial consumers. We document...

We survey a representative sample of U.S. individuals about how well leading academic theories describe their financial beliefs and decisions. We find substantial support for many factors hypothesized to affect portfolio equity share, particularly background risk, investment horizon, rare...