In many industries, firms reward their customers for making referrals. We analyze the optimal policy mix of price, advertising intensity, and referral fee for monopoly when buyers choose to what extent to refer other consumers to the firm. We find that the firm uses its referral fee, but not its...

This paper explores the importance of investment-specific technology changes in anticipated TFP fluctuations. To this end, we identify two types of news shocks with the maximum forecast error variance approach: news shocks to TFP and news shocks to the relative price of investment. We show in a...

In a signaling game between a receiver and senders, prejudice occurs if senders are prejudged based on an index such as race without reference to their qualifying signals. This paper investigates what makes the receiver ignore senders' informative signals in favor of the uninformative index....

We analyze the welfare implication of regulating the price of last-mile access to consumers provided by local Internet service providers (ISPs). We consider a new two-sided market model that highlights the vertical relationship between two platforms, a local ISP and a large content provider...

This paper characterizes jointly optimal default and exchange-rate policy. The theoretical environment is a small open economy with downward nominal wage rigidity as in Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe (2013) and limited enforcement of international debt contracts as in Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). It is...

This paper models employers' preference for discrimination toward ex ante identical groups of workers when the workers must compete for limited positions. Employers benefit from discrimination against minority workers because it can reduce the overall risk from workers' noisy signals as it...

This paper examines how moral rules form in the process of social learning in order to analyze the relationship between legal rules and moral rules. Members of society learn morality from the observed behavior of other members. Their incentive to act morally is influenced by their expectation of...

This paper studies firms' usage of interest rate swaps to manage risk in a model economy driven by aggregate productivity shocks, inflation shocks, and counter-cyclical idiosyncratic productivity risk. Consistent with empirical evidence, firms in the model are fixed-rate payers, and swap...

We present a new Stata command, tebounds, which implements a variety of techniques to bound the average treatment effect (ATE) of a binary treatment on a binary outcome in light of endogenous and misreported treatment assignment. To tighten the worst case bounds, the Monotone Treatment Selection...