Despite its presumed role as an engine of economic growth, we know surprisingly little about the drivers of scientific creativity. In this paper, we exploit key differences across funding streams within the academic life sciences to estimate the impact of incentives on the rate and direction of...

We develop a theoretical model to study the effects of libertarian paternalism on knowledge acquisition and social learning. Individuals in our model are permitted to appreciate and use the information content in the default options set by the government. We show that in some settings...

Investor sophistication has lagged behind the growing complexity of retail financial markets. To explore this, we develop a dynamic model to study the interaction between obfuscation and investor sophistication. Taking into account different learning mechanisms within the investor population, we...

This paper studies performance-sensitive debt (PSD), the class of debt obligations whose interest payments depend on some measure of the borrowers performance. We demonstrate that the existence of PSD obligations cannot be explained by the trade-off theory of capital structure, as PSD leads to...

Motivating innovation is an important concern in many incentive problems. For example, shareholders of large corporations often need to motivate managers to pursue more innovative business strategies. This paper shows that the optimal incentive scheme that motivates innovation exhibits...

We study the accuracy and usefulness of automated (i.e., machine-generated) valuations for illiquid and heterogeneous real assets. We assemble a database of 1.1 million paintings auctioned between 2008 and 2015. We use a popular machine-learning technique - neural networks - to develop a pricing...