Many have argued that digital technologies such as smartphones and social media are addictive. We develop an economic model of digital addiction and estimate it using a randomized experiment. Temporary incentives to reduce social media use have persistent effects, suggesting social media are...

A free and informative press is widely agreed to be crucial to the democratic process today. But throughout much of the nineteenth century U.S. newspapers were often public relations tools funded by politicians, and newspaper independence was a rarity. The newspaper industry underwent...

We study newsworthiness in theory and practice. We focus on situations in which a news outlet observes the realization of a state of the world and must decide whether to report the realization to a consumer who pays an opportunity cost to consume the report. The consumer-optimal reporting...

We investigate the role of person- and place-specific factors in the opioid epidemic by developing and estimating a dynamic model of risky prescription opioid use. We estimate the model using the relationship between cross-state migration and risky use among adults receiving federal disability...

Existing theories of media competition imply that advertisers will pay a lower price in equilibrium to reach consumers who multi-home across competing outlets. We generalize and extend this theoretical result and test it using data from television and social media advertising. We find that...

We study the role of physicians in driving geographic variation of US healthcare utilization. We estimate a model that separates variation in average utilization of Medicare beneficiaries due to physicians, non-physician supply side factors, and patient demand. The model is identified by...

We study the causal interpretation of instrumental variables (IV) estimands of nonlinear, multivariate structural models with respect to rich forms of model misspecification. We focus on guaranteeing that the researcher's estimator is sharp zero consistent, meaning that the researcher concludes...