Curriculum Vitae
Teaching
Recent Papers
- How does early-career discrimination affect workers' long-term prospects? Does it amplify or subside over time?
- The answer critically depends on how worker ability is revealed: when failures are more informative than successes, even modest early discrimination can have outsized long-term effects.
- Results established first in a small-market model with fixed wages, then extended to a large labor market with flexible wages.
- Proves existence of a unique regular solution for a large class of time-heterogeneous nonlinear PDEs with multidimensional state, irregular obstacle, and Lipschitz domain.
- Lipschitz domains include economically relevant non-smooth domains such as orthants and budget sets.
- Irregular obstacles capture non-smooth stopping payoffs arising when a final binary decision must be made upon stopping.
- Analyzes aggregation rules under which a defendant may be punished if the overall probability of guilt across accusations is high.
- Shows that this approach, advocated by prominent legal scholars, can severely reduce the informativeness of witness reports and increase offender rates once strategic interactions are taken into account.
- Revisits Williams (Econometrica, 2011) on optimal insurance with persistent private information and continuous time.
- The contract characterized as optimal in that paper belongs to a class of self-insurance contracts and is generically suboptimal within this class.
- Several claims about immiserization and the role of persistence and continuous time are not supported by the analysis; discrepancies are carefully elucidated.
- Studies robust implementation when agents must pay a cost to learn the state and face uncertainty about preferences and higher-order beliefs.
- Proposes a mechanism implementing any desired social choice function when payoff perturbations have small ex ante probability.
- Shows that full implementation is impossible unless agents have a direct interest in the state as it relates to the social choice.
- Studies the optimal design of judicial mechanisms—evidence production and sentencing—for several welfare criteria differing in their treatment of deterrence.
- The optimal mechanism features plea bargaining, a binary verdict trial, and a conviction threshold based on the likelihood of guilt—all reminiscent of the US criminal justice system.
- Proposes a model of societal learning where information must be discovered by individuals with specific expertise or unique access.
- Without an intrinsic motive to seek and reveal the truth, societal learning relies on statistical conditions related to the availability of evidence.
- Applications cover institutional enforcement, social cohesion, scientific progress, and historical revisionism.
- Defines a concept of renegotiation-proof contracts for dynamic contracts with a publicly observed or diffusion-driven state, using the algebraic notion of left-action groups.
- Applied to a principal-agent insurance model with persistent private endowment shocks; renegotiation-proof contracts have a closed form characterized by a single number.
- Proposes an economic model formalizing and unifying arguments in the legal literature for evidence-based sentencing.
- Addresses remaining objections: political legitimacy, robustness, and incentives to acquire evidence.
- Introduces contestable norms—social norms that include provisions both to deter violations and to address challenges to move to alternative norms.
- Characterizes their payoffs, efficiency, stability, and evolution. Sheds new light on the efficient institution hypothesis and the renegotiation paradox.
Research by Topic
Auctions & Consumer Theory
Comparative Statics
Decision Theory
Dynamic Methods
Labor Economics
Law & Economics
Political Economy
Renegotiation, Contract Theory & Bargaining
Social Learning, Implementation & Experimentation