Publications

Rules for the Rulemakers: Asymmetric Information and the Political Economy of Benefit-Cost Analysis
with David Besanko and Clair Yang
Journal of Regulatory Economics 66(1):1–51, 2024
This paper presents a model of an executive administration that decides whether to mandate benefit-cost analysis (BCA) of newly proposed regulations. A regulator has private information about the social benefit of a new rule but may differ from the executive’s preferences for regulation. BCA, which provides a noisy signal of the rule’s social benefit, is most valuable when the executive is regulation neutral. Extremely regulation-averse administrations may be harmed by BCA unless they can bias it. Our results are consistent with use of BCA by U.S. presidential administrations since Reagan.

Working papers

Firm Productivity and Learning with Digital Technologies: Evidence from Cloud Computing
with James Brand, Mert Demirer, and Connor Finucane
We study firm productivity and learning in cloud computing by leveraging CPU utilization data from over one billion virtual machines used by nearly 100,000 firms. We find large and persistent dispersion in firms' productivity with cloud computing, similar to canonical results in the literature. More productive firms respond better to demand fluctuations, show higher attentiveness to resource utilization, and use a wider variety of specialized machines. New adopters learn to be more productive with the cloud over time, improving 33.0% in their first year, but it takes four years for them to reach a steady state, slower than many previously studied settings. Our results indicate substantial aggregate implications of inefficiencies in computing: improving firm productivity reduces the use of computing resources by up to 35% and electricity by up to 28%.

Works in progress

A Large Scale Evaluation of Merger Simulations
with Vivek Bhattacharya, Gastón Illanes, José D. Salas, and David Stillerman

Information Sharing versus Collusion: Evidence from Poultry Processing

Common Pricing Algorithms and Information Design

Antitrust Spillovers: Evidence from Meatpacking, 1917–1921