Digital Commons Network^™

Multidimensional Screening For Quality With An Application To Health Insurance, Hector Chade, Victoria Marone, Amanda Starc, Jeroen Swinkels

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We analyze a multidimensional screening model in which a principal offers a menu of quality-price pairs to a consumer with multiple dimensions of private information and a quasilinear utility function. We derive necessary conditions for optimality, and use them to provide insight into optimal exclusion, positive trade, and screening. We then recast the problem in terms of incremental quality levels and prices, the so-called demand-profile approach (DPA). Under DPA, the problem decouples across increments and can be solved one at a time. We provide novel conditions under which DPA recovers the solution to the full problem exactly or approximately, and …

Neural Networks In Economics: A Selective Review, Xiaohong Chen, Luis Hoderlein, Jonas Lieber

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The "deep learning revolution" has led to remarkable success of neural networks in applications across a wide range of fields, such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, code generation, protein structure prediction, image and video generation, and dynamic control. This review introduces neural networks to economists. Recent advances and challenges in approximation theory, neural network architecture, computation, econometric theory and practice are presented. Finally, we survey the rapidly evolving applications of modern neural networks and Large Language Models in economic research.

Immigration, Innovation, And The Geography Of Growth, Costas Arkolakis, Sun Kyoung Lee, Michael Peters

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Between 1880 and 1920, more than 20 million immigrants settled in the United States. We study how this migration wave affected innovation and growth. Using a newly constructed dataset linking individual census records to historical immigration records and the universe of US patents, we highlight a new channel through which immigrants contributed to growth: they disproportionately settled in urban innovation hubs. To quantify the aggregate and regional effects of this mass migration episode, we develop a new spatial growth model in which skilled workers have a comparative advantage in innovation and sort endogenously across space. We find that international arrivals …

Lessons Learned: Jeremy Rudin, Mary Anne Chute Lynch

Journal of Financial Crises

Jeremy Rudin served as assistant deputy minister in the financial sector policy branch of Canada’s Department of Finance during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC) and was at the helm of the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) from 2014 to 2021, which included the COVID-19 crisis. As superintendent, Rudin also represented Canada on the Financial Stability Board (FSB) Steering Committee.

Lessons Learned: Francesco Papadia, Mercedes Cardona

Journal of Financial Crises

Francesco Papadia served as director general for market operations at the European Central Bank (ECB) during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007–09 (GFC) and in the early stages of the Sovereign Debt Crisis of the early 2010s. He was responsible for the implementation of the monetary policy of the euro area as well as the investment of the ECB’s foreign reserves and own funds. In 2016, he was named chair of the selection panel at the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund, overseeing the board of an independent special purpose vehicle created to stabilize the Greek banking sector in the wake of …

Lessons Learned: Deepak Mohanty, Salil Gupta

Journal of Financial Crises

Deepak Mohanty, an economist, was chair of India’s pension regulator, the Pension Fund Regulatory and Development Authority (PFRDA), from 2023 to 2025. From 2008 to 2015, as executive director of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), he oversaw multiple critical departments, including monetary policy, economic research, and statistics. Mohanty has also served as senior adviser to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and chief economic adviser to the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI).

The Role Of National Recapitalization Funds In Sovereign Lending, Elena Gabriela Olariu, Konstantina Panagopoulou Perez

Journal of Financial Crises

The Global Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 showed that a substantial portion of funds borrowed by a state from a lender of last resort may be allocated to bank recapitalization. While national recapitalization funds are not themselves borrowers, they play a key role in recovery operations. This article analyses how lenders, such as the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) and the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), incorporate recapitalization funds into their lending framework and how they deal with extraordinary events, such as corporate transformations or liquidation of these funds. To do this, we formulate three key principles that a lender may consider …

Lessons Learned: William Isaac, Shavonda Brandon

Journal of Financial Crises

William (Bill) Isaac honed his crisis management expertise during his tenure as chairman of the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) from 1981 to 1985 during the Savings and Loans (S&L) Crisis. He steered the agency through a volatile period marked by a sea of bank and thrift failures, most notably that of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company. In 1986, Isaac founded the Secura Group LLC (later FTI Consulting, Inc.), a regulatory consulting firm where he worked until 2019. He also served as chairman of the board of Fifth Third Bancorp from 2009 to 2014 and has served …

From Innovation To Speculation: Ai And The Magnificent Seven, Rerotlhe B. Basele, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shuping Shi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The AI boom has driven the Nasdaq and the Magnificent Seven tech stocks to record highs. But how much do these new records reflect underlying value, how much is speculation, and how vulnerable are these stocks and the wider market to a major downturn? Our evidence and analyses show clear signs of bubble exuberance in most of these stocks, concentrated in a few names like Nvidia, leading to latent risks for investors who assume their index funds are safely diversified and supported by wider economic fundamentals.

Offsetting Carbon With Lemons: Adverse Selection And Certification In The Voluntary Carbon Market, Vahideh Manshadi, Faidra Monachou, Ilan Morgenstern

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

To meet voluntary climate targets, firms often complement internal decarbonization efforts by purchasing carbon credits in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which finance projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. However, these emissions reductions are difficult to verify, and growing evidence of overcrediting has cast doubt on the VCM's potential to genuinely offset emissions. We investigate how the VCM's defining features shape its climate effectiveness. Our model captures three central elements: adverse selection, as high-quality projects that truly reduce emissions are costlier yet difficult to distinguish from low-quality ones; imperfect third-party certification, as projects are screened based on a noisy signal of …

Incentives, Evidence, And Reminders For Bureaucrats: Overcoming Barriers To Policy Scale Up, Patrick Agte, Daniel R. Morales, Christopher Neilson, Sebastian Otero, Guatam Rao

Discussion Papers

Scaling up effective policies often requires the attention of frontline bureaucrats with many competing responsibilities. Even when policymakers adopt effective programs, implementation may not follow. In a nationwide experiment in the Dominican Republic, we test interventions to increase school principals' implementation of an educational program proven effective in a previous RCT. Only 37% of control schools verifiably implemented the intervention when ordered to by the Ministry of Education, compared with 83% in the original trial. Implementation was no higher among schools that previously implemented the program in the RCT, suggesting that fixed costs of adoption do not explain non-adoption. We …

Cross Section Curve Data Autoregression, Peter C.B. Phillips, Liang Jiang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper develops and applies new asymptotic theory for estimation and inference in parametric autoregression and vector autoregression with function valued cross section curve time series. The study provides a new approach to dynamic panel regression with high dimensional dependent cross section data. We deal with the stationary case and provide a full set of results extending those of standard Euclidean space autoregression, showing how function space curve cross section data raises efficiency and reduces bias in estimation and shortens confidence intervals. Wild-bootstrap methods are also developed to improve testing and inference. The findings reveal that function space models with …

Forecasting With Uncertain Persistence, Joel Flynn, Maksim Meinert, Karthik Sastry

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

With uncertainty about persistence, we show that forecasts necessarily become more persistent and over-react at long horizons. For these reasons, correctly specified and Bayesian forecasts may under-react at short horizons and over-react at long horizons. These results provide a unified explanation for several asset pricing and forecasting puzzles, including: (i) the excess responsiveness of long-horizon rates to short rates, (ii) the dominance of apparent term premia for long-term rates, (iii) the ex post predictability of bond yields, (iv) the excess volatility of long-horizon forward prices, (v) the excess persistence of long-horizon forecasts, and (vi) the over-reaction of long-horizon forecasts.

From Unstructured Data To Demand Counterfactuals: Theory And Practice, Timothy Christensen, Giovanni Compiani

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Empirical models of multi-product demand rely on low-dimensional product representations to capture substitution patterns, increasingly using proxies built from unstructured data. When proxies are imperfect, standard workflows yield biased counterfactuals and invalid inference. We develop a practical toolkit to address these issues. Our methods apply to market-level and/or individual data, require minimal additional computation, provide simple standard-error formulas, and accommodate proxies from fine-tuned models. Further, we propose diagnostics to assess proxy quality. Our methods yield meaningful improvements in predicting substitution in empirically calibrated simulations and in an application where we assess counterfactual prediction performance against a ground truth.

From Trade War To Green Transition: Optimal Electric Vehicle Tariffs With Revenue-Funded Subsidies, Panle Jia Barwick, Jack Collison, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Shanjun Li, Yucheng Wang

Discussion Papers

We study the optimal design of trade and industrial policy when governments pursue environmental objectives alongside traditional national welfare. Motivated by the global transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and growing concerns about competitiveness, resilience, and the environment, we develop a framework in which policymakers choose tariffs and domestic production subsidies to maximize national welfare, defined as the sum of consumer surplus, domestic profits, environmental benefits, and tariff revenue net of subsidies. We combine a theoretical model of differentiated-product oligopoly with a structural demand model estimated using vehicle-level data from 13 countries during 2004-2023 that together account for the vast majority …

How Much And How Fast Do Investors Respond To Equity Premium Changes? Evidence From Wealth Taxation, Andreas Fagereng, Luigi Guiso, Marius Ring

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Using administrative panel data on Norwegian investors’ portfolios, we document strong but slow portfolio allocation responses to a persistent wealth-tax-induced shock to the equity premium. Short-run responses resemble the modest sensitivity documented using surveys. The longer-run responses are much larger and can be rationalized by moderate risk aversion. We document that equity premium shocks affect stock market entry but not exits, suggesting that entry costs dominate participation costs. Our finding of slow responses supports the asset-pricing literature that uses adjustment frictions to explain important asset-pricing puzzles, and has implications for optimal capital taxation when tax rates differ across assets.

How Much Should A Conversational Recommender System Converse?, Akshit Kumar, Vahideh Manshadi, Akhilesh Tumu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Conversational recommender systems powered by generative AI can enhance personalization by facilitating information elicitation through follow-up questions. However, engaging in these conversations imposes a communication cost on users. As platforms with different objectives and monetization models deploy these systems, a central question is: how does the platform’s objective and sellers’ strategic response shape the design of these systems in terms of their elicitation strategy? We develop a parsimonious model of conversational elicitation in which interaction generates noisy preference information and imposes a communication cost borne by the user. A user-welfare-maximizing platform elicits more information when accurate niche matching yields large …

Music And Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, And Christian Worship, Chelle Stearns

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Music and Spirituality: Theological Approaches, Empirical Methods, and Christian Worship, edited by George Corbett and Sarah Moerman, by Chelle Stearns.

The Sound Of Vultures' Wings: The Tibetan Buddhist Chöd Ritual Practice Of The Female Buddha Machik Labdrön, Michael R. Sheehy

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for The Sound of Vultures' Wings: The Tibetan Buddhist Chöd Ritual Practice of the Female Buddha Machik Labdrön, authored by Jeffrey W. Cupchik, by Michael R. Sheehy.

The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity And Ghana's Drum Wars, Vicki L. Brennan

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for The Noise Silence Makes: Secularity and Ghana's Drum Wars, authored by Mariam Goshadze, by Vicki L. Brennan.

Cool Christianity: Hillsong And The Fashioning Of Cosmopolitan Identities, Fernando Berwig

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

A book review is presented for Cool Christianity: Hillsong and the Fashioning of Cosmopolitan Identities, authored by Cristina Rocha, by Fernando Berwig.

“About Organs”: A Lutheran Statement About Organ Music From 1597, And Its Historical Context, Markus Rathey

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

The article presents a translation of an important document about organ music, published by the Theology Department at Wittenberg University in 1597. While written in response to an ongoing controversy, the document became the authoritative statement of the Lutheran church about organs and organ music in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The article presents the first complete English translation of the text and it analyzes the historical context of the document.

Tuning The Neighborhood: Purifying People, Places, And Environments In Suburban Kolkata, Sourav Saha

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In modern science, disciplines such as physics, mechanical and civil engineering, seismology, and acoustics have conceptualized vibration as a quantifiable mechanical phenomenon, measured through the metrics of frequency, amplitude, and resonance. In contrast, scholarship in anthropology, musicology, and sound studies has approached vibration as a socio-historical, cultural, and political phenomenon. This article examines how vibration (spandan) operates as a metaphysical, sensory, and ethico-affective force that mediates relations among people, places, and environments. Focusing on the practice of satsang adhibesan (devotional congregation), the article demonstrates how members of the Deoghar-Satsang community participate in sonic rituals of prayer, silent chanting, meditation, sacred …

Singing About Singing: Images Of Choirs In Aquitanian 'Versaria', Eva Moreda Rodriguez

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

Charles Atkinson and Gunilla Iversen, among others, have noted and discussed the increased presence of terms relating to music, singing and sound in Latin-language liturgical or paraliturgical music of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Aquitanian versus and Benedicamus trope repertoires provide a prime example, with words such as cantum, carmen, chorus and others recurring frequently. The recent development of scholarly strands (Emma Dillon, Sarah Kay) that considers how music and text combines (Dillon’s “sound of song”) to shape and put forward discourses that are precisely about the nature of sound, singing and music open up new opportunities to examine …

3d Puzzle Generation Beyond Voxelized Parts, Iris Xia

Computer Science Theses

Burr puzzles are interlocking assemblies whose pieces must be inserted and removed through tightly constrained motions. Designing them is difficult because geometric fit, interlocking behavior, and disassembly order are tightly coupled, while existing computational methods remain largely limited to voxelized or template-based constructions.

This work presents a framework for 3D puzzle generation beyond voxelized parts. The method replaces local mobility heuristics with a certified search over geometry edits. Starting from a topological contact specification, it constructs signed distance fields for individual parts, applies complementary local edits, and validates each candidate using exact geometric checks and a kernel disassembly graph. The …

Node Differentially Private Algorithms For Survivable Networks And Graphs Analysis, Jinghua Sun

Computer Science Theses

This thesis studies two graph algorithmic settings where additional structure gives stronger guarantees than worst-case black-box methods. The paper considers higher order edge connectivity under node differential privacy. We study the minimum k-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem (k-ECSS) and the minimum k-edge-connected component problem (k-ECC). These objectives have large global sensitivity under node privacy, since adding or deleting one vertex and its incident edges can significantly change robust connectivity structure. To address this, we use Propose-Test-Release for locally stable k-ECC instances and a Lipschitz extension framework for k-ECSS, based on bounded-degree complement objectives and the Generalized Exponential Mechanism.

The second part …

Crowding In Private Capital For Climate Adaptation In India, Shreya Bajaj

Master in Public Policy Theses

Reports show that India is highly vulnerable to climate change. Mitigation efforts alone cannot address these risks, and adaptation remains essential. Yet while much of the existing literature documents the adaptation finance gap, it offers less practical guidance on where private capital can realistically be used and what institutional arrangements are needed to make it work. This paper tries to address that gap in the Indian context.

This paper examines three adaptation finance use cases through which private capital could support climate adaptation and resilience in India: parametric disaster risk transfer, pooled municipal finance, and water fund. For each issue, …

A Just Reimagining Of The Loss & Damage Fund, Sarah Cheung

Master in Public Policy Theses

The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD), established at COP28 in 2023, represents a historic diplomatic breakthrough in multilateral climate finance, yet its design reflects the compromises necessary to secure political agreement rather than a just institutional architecture. This thesis evaluates the FRLD and two prominent reform proposals—the Bridgetown Initiative 3.0 and Esther Duflo's Grand Bargain—against a novel framework that provides a more precise way to evaluate the “justness” of different arrangements. This framework encompasses three dimensions: compensatory, distributive, and procedural justice. [JS1] A dimension of justice is achieved in a two-fold manner; first, through rhetorical commitments in …

The Regionalization Of The North American Auto Industry: A Comparative Analysis Of Automotive And White Goods Trade Under Nafta And The Usmca, 1990-2024, Helen Alexandra Helfgott

Master in Public Policy Theses

This research examines whether the auto-specific provisions introduced under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) have had a measurable regionalizing effect on North American export flows. The USMCA's auto-specific provisions, established in the rules of origin requirements (ROOs), increase regional value content requirements (RVC) while imposing new requirements for labor value content (LVC), steel and aluminum sourcing, and core parts. This research assesses whether these provisions are associated with a distinctive pattern of intra-regional export concentration not present in other sectors.

The study employs a descriptive comparative framework using data from UN Comtrade, spanning …

The Offense-Defense Balance And The Modern System In Ukraine, Daniel Hogestyn

Master in Public Policy Theses

This thesis evaluates whether the Russo Ukrainian war represents a revolution in military affairs (RMA) by testing Stephen Biddle’s "modern system" theory of battlefield outcomes against recent combat operations. Applying Biddle’s formal model to the 2023 Ukrainian offensive in Zaporizhia, the thesis finds that the offensive's failure conforms closely to Biddle’s causal logic, with force employment variables drawn from 20th century combat sufficient to account for the outcome. Biddle's model in military power argues that force employment has explained victory and defeat since World War I, rather than technology or numerical preponderance alone. Many commentators claim that proliferation of small …