Research

Are Juries Racially Discriminatory? Evidence from the Race-Blind Charging of Grand Jury Defendants with and without Racially Distinctive Names (With Mark Hoekstra and Suhyeon Oh)
We implement five different tests of whether grand juries, which are drawn from a representative cross-section of the public, discriminate against Black defendants when deciding to prosecute felony cases. Three tests exploit that while jurors do not directly observe defendant race, jurors do observe the “Blackness” of defendants’ names. All three tests—an audit-study-style test, a traditional outcome-based test, and a test that estimates racial bias using blinded/unblinded comparisons after purging omitted variable bias—indicate juries do not discriminate based on race. Two additional tests indicate racial bias explains at most 0.3 percent of the Black-White felony conviction gap. https://www.nber.org/papers/w34106

Behind the screens: A replication and extension of Coasian bargaining experiments in the digital age. (with Catherine Eckel, Ryan Rholes, and Jesse Backstrom) European Economic Review 175 (2025): 105024.
This paper replicates Hoffman and Spitzer’s seminal Coasian bargaining experiments from the early 1980s and extends them to examine the impact of digital communication. We find that, while the face-to-face replication results mostly align with the original findings, transitioning to a digital environment induces a 23.3 percent decrease in efficient decision-making and over a fourfold increase in self-regarding behavior. These effects are amplified in one-shot bargaining scenarios and when property rights are strengthened and persist as bargainers gain experience. Our findings allude to several implications of digital communication for efficiency and welfare distributions in negotiation settings.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2025.105024

The Impact of Vaccine Misinformation: Evidence from the US (Download)(AEA Poster Video)
The increasing amount of vaccine misinformation, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, has generated significant debate about the proper role of government and media platforms in combating it. However, little is known about whether and to what extent misinformation can actually change immunization behavior. This paper addresses this question by examining how parents responded to the unexpected surge in media coverage in 2007 of the verifiably false claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Specifically, I use a difference-in-differences approach to compare the vaccination rates of children whose parents were most and least likely to be affected by the coverage over time. Results indicate that susceptible parents were 3.3 percentage points less likely to vaccinate their children with an MMR shot by the recommended age of 15 months and 4.1 percentage points less likely to do so by 29 months.