Early career training is an essential component of building the future dissemination and implementation (D&I) science. The United States National Institutes Health Ruth L. Kirschstein Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) award offers a mechanism for doctoral students to acquire specialized D&I mentorship, pursue independent research in science, receive financial...

We introduce the multivariate Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, solve it analytically, and discuss how it generalizes a vast class of continuous-time and discretetime multivariate processes. Relying on the simple geometrical interpretation of the dynamics of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process we introduce cointegration and its relationship to statistical arbitrage. We illustrate an application to swap co...

This program evaluation estimates the effects on standardized test scores of graduating from the Fe y Alegría private school system in Venezuela. We find an Average Treatment Effect on the order of 0.1 standard deviations, using a control group of public school students. We posit that the better performance of the.Fe y Alegría system stems from their labor contract flexibility and decentralized...

We investigate the implications of optimal portfolio choice on fair pricing of specific pension insurance contracts. We motivate that the manager of the insurance company should optimize utility of final payout for the policy holders. The payout to the policy holder is highly non-linear in wealth, implying that the optimization problem is non-trivial. Still, we find closed form solutions. Simul...

This paper studies the intertemporal allocation of incentives in a repeated moral hazard model with reference-dependent preferences as in Kőszegi and Rabin (2009). Besides consumption utility, the agent experiences utility from the change in his beliefs about present and future effort and income. When effort plans are rational, the prospect of being disappointed by the outcome realization equal...

This paper analyses the optimal wage contract when firms face demand uncertainty and workers care about employment stability. Workers choose the firm that offers the highest utility taking into account the future lay-off probabilities; firms choose the wage contract that maximises the residual share of the gains from production. For risk-neutral workers this occurs with any efficient wage contr...

This paper analyses contract design in a decentralized market environment with frictions. While principals (e.g., firms) have all contractual power, their market power is constrained as agents (e.g., workers) can choose to wait and search for better offers. We find that results depend crucially on how market frictions affect agents’ utilities. With type-independent costs of search and waiting, ...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the agent’s knowledge about the performance measure is ambiguous and he is averse towards ambiguity. We show that the principal may optimally provide no incentives or contract only on a subset of all informative performance measures. That is, the Informativeness Principle does not hold in our model. These results stand in stark contras...

Ever since the seminal work by Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) on competitive insurance markets under adverse selection the equilibrium-non-existence problem has been one of the major puzzles in insurance economics. We extend the original analysis by considering firms which face capacity constraints, which might be due to limited capital. We show that under mild assumptions a pure strategy equil...