We first establish that policymakers on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee choose lower interest rates with experience. We then reject increasing confidence in private information or learning about the structure of the macroeconomy as explanations for this shift. Instead, a model...

Using voting data from the Bank of England, we show that different individual assessments of the economy strongly influence votes after controlling for individual policy preferences. We estimate that internal members form more precise assessments than externals and are also more hawkish, though...

We use a unique corpus of job descriptions for C-suite positions to document skills requirements in top managerial occupations across a large sample of firms. A novel algorithm maps the text of each executive search into six separate skill clusters reflecting cognitive, interpersonal, and...

Firm-level stock returns differ enormously in reaction to COVID-19 news. We characterize these reactions using the Risk Factors discussions in pre-pandemic 10-K filings and two text-analytic approaches: expert-curated dictionaries and supervised machine learning (ML). Bad COVID-19 news lowers...

The leading strategy for analyzing unstructured data uses two steps. First, latent variables of economic interest are estimated with an upstream information retrieval model. Second, the estimates are treated as “data” in a downstream econometric model. We establish theoretical arguments for...

In an auction market, the auctioneer exerts significant influence in choosing and administering a selling strategy. We make the case for viewing the auctioneer as a market maker, whose success depends on how well he manages externalities without jeopardizing the trust of the buyers and sellers....

We define and axiomatically characterize an index of ethnic stratification that measures the extent to which the hierarchy in socio-economic positions across the individuals of a society follows ethnolinguistic lines. This index generalizes the idea of between-group inequality to situations...