Published Papers
An Empirical Analysis of CFIUS: Examining Foreign Investment Regulation in the United States (2014), with Tian Huang, Yale J. of Int’l L. (available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=2287503)
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) examines foreign proposed transactions to garner control of American entities and advises on national security risks through a confidential review process. Previous scholarship on CFIUS has concentrated on specific events and legislative amendments to the process. This Note, through aggregating publicly available sources of information regarding CFIUS reviews, produces the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the process. Using event studies, we show that CFIUS actions have resulted in multi-billion dollar wealth transfers to American companies. Our regression analysis of publicly available data indicates that outcomes of CFIUS reviews are best explained by factors relating to national security concerns.
Submitted Manuscripts
Better Court Structure, Better Judgments: Exploring Securities Class Action Litigation with a Diagnostic Model of Judging [Replication Code] (working paper available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6156667)
Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization, revise and resubmit
CELS 2025 Theodore Eisenberg Poster Prize (poster version)
Court structure can influence the quality of judicial decision making, and a combination of term limits and subject-matter specialization in the federal bench could avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements of non-meritorious securities class action litigation matters every year. Using a variety of data related to securities class action lawsuits, I employ a structural model of expert decision making to estimate federal judges’ skill in appropriately identifying and dismissing non-meritorious suits. This skill increases with relevant experience and decreases with advanced age. Finally, I model counterfactual scenarios to derive the optimal length of judicial term limits and caseload for specialized subject-matter courts. I estimate that, if enacted concurrently with the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995, court structure interventions at these optimal levels could have avoided roughly $19.4 billion in non-meritorious settlements and returned over $1.5 billion to shareholders in suits that were erroneously dismissed.
AI Deceleration (or Acceleration) by Taxation, 40 Harvard Journal of Law and Technology (forthcoming 2026) (with Jonathan Choi) [Replication Code] (working paper available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7163738)
Even the chief executives of America’s leading AI companies cannot agree on whether their products will substitute for or complement human labor. Yet most policy proposals, from data center bans to bonus depreciation for AI hardware, commit policymakers ex ante to just one view of how AI will integrate with workers. By extending a leading macroeconomic model of worker automation, we show that any fixed policy is unacceptably fragile: an AI tax calibrated to a world in which AI on net substitutes for human labor produces large welfare losses in a world in which AI is a net complement, and vice versa.
We propose an adaptive Pigouvian rule that responds to observed wage dynamics by taxing automation when real wages fall and subsidizing it when they rise. We show that this rule is the unique policy in our comparison set with positive welfare gains in both worlds, and it exhibits other attractive qualities that are emphasized in the policy robustness literature. From a coalition-building perspective, it is the only policy mechanism that both AI decelerationists and accelerationists should commit to ex ante. We propose implementing this adaptive rule through a two-pronged reform: (1) equalize the existing capital-labor tax wedge, and (2) enact a national AI-usage sales tax whose rate (which may be negative) is indexed to AI-induced unemployment (or change in real wages) by an independent labor-market body.
Working Papers
Investor Adverse Selection and Corporate Governance (working paper available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6188283)
If shareholders select into firms for idiosyncratic reasons, such as based on their enthusiasm for the CEO, could the shareholder base itself constitute a source of corporate governance distortion? By embedding the Holmstrom-Milgrom contracting model into a market where investors receive noisy signals about CEO skill, I show that in expectation overly optimistic investors self-select into a firm’s shareholder base leading to approval of excessively steep incentive pay packages. This paper presents empirical evidence in support of that theoretical mechanism. First, steeper incentive pay correlates with the types of investors most likely to buy into a company based on internal assessments and vote their shares. Second, a structural estimation based on compensation and performance data from 2000–2025 recovers a mean investor belief error that is positive and statistically significant in a specification that permits either sign or a null result. The implied losses average $1.16 million per firm per year, roughly sixteen percent of aggregate CEO pay. Third, say-on-pay approval, a data source external to the estimation, peaks almost exactly at the model’s zero-misperception point and declines as contracts move toward either extreme, consistent with increasingly vociferous objection from less-selected members of the shareholder base as the pivotal shareholder’s error grows. An asset pricing test shows that optimistically held firms suffer no return penalty, so the distortion is not a marker for larger hidden governance damages. Counterfactual policy simulations show that while a cap on incentive pay may be modestly welfare-enhancing, improving the quality of investor information is a more promising margin for intervention.
A ‘New View’ of America’s Original Sin: Induced Innovation and Slavery in the Antebellum United States (working paper available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4877471)
This paper provides evidence that slavery directed technological progress in the antebellum South toward labor-augmenting innovations. To detect the relative trends in each region’s investment in technological development, I utilize a natural language processing analysis of U.S. patents granted between the passing of the Patent Act of 1836 and the end of Reconstruction. Contextualizing these results with Atkinson and Stiglitz’s “New View” framework for describing directed technological change, the paper then describes how outsized capital gains on “slave capital” played a pivotal role in altering the overall return to investment in labor-augmenting technologies in the South as compared to the North, thus setting the two regions on different trajectories of industrial development.
Estimating and Correcting for Misclassification Error in Empirical Textual Research, with Jon Choi (working paper available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4913179)
We present a framework for quantifying the impact of and correcting for misclassification error in empirical research involving textual data. Misclassification error commonly arises when, for example, large language models (LLMs) or human research assistants are tasked with classifying features in text. For statistics calculated with classification estimates, misclassification error may introduce attenuation bias from noise, directional bias from an imbalance of false positives and false negatives, or both. We present strategies for statistically quantifying misclassification error and for correcting estimations based on mismeasured data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques with Monte Carlo simulations as well as two worked examples involving real data from LLM classifications. The examples demonstrate the importance of correcting for measurement error, particularly when using LLMs with imbalances in their confusion matrices.
Other
A Matt Levine Effect? (with William Fallon and Nick Foretek), a humorous essay on the difficulty of taking a good vacation, draft dated March 12, 2023
The Gift of the Banya: An Enlightening and Freeing Journey Through the Russian Bath, a review of Bryon MacWilliams’ memoir With Light Steam, New City (2015)
The Poetry of Boundaries, an essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s short stories, The Birch, a Columbia University journal for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies (2011)