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.
Working Papers
Better Court Structure, Better Judgments?: Exploring the Impact of Term Limits and Court Specialization with a Diagnostic Model of Judging in Securities Class Action Litigation (working paper)
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 billions of dollars in settlements of non-meritorious securities class action litigation matters. Using a variety of data related to securities class action lawsuits, I estimate federal judges’ skill in appropriately identifying and dismissing non-meritorious strike suits and model how this skill increases with relevant experience and decreases with advanced age. Unlike previous research that generally accounts for only either judicial skill or judicial preferences, this paper’s structural modeling approach is able to attribute variation in observed litigation outcomes to judicial heterogeneity along both dimensions – finding significant variation in each. Finally, I model counterfactual scenarios to derive the optimal length of judicial term limits and caseload for specialized subject-matter courts. I find that, if enacted concurrently with the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995, court structure interventions at these optimal levels could have avoided over $5.9 billion in non-meritorious settlements and returned $1.2 billion to shareholders in suits that were erroneously dismissed.
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 Measurement Error in Empirical Textual Research, with Jon Choi (working paper)
We present a framework for quantifying the impact of and correcting for measurement error in empirical research involving textual data. Measurement 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, measurement error may introduce attenuation bias or, if there is an imbalance of false positives and false negatives, directional bias, or both. We present strategies for statistically quantifying measurement error and for correcting estimations based on mismeasured data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques with a Monte Carlo simulation as well as a worked example involving real data. The examples demonstrate the importance of correcting for measurement error, particularly when using LLMs with imbalances in their confusion matrix.
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)