Working Papers

This paper studies the impact of employee output information disclosure through GitHub on labor reallocation towards large firms. GitHub, which is the world's largest software management platform, tracks and publicly displays real-time individual contributions. In 2016, a policy change enabled GitHub users to display their contributions more accurately on their profiles. Following this update, employees with 1 standard deviation higher GitHub contributions witnessed a 5.7% increase in job transitions to large firms, predominantly at the expense of smaller companies. While productive individuals left small firms for senior roles in larger companies, the latter retained them through internal promotions. The departure of productive workers led to an overall reduction in employment growth and productivity for small firms with more productive employees prior to the shock. Our findings highlight the role of labor-related big data in amplifying the dominance of large firms in recent years. 

(with Franklin Qian, and Yifan Sun)

Best Paper at ISB Summer Research Conference, 2024

This study examines the causal effect of entrepreneurs' prior experience on the success of startups. Using variations in Green Card waiting periods within a country as an instrument for the experience of immigrant first-time entrepreneurs, we find that startups with more experienced founders achieve greater success in securing funding, generating patents, and expanding their workforce. The key driver of this success is the larger initial team size, made possible by the founders' enhanced ability to recruit former colleagues. Our results suggest that each additional year of experience translates into an estimated value of $200,000, highlighting an important factor for policymakers and venture capitalists to consider.

We study the causal effect of a large increase in firm leverage. Our setting is dividend recapitalizations in private equity (PE), where portfolio companies take on new debt to pay investor returns. After accounting for positive selection into more debt, we show that dramatically increasing leverage makes firms much riskier. The debt-bankruptcy relationship is in line with Altman-Z model predictions. Dividend recapitalizations increase deal returns but reduce: (a) wages among surviving firms; (b) pre-existing loan prices; and (c) fund returns, which seems to reflect moral hazard via new fundraising. These results suggest negative implications for employees, preexisting creditors, and investors.

Revise & Resubmit at the American Economic Review

Doctoral Symposium & Travel Grant at Midwest Finance Association, 2022; Runner-Up for Best Doctoral Paper at Eastern Finance Association, 2022

This paper provides causal evidence on the impact of immigrant labor mobility frictions on business dynamism. An unexpected information-technology-related change in the Green Card process reduced inter-firm mobility for Indian and Chinese immigrants in October 2005. The mobility drop was twice as severe for startups compared to incumbent firms. The resultant reductions in immigrant labor availability reduced new firm formation, with 12,000 fewer new firms founded in markets with more Indian and Chinese employees in the next five years. The distortion also decreased the funding and IPO of existing startups with Indian and Chinese co-founders. Incumbent firms benefited from mobility restrictions with $28.7 billion in abnormal stock returns for public firms with Indian and Chinese employees in the ten days following the announcement. The slowdown in internal promotions for Indian and Chinese employees suggests monopsony power as an important driver for incumbent firm value. 

Publications

Owner Incentives and Performance in Healthcare: Private Equity Investment in Nursing Homes
(with Atul Gupta, Sabrina Howell, and Constantine Yannelis)

The Review of Financial Studies,  0893-9454, November 2023
Editor's Choice, Awarded Best Paper in Health and Finance by Midwest Finance Association, 2021

Amid an aging population and a growing role for private equity (PE) in the care of older adults, this paper studies how PE ownership affects U.S. nursing homes using patient-level Medicare data. We show that PE ownership leads to a patient cohort with lower health risk. However, after instrumenting for the patient-nursing home match, we find that PE ownership increases mortality by 11%. Declines in measures of patient well-being, nurse staffing, and compliance with care standards help to explain the mortality effect. Overall, we conclude that PE has nuanced effects with adverse outcomes for a subset of patients. 

International Trade and Social Connectedness
(With Mike Bailey, Sebastian Hillenbrand, Theresa Kuchler, Rob Richmond, and Johannes Stroebel)

Journal of International Economics, 129(103418), March 2021

We use de-identified data from Facebook to construct a new and publicly available measure of the pairwise social connectedness between 170 countries and 32 European regions. We find that two countries trade more when they are more socially connected, especially for goods where information frictions may be large. The social connections that predict trade in specific products are those between the regions where the product is produced in the exporting country and the regions where it is used in the importing country. Once we control for social connectedness, the estimated effects of geographic distance and country borders on trade decline substantially.