Title: Making Public Law: Artificial Intelligence for Legal Accessibility and Judicial Legitimacy (joint with Elliott Ash, Aniket Kesari, Suresh Naidu, and Dominik Stammbach)

Abstract: Laws have increasingly become difficult for the public to understand due to their complexity and the decline in trusted legal journalism. We build a novel AI-powered legal summarizer to produce easy-to-read summaries of the reasoning in judicial opinions. We study the effects of these summaries in three related experiments. First, we show in a survey experiment that, compared to existing expert-written summaries, AI-generated simple summaries of U.S. Supreme Court judicial opinions are more accessible to the public and more easily understood by non-experts. They help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education. Second, we study how these summaries affect policy attitudes and institutional legitimacy in a large-scale survey experiment around the release of the affirmative action decision in June 2023. While the summaries enhance understanding of judicial opinions across issues, they have mixed effects on the acceptance of court decisions. Finally, we explore the effect of these summaries on public discourse in a social media experiment.

Title: Community Enforcement with Endogenous Records

Abstract: I study repeated games with anonymous random matching where players can erase signals from their records. When players are sufficiently long-lived and have strictly dominant actions, they will play their dominant actions with probability close to one in all equilibria. When players' expected lifespans are intermediate, there exist purifiable equilibria with a positive level of cooperation in the submodular prisoner's dilemma but not in the supermodular prisoner's dilemma. Therefore, the maximal level of cooperation a community can sustain is not monotone with respect to players' expected lifespans and the complementarity in players' actions can undermine their abilities to sustain cooperation.

Title of paper: Monetary Policy in a Multimarket Economy: The Role of Demand and Adjustment Costs.

Here is an abstract: What is the role of demand elasticities and price adjustment costs in shaping the heterogeneous response of firms’ markups to monetary policy shocks? In this paper, we build a novel heterogeneous firms New Keynesian model where markups evolve endogenously over firms’ life cycle, which we further enrich with firm-specific price rigidities and a multi-market structure. Crucially, firms’ growth is market-specific, leading to heterogeneous size and markup distributions on different markets. Since markets cannot be identified in the data, we show that market shares are badly proxied by firm size and can instead be empirically related to firm age. This is consistent with evidence that old firms in Compustat have a more countercyclical markup response after an unexpected contractionary monetary policy shock. Our framework predicts that dominant firms on each market face a more inelastic demand, which implies a lower pass-through rate from costs to prices, but also higher costs to adjust prices. Therefore, after a contractionary monetary policy shock, dominant firms pass less the reduction in marginal costs to prices compared to competitors, and increase their markups by more, as we document empirically. Both margins point towards important implications for monetary policy transmission and amplification.

Title: Politics of Food (joint work with Jared Gars and Mateusz Stalinski)