We empower faculty to design and discover original research that challenges conventions and creates breakthroughs that push boundaries of knowledge.
Publication Types
Journal Articles
Books
Working Papers
Case Studies
Browse Publications
Washington, DC Metropolitan Area: 2021 State of Latino Entrepreneurship
Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative surveyed 15,000 employer businesses in 2021 as part of its annual national survey to assess the current state of U.S. Latino entrepreneurship. We have compiled some of the most pressing insights about…
Wine Markets: Genres and Identities
Counterfactual Inference for Consumer Choice Across Many Product Categories
This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer’s utility is additive in the…
How Did Absentee Voting Affect the 2020 U.S. Election?
The 2020 U.S. election saw a record turnout, saw a huge increase in absentee voting, and brought unified national Democratic control — yet these facts alone do not imply that vote-by-mail increased turnout or benefited Democrats. Using new…
Poles Apart: Why People Turn Against Each Other, and How to Bring Them Together
We humans are social animals, naturally driven to form close-knit groups. All too often, though, these groups become partisan. They start to compete with one another. They become mutually hostile. Why does this happen? And what can be done to…
Structural Empirical Analysis of Contracting in Vertical Markets
This chapter presents an overview of advances in the structural analysis of contracting in vertical markets over the past fifteen years. We provide a discussion of theoretical models of contracting and bargaining that form the…
Creditor Control Rights and Executive Bonus Plans
We study whether and how creditors exercise their control rights to shape their borrowers’ executive compensation plans. Highly levered borrowers often face incentives to underinvest due to agency conflicts driven by differences in time horizon…
Augmented Minimax Linear Estimation
Many statistical estimands can expressed as continuous linear functionals of a conditional expectation function. This includes the average treatment effect under unconfoundedness and generalizations for continuous-valued and personalized…
Can Staggered Boards Improve Value? Causal Evidence from Massachusetts
Staggered boards (SBs) are one of the most potent common entrenchment devices, and their value effects are considerably debated. We study SBs’ effects on firm value, managerial behavior, and investor composition using a quasi‐experimental setting…
Distribution-free, Risk-controlling Prediction Sets
While improving prediction accuracy has been the focus of machine learning in recent years, this alone does not suffice for reliable decision-making. Deploying learning systems in consequential settings also requires calibrating and communicating…
Facets of Specialization and Its Relation to Career Success: An Analysis of U.S. Sociology, 1980 to 2015
We investigate how sociology students garner recognition from niche field audiences through specialization. Our dataset comprises over 80,000 sociology-related dissertations completed at U.S. universities, as well as data on graduates’ pursuant…
Increased Transparency in Procurement: The Role of Peer-Effects
Motivated by recent initiatives to increase transparency in procurement, we study the effects of disclosing information about previous purchases in a setting where an organization delegates its purchasing decisions to its employees. When…
Megastudies Improve the Impact of Applied Behavioural Science
Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens’ decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over…
New Medicare Technology Add-on Payment Could Be Used as a Market Support Mechanism to Accelerate Antibiotic Innovation
Despite growing antibiotic resistance, the clinical drug development pipeline for antibiotics has been sparse largely because of an unsustainable business model. We illustrate three models to accelerate antibiotic development, using Medicare new…
Regression Adjustment in Completely Randomized Experiments with a Diverging Number of Covariates
Randomized experiments have become important tools in empirical research. In a completely randomized treatment-control experiment, the simple difference in means of the outcome is un-biased for the average treatment effect, and covariate…
Synthetic Difference-in-Differences
We present a new estimator for causal effects with panel data that builds on insights behind the widely used difference-in-differences and synthetic control methods. Relative to these methods we find, both theoretically and empirically, that this…
Tax Loss Measurement
We use financial disclosures to develop a novel proxy for net operating loss carryforward (NOL) tax benefits. This approach more accurately identifies firms with tax losses, more precisely measures the tax loss, and better predicts reductions in…
The Economic Value of Norm Conformity and Menu-Opt-out Costs
This paper theoretically and empirically analyzes the trade-offs between consumption versus norm conformity and choosing from a menu of default (pre-selected) options versus opting to compute a preferred non-menu choice. In the theoretical model…
Where is Standard of Living the Highest? Local Prices and the Geography of Consumption
Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper we provide…
Where the Blame Lies: Unpacking Groups Shifts Judgments of Blame in Intergroup Conflict
Whom do individuals blame for intergroup conflict? Do people attribute responsibility for intergroup conflict to the in-group or the out-group? Theoretically integrating the literatures on intergroup relations, moral psychology, and judgment and…