Working Papers

These papers are working drafts of research which often appear in final form in academic journals. The published versions may differ from the working versions provided here.

SSRN Research Paper Series

The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.

You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.

Academic Area
Centers & Initiatives
Results for

Political polarization in medicine

Woojin Kim
July2025

Political polarization is increasingly affecting policymaking, but how is it influencing professional decision-making? This paper studies the differences in medical practice between Republican and Democratic physicians over 1999-2019. It links…

Expectations Formation with Fat-Tailed Processes: Evidence and Theory

Tim de Silva, Eugene Larsen-Hallock, Adam Rej, David Themar
June302025

This paper studies expectations formation when the underlying process has fat tails. Using a large sample of firm sales growth expectations, we document three facts: (i) the relationship between forecast revisions and future forecast errors is…

The wealth of stagnation: Falling growth, rising valuations

James D. Paron
June292025

Over the last half-century, economic growth stagnated but stock-market wealth boomed. I present evidence that declining innovation productivity reconciles these trends. At the macro level, I document that R&D spending has fallen relative to…

Selective Inattention to Interest Rates

Pierfrancesco Mei, Tim de Silva
June252025

This paper studies whether households are selectively inattentive to interest rates and examines its macroeconomic implications. We first use existing and newly-designed household surveys to establish that households close to durables purchases…

Insurance versus Moral Hazard in Income-Contingent Student Loan Repayment

Tim de Silva
June232025

Student loans with income-contingent repayment insure borrowers against income risk but can reduce their incentives to earn more. Using a change in Australia’s income-contingent repayment schedule, I show that borrowers reduce their labor supply…

Sovereign default and the decline in interest rates

Max Miller, James D. Paron, Jessica A. Wachter
June142025

Sovereign debt yields have declined dramatically over the last half-century. Standard explanations, including aging populations and increases in asset demand from abroad, encounter difficulties when confronted with the full range of evidence. We…

Profitable Misconduct, Corporate Governance, and Law Enforcement

Anat R. Admati, Nathan Atkinson, Paul Pfleiderer
June92025

This paper analyzes interactions between corporate governance and law enforcement practices, focusing on cases where deterrence is weak and harmful misconduct is profitable. We show how managerial compensation contracts, including stock-based…

Third-Party Litigation Financing Under a Veil of Secrecy: The Equilibrium Consequences of Disclosure Requirements

Steven Grenadier, Brian Grenadier
June2025

Third-party litigation finance is an increasingly popular practice in commercial litigation. Despite calls for mandated disclosure, litigation funders are mostly anonymous to defendants, judges and juries. We first present an equilibrium model of…

Resisting Populism through Financial Market Exposure: Experimental Evidence from Brexit

Saumitra Jha
May262025

Populism has been on the rise, posing a threat to liberal democracy. Existing evidence suggests that globalization, economic shocks, and concerns over cultural change increase support for populist agendas. Yet less is known about interventions…

Data and Welfare in Credit Markets

Mark Jansen, Fabian Nagel, Constantine Yannelis, Anthony Lee Zhang
May202025

We show how to measure the welfare effects arising from increased data availability. When lenders have more data on prospective borrower costs, they can charge prices that are more aligned with these costs. This increases total social welfare and…

Measuring Perceived Slant in Large Language Models Through User Evaluations

Sean J. Westwood, Justin Grinner, Andrew B. Hall
May82025

As LLMs become the default interface for search, news, and everyday problem-solving, they may filter and frame political information before citizens ever confront it. Identifying and mitigating partisan “bias”—output with a systematic slant…

Human + AI in Accounting: Early Evidence from the Field

Jung Ho Choi, Chloe Xie
May72025

This paper provides early evidence on the integration and impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in accounting at the accountant and task levels. Using a multi-method approach, we first identify heterogeneous adoption patterns,…

Reframing Analyst Forecast Efficiency: An Empirical Bayes Perspective

Christopher S. Armstrong, Chongho Kim, Yaniv Konchitchki, Frank Zhou
May62025

We develop a rational, non-behavioral framework in which analysts use empirical Bayesian techniques to construct their forecasts. Our approach assumes that analysts construct a single empirical prior by aggregating information across all of the…

Axiomatic Equilibrium Selection: The Case of Generic Extensive-Form Games

Srihari Govindan, Robert Wilson
May2025

A solution concept that is a refinement of Nash equilibria selects for each finite game a nonempty collection of closed and connected subsets of Nash equilibria as solutions. We impose three axioms for such solution concepts. The axiom of…

Generative AI in Equilibrium: Evidence from a Creative Goods Marketplace

Samuel Goldberg, H. Tai Lam
May2025

Artists and policy makers are concerned that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) may lead to disappearance of non-GenAI content. In this paper we study the implications of GenAI for the production and consumption of creative goods; such as…

The Shadow Price of “Public” Information

Ed deHaan, Chanseok Lee, Miao Liu, Suzie Noh
May2025

Converting public information into stock picks is unlikely to be costless, yet the magnitude of public information processing costs is unknown. We quantify extra-marginal information costs for mutual fund managers by building an “AI analyst” that…

Beyond Black-Box: Structuring Multi-Stage Recommender Systems Using Predicted Intents

Yuyan Wang, Cheenar Banerjee, Samer Chucri, Minmin Chen
April192025

Modern recommender systems, which rely on large-scale machine learning (ML) models to predict the next item a consumer will engage with, often lack generalizability and understanding of consumer behaviors due to their black-box nature. To address…

Using Multiple Outcomes to Adjust Standard Errors for Spatial Correlation

Stefano DellaVigna, Guido W. Imbens, Woojin Kim, David Ritzwoller
April172025

Empirical research in economics often examines the behavior of agents located in a geographic space. In such cases, statistical inference is complicated by the interdependence of economic outcomes across locations. A common approach to account…

Breaking through the Ethnic Growth Trap

Saumitra Jha
April2025

In this overview piece, I review the literature and identify important directions for how developing societies can break out of such ethnic growth traps and instead leverage the gains that can often be had from ethnic diversity. To do this…

Dollar Upheaval: This Time is Different

Zhengyang Jiang, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Hanno Lustig, Robert Richmond, Chenzi Xu
April2025

What can we learn from the high-frequency responses in bond and currency markets to the recent tariff announcement about the status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency? The dollar depreciated by 3.4% after April 4 in spite of rising…