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.
New AI tools have the potential to change the way workers perform and learn, but little is known about their impacts on the job. In this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant…
We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about…
Social networks utilize award recognition and front pages to motivate user content creation, facilitate consumer discovery of content, and provide attention and recognition to the best content. Past research shows that such…
How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study…
Tropical deforestation for agriculture causes alarming CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. To prevent this, various governments and multinational commodity-buyers offer a positive incentive for locals…
This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification…
Banks’ lending technology hinges on their handling of soft and hard information in dealing with different types of credit demand. Through assembling a novel dataset on banks’ investment in information technologies (IT), this paper…
We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations…
In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with…
A higher U.S. government debt/output ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current debt/output ratio…
Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about…
This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup…
Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods…
We solve a multi-stage real options model of litigation that embeds extant frameworks from the literature. The characterization of filing a lawsuit as a compound option permits a novel analysis of real-world phenomena. Heightened…
We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and…
The under-representation of women in the technology industry has long been recognized as a concern, and the provision of gender-specific information on job search platforms has emerged as a potential solution. In this research, we…
We examine whether the proprietary costs of economically linked peers influence focal firms’ merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions, which often involve extensive transfers of proprietary information across merging entities. Using…
ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory…
We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010…