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 and the Rock Center.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
Catch-Up and Fall-Back Through Innovation and Imitation
Will fast growing emerging economies sustain rapid growth rates until they “catch-up” to the technology frontier? Are there incentives for some developed countries to free-ride off of innovators and optimally “fall-back” relative to the…
Market-Based Bank Capital Regulation
Today’s regulatory rules, especially the easily-manipulated measures of regulatory capital, have led to costly bank failures. We design a robust regulatory system such that (i) bank losses are credibly borne by the private sector (ii)…
Financial Contracts with Recontracting
This paper presents a tractable model of dynamic moral hazard with purely pecuniary private benefits. To obtain a tractable but binding moral hazard problem, I introduce recontracting: the agent can offer a new continuation contract to the…
Oblivious Equilibrium for Concentrated Industries
This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of “dominant firms…
Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment
About 10% of US employees now regularly work from home (WFH), but there are concerns this can lead to “shirking from home.” We report the results of a WFH experiment at CTrip, a 16,000- employee, NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency. Call center…
Moral Hazard and the Balance Sheet Channel
I build a model of balance sheet recessions where financial frictions are derived from a moral hazard problem. I show that TFP shocks are amplified through a balance sheet channel only if the private action of the agent exposes him to aggregate…
Incomplete Contracts and the Internal Organization of Firms
We survey the theoretical and empirical literature on decentralization within firms. We first discuss how the concept of incomplete contracts shapes our views about the organization of decision-making within firms. We then overview the empirical…
Competition for a Majority
We define the class of two-player zero-sum games with payoffs having mild discontinuities, which in applications typically stem from how ties are resolved. For games in this class we establish sufficient conditions for existence of a value of the…
Costs and Benefits of Dynamic Trading in a Lemons Market
We study a dynamic market with asymmetric information that creates the lemons problem. We compare efficiency of the market under different assumptions about the timing of trade. We identify positive and negative aspects of dynamic trading,…
Time Horizon and Cooperation in Continuous Time
When subjects interact in continuous time, their ability to cooperate may dramatically increase. In an experiment, we study the impact of different time horizons on cooperation in (quasi) continuous time prisoner’s dilemmas. We find that…
Rules With Discretion and Local Information
To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: It can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held, because…
The United States Labor Market: Status Quo or A New Normal?
The recession of 2007-09 witnessed high rates of unemployment that have been slow to recede. This has led many to conclude that structural changes have occurred in the labor market and that the economy will not return to the low rates of…
Why Bosses Matter
How and by how much do supervisors enhance worker productivity? Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Replacing a boss who is in the…
Games with Unawareness
We provide a tool to model and solve strategic situations where players’ perceptions are limited, in the sense that they may only be aware of, or model, some of the aspects of the strategic situations at hand, as well as situations where players…
Not Only What But also When: A Theory of Dynamic Voluntary Disclosure
We study a dynamic strategic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of information. Such situations are prevalent in real life, e.g., in corporate disclosure environments that are characterized by information asymmetry between the firm…
Ranking Friends
We investigate the scope for cooperation within a community engaged in repeated reciprocal interactions. Players seek the help of others and approach them sequentially according to some fixed order, that is, a ranking profile. We study the…
The Voter's Blunt Tool
When do voters win? In this paper we derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests. We show that increasing political competition, increasing office holding benefits, decreasing…
Women in the Boardroom: Symbols or Substance?
The central argument for increasing the number of women on corporate boards of directors has been the so-called business case for diversity which proposes that women and minorities add valuable new perspectives that result in enhanced corporate…
Forbearance in Optimal Multilateral Trade Agreements
I present a theory of optimal multilateral trade agreements with public political shocks. I first show that forbearance - where one country withholds retaliation when its trading partner receives a shock - is a feature of an optimal agreement.…
Legislated Protection and the WTO
Tariff bindings and administered protection are two characteristics of the WTO that are little understood. Tariff bindings place a ceiling on tariffs that is not always reached, while administered protection ensures that all sectors have access…