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.
Economists (and Economics) in Tech Companies
As technology platforms have created new markets and new ways of acquiring information, economists have come to play an increasingly central role in tech companies – tackling problems such as platform design, strategy, pricing, and policy. Over…
School Choice with Unequal Outside Options
Students with identical valuations for public schools but unequal outside options have different opportunity costs of revealing their preferences. Consequently, manipulable mechanisms need not resolve conflicting preferences in a Pareto-improving…
Financing Entrepreneurship and Innovation in China: A Public Policy Perspective
This study reports on the current state-of-affairs in the funding of entrepreneurship and innovations in China and provides a broad survey of academic findings on the subject. We discuss the implications of these findings for public policies…
Credible Mechanisms
Consider an extensive-form mechanism, run by an auctioneer who communicates sequentially and privately with agents. Suppose the auctioneer can deviate from the rules provided that no single agent detects the deviation. A mechanism is credible if…
The Emergence of Cost Effective Battery Storage
Energy storage will be key to overcoming the intermittency and variability of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power. This paper proposes a cost metric for measuring the cost of energy storage and for identifying optimally sized…
Stable Predictions across Unknown Environments
In many important machine learning applications, the training distribution used to learn a probabilistic classifier differs from the testing distribution on which the classifier will be used to make predictions. Traditional methods correct the…
The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers
The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favor women. We explore one facet of the gig economy by examining labor supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber…
The Long-Term-Care Insurance Puzzle: Modeling and Measurement
Individuals face significant late-in-life risks, including needing long-term care (LTC). Yet, they hold little long-term care insurance (LTCI). Using both “strategic survey questions,” which identify preferences, and stated demand questions, this…
Learning by Trading
How can we help individuals handle financial decisions in an increasingly complex environment? We explore an easily scalable avenue for improving financial understanding: learning by online trading in stocks. We randomly assign 1345 adults…
Learning and Risk Premiums in an Arbitrage-free Term Structure Model
We study the evolution of risk premiums on US Treasury bonds from the perspective of a real-time Bayesian learner RA who updates her beliefs using a dynamic term structure model. Learning about the historical dynamics of yields led to…
Just a Few Seeds More: Value of Network Information for Diffusion
Identifying the optimal set of individuals to first receive information (`seeds’) in a social network is a widely-studied question in many settings, such as the diffusion of information, microfinance programs, and new technologies. Numerous…
Operational Volatility and Synergistic Value in Vertically Integrated Energy Systems
We examine the magnitude of synergistic effects in vertically integrated energy systems that arise when the external market for an intermediate input (electricity) is imperfect and the two subsystems are subject to operational volatility in terms…
The Road Ahead for Solar PV Power
Over the past decade, solar photovoltaic (PV) power has experienced dramatic deployment growth coupled with substantial decreases in system prices. This article examines how solar PV power is currently positioned in the electricity marketplace…
Carpooling and the Economics of Self-Driving Cars
We study the interplay between autonomous transportation, carpooling, and road pricing. We discuss how improvements in these technologies, and interactions among them, will affect transportation markets. Our main results show how to achieve…
The Geography of Poverty and Nutrition: Food Deserts and Food Choices Across the United States
We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject…
The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco
Revision Requested, American Economic Review
We exploit quasi-experimental variation in assignment of rent control to study its impacts on tenants, landlords, and the overall rental market. Leveraging new data tracking individuals…
Financing Transplant Costs of the Poor: A Dynamic Model of Global Kidney Exchange
In some developing nations, many end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients die because the costs of kidney transplantation and dialysis are beyond the reach of most citizens. In this paper, we analyze two proposals for extending kidney exchange to…
The Prospects for Renewable Hydrogen Production
Hydrogen has long been heralded as a potentially critical element in the transition to a low carbon economy. The recent sharp cost declines for renewable energy raise the question whether an economic case can be made to produce hydrogen from…
The Leverage Ratchet Effect
Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance firm value.…