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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.
When Should You Adjust Standard Errors for Clustering?
In empirical work in economics it is common to report standard errors that account for clustering of units. Typically, the motivation given for the clustering adjustments is that unobserved components in outcomes for units within clusters are…
The Long-Term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High Stakes Tests
We examine the long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high stakes tests. Bunching in Swedish math test score distributions reveal that teachers inflate students who have “a bad test day,” but do not discriminate based on…
Structured Embedding Models for Grouped Data
Word embeddings are a powerful approach for analyzing language, and exponential family embeddings (EFE) extend them to other types of data. Here we develop structured exponential family embeddings (S-EFE), a method for discovering embeddings that…
Optimal Capital Structure and Bankruptcy Choice: Dynamic Bargaining vs Liquidation
We model a firm’s optimal capital structure decision in a framework in which it may later choose to enter either Chapter 11 reorganization or Chapter 7 liquidation. Creditors anticipate equityholders’ ex-post reorganization incentives and price…
Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity. We present a wide range of evidence from…
Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests
Many scientific and engineering challenges — ranging from personalized medicine to customized marketing recommendations — require an understanding of treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric causal forest for…
Dynamic Coordination and Intervention Policy
We model a dynamic economy with strategic complementarity among investors and endogenous government interventions that mitigate coordination failures. We establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness, and show that one intervention can affect…
Sampling-Based vs. Design-Based Uncertainty in Regression Analysis
Previously titled: Finite Population Causal Standard Errors
Consider a researcher estimating the parameters of a regression function based on data for all 50 states in the United States or on data for all visits to a website. What…
The Digital Privacy Paradox: Small Money, Small Costs, Small Talk
‘Notice and Choice’ has been a mainstay of policies designed to safeguard consumer privacy. This paper investigates distortions in consumer behavior when faced with notice and choice which may limit the ability of consumers to safeguard their…
Design of Macro-Prudential Stress Tests
We study the design of macro-prudential stress tests and capital requirements. The tests provide information about correlation in banks portfolios. The regulator chooses contingent capital requirements that create a liquidity buffer in case of a…
Bias in Cable News: Real Effects and Polarization
We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and…
Do MBAs Pick Winning Stocks When Choosing Their First Job?
Every summer and fall, freshly minted MBAs and MBA summer interns take new positions at companies. We analyze whether their choices have any predictive power on the success of those companies. We show that MBAs tend to join companies that have…
Multilateral Trade Bargaining: A First Peek at the GATT Bargaining Records
This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. Focusing on the Torquay Round (1950-51), we document six stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations.…
Unification versus Separation of Regulatory Institutions
Why might a country choose to aggregate regulatory information into a single government agency? And what might reverse this choice? We consider an oversight setting in which the institutional structure affects access to information. A regulator…
Nash-in-Nash Tariff Bargaining with and without MFN
We provide an equilibrium analysis of the efficiency properties of bilateral tariff negotiations in a three-country, two-good general equilibrium model of international trade when transfers are not feasible. We consider “weak-rules” …
The Impact of News Aggregators on Internet News Consumption: The Case of Localization
A policy debate centers around the question whether news aggregators such as Google News decrease or increase traffic to online news sites. One side of the debate, typically espoused by publishers, views aggregators as substitutes for traditional…
Solving Heterogeneous Estimating Equations with Gradient Forests
We propose a method for non-parametric statistical estimation, based on random forests (Breiman, 2001), that can be used to fit any heterogeneous parameter of interest identified as the solution to a set of local estimating equations. Following…
Matrix Completion Methods for Causal Panel Data Models
In this paper we develop new methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where a subset of units are exposed to a treatment during a subset of periods, and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the…
Dynamic Trading: Price Inertia and Front-Running
We build a linear-quadratic model to analyze trading in a market with private information and heterogeneous agents. Agents receive private taste/inventory shocks and trade continuously. Agents differ in their need for trade as well as the cost to…
Optimal Regulation of Financial Intermediaries
Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Review
I characterize the optimal financial regulation policy in an economy where financial intermediaries trade capital assets on behalf of households, but must retain an equity stake for…