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SSRN Research Paper Series
The Social Science Research Network’s Research Paper Series includes working papers produced by Stanford GSB the Rock Center.
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Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress
Over the past thirty years changes in divorce law have significantly increased access to divorce. The different timing of divorce law reform across states provides a useful quasi-experiment with which to examine the effects of this change. We…
Competing For The Public Through The News Media
Interest groups seek to influence economic activity through public and private politics. Public politics takes place in the arenas of public institutions, whereas private politics takes place outside public institutions often in the arena of…
Deregulation Process, Governance Structures and Efficiency: The U.S. Electric Utility Sector
This paper is an empirical assessment of the comparative efficiency of governance structures in an environment marked by high uncertainty. We analyze the short-term impact of retail deregulation on the productive efficiency of electric utilities…
Disagreement about Inflation Expectations
Analyzing 50 years of inflation expectations data from several sources, we document substantial disagreement among both consumers and professional economists about expected future inflation. Moreover, this disagreement shows substantial variation…
Firms' Choice of Regulation Instruments to Reduce Pollution: A Tansaction Cost Approach
This paper extends transaction costs economics to analyze relationships between firms and regulatory agencies. It compares the economic efficiency of firm-agency governance structures for dealing with pollution reduction. The transaction costs of…
In Search Of ISO: An Institutional Perspective On The Adoption Of International Management Standards
This paper analyzes the determinants of the cross-national adoption of the international Environmental Management System standard ISO 14001 using a panel of 102 countries from 1996 to 2000. I use new institutional economics to develop hypotheses…
Is Business Cycle Volatility Costly? Evidence from Surveys of Subjective Well-being
This paper analyzes the effects of business cycle volatility on measures of subjective well-being, including self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. I find robust evidence that high inflation and, to a greater extent, unemployment lower…
Total Foundation Asset Management: Exploring Elements of Engagement Within Philanthropic Practice
Abstract not available.
What do Financial Markets Think of War in Iraq?
We analyze financial market data in order to produce an ex-ante assessment of the economic consequences of war with Iraq. The novel feature of our analysis derives from the existence of a market for Saddam Securities, a new future traded on an…
Are Voters Rational? Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections
Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect politicians who deliver favorable outcomes. A second implication is that rational voters will not support a politician because of good outcomes unrelated to the…
A Capital Idea: Total Foundation Asset Management and The Unified Investment Strategy
This paper presents the perspective that the purpose of foundations is not simply to engage in grant making, but rather to invest in the creation of social value. The idea is also presented that available foundation assets for supporting this…
Private Politics and Private Policy: A Theory of Boycotts
Pubic policies such as regulation, antitrust, and international trade are the result of public politics and competition over who gets what with government the arbiter of that competition. Policies are also chosen by private parties without the…
Selection Criteria for Roll Call Votes
On grounds of inclusion of undesirable votes (type I errors) and exclusion of desirable votes (type II errors), we question the convention of selecting only final passage votes for roll call analysis. We propose an alternative selection method…
Institutionalism as a Methodology
We provide a definition of institutionalism and a schematic account that distinguishes between institutional theories (in which institutions are exogenous) and theories of institutions (in which some, but necessarily not all, institutions are…
Plausibility of Signals by a Heterogeneous Committee
Krishna and Morgan (2001a) propose “amendments” to two of Gilligan and Krehbiel’s (1987, 1988) theoretical studies of legislative signaling. The new results for homogeneous committees do not significantly change the empirical expectations of…
Private Ordering on the Internet: The eBay Community of Traders
eBay provides an online auction venue for remote and anonymous individuals to realize gains from trade. As a venue it never sees the items sold, verifies the item listings, handles settlements, or represents either the buyer or seller. Despite…
Private Politics
This paper introduces the subject of private politics and presents illustrative models using as the context a conflict between an activist and a firm. Private politics addresses situations of conflict and the resolution of that conflict without…
Relations Between Fully-Revealing Equilibria of Multiple-Sender Signaling and Screening Models
We explore the relation between certain multiple-sender cheap-talk signaling games and the corresponding screening or mechanism design games. The existence of fully-revealing equilibria in the signaling game implies the existence of implementable…
A Behavioral Model of Turnout
The so-called “paradox of voting” is major anomaly for rational choice theories of elections. If voting is costly and citizens are rational then large electorates the expected turnout would be small, for if many people voted the chance of anyone…
Domestic Discretionary Appropriations, 1950-1999 Here's the President. Where's the Party?
Annual changes in domestic discretionary spending are analyzed to test predictions from three distinct types of theories of U.S. policy-making: (1) preference-driven, or nonpartisan, theories such as the recently developed pivotal politics theory…