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.
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Economists routinely make functional form assumptions about consumer demand to obtain welfare estimates — often for convenience, tractability, or both. How sensitive are welfare estimates to these assumptions? In this paper, we…
Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper…
We estimate a measure of segregation, experienced isolation, that captures individuals’ exposure to diverse others in the places they visit over the course of their days. Using Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected from…
We develop new semiparametric methods for estimating treatment effects. We focus on a setting where the outcome distributions may be thick tailed, where treatment effects are small, where sample sizes are large and where…
Interest rate caps are widespread in consumer credit markets, yet there is limited evidence on their effects on market outcomes and welfare. The effects of this policy are ambiguous and depend on a trade-off between consumer…
Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two barriers to long-acting…
Empirical models play a distinctive role in the study of matching markets. They provide a quantitative framework for measuring heterogeneity in preferences for schools (Hastings et al., 2009), comparing school assignment…
Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level…
Analyzing observational data from multiple sources can be useful for increasing statistical power to detect a treatment effect; however, practical constraints such as privacy considerations may restrict individual-level…
Banks’ reluctance to repair their balance sheets, combined with deposit insurance and regulatory forbearance in recognizing greater risks and losses, can lead to solvency problems that look like liquidity (bank-run) crises…
We study the problem of model selection for contextual bandits, in which the algorithm must balance the bias-variance trade-off for model estimation while also balancing the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In this paper, we…
It has become increasingly common for data to be collected adaptively, for example using contextual bandits. Historical data of this type can be used to evaluate other treatment assignment policies to guide future innovation or…
Learning optimal policies from historical data enables the gains from personalization to be realized in a wide variety of applications. The growing policy learning literature focuses on a setting where the treatment assignment…
COVID-19 drove a mass social experiment in working from home. We survey more than 30,000 Americans over multiple waves to investigate whether WFH will stick, and why. Our data say that 20 percent of full workdays will be supplied…
Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur…
In medicine, randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for informing treatment decisions. Observational comparative effectiveness research is often plagued by selection bias, and expert-selected covariates may not be…
Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze…
We study how fathers’ access to workplace flexibility affects maternal postpartum health. We use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum…
When the government commits to a debt policy, the future value of government primary surpluses at all horizons is dictated by the debt dynamics under the risk-neutral measure. We compare the present discounted value of future…
The health care system commonly relies on information about family medical history in the allocation of screenings and in diagnostic processes. At the same time, an emerging literature documents that treatment for “marginally…