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.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
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…
A Theory of Community Formation and Social Hierarchy
We analyze the classic problem of sustaining trust when cheating and leaving trading partners is easy, and outside enforcement is difficult. We construct equilibria where individuals are loyal to smaller groups– communities– that allow…
Bitcoin Pricing, Adoption, and Usage: Theory and Evidence
This paper develops a model of user adoption and use of virtual currency (such as Bitcoin), and focusing on the dynamics of adoption in the presence of frictions arising from exchange rate uncertainty. The theoretical model can be used…
Estimating Local Fiscal Multipliers
We propose a new source of cross-sectional variation that may identify causal impacts of government spending on the economy. We use the fact that a large number of federal spending programs depend on local population levels. Every ten years, the…
Dynamic Natural Monopoly Regulation: Time Inconsistency, Asymmetric Information, and Political Environments
This paper quantitatively assesses time inconsistency, moral hazard, and political ideology in monopoly regulation of electricity distribution. We specify and estimate a dynamic model of utility regulation featuring investment and moral hazard.…
Adaptive Concentration of Regression Trees, with Application to Random Forests
We study the convergence of the predictive surface of regression trees and forests. To support our analysis we introduce a notion of adaptive concentration for regression trees. This approach breaks tree training into a model selection phase in…
A “Pencil-Sharpening” Algorithm for Two Player Stochastic Games with Perfect Monitoring
We study the subgame perfect equilibria of two player stochastic games with perfect monitoring and geometric discounting. A novel algorithm is developed for calculating the discounted payoffs that can be attained in equilibrium. This algorithm…
The Impact of Consumer Multi-homing on Advertising Markets and Media Competition
We develop a model of advertising markets in an environment where consumers may switch (or “multi-home”) across publishers. Consumer switching generates inefficiency in the process of matching advertisers to consumers, because advertisers may not…
Reform Fatigue
We present a rational theory of reform fatigue. At each instant a politician chooses to divide effort between reforms and the status quo, and this choice is modeled as a two-armed bandit problem. Reforms are expected to yield a higher rate of…