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.
We develop a model of financial crises with both a financial amplification mechanism, via frictional intermediation, and a role for sentiment, via time-varying beliefs about an illiquidity state. We confront the model with data on…
We introduce safe asset demand for dollar-denominated bonds into a tractable incomplete market model of exchange rates. The convenience yield on dollar bonds enters as a stochastic wedge in the Euler equations for exchange rate…
We study the behavior of credit and output across a financial crisis cycle using information from credit spreads. We show the transition into a crisis occurs with a large increase in credit spreads, indicating that crises involve…
Governments use their countries’ economic strength from existing financial and trade relationships to achieve geopolitical and economic goals. We refer to this practice as geoeconomics. We build a framework based on three core…
We study specialized lending in a credit market competition model with private information. Two banks, equipped with similar data processing systems, possess “general” signals regarding the borrower’s quality. However, the…
Banks’ lending technology hinges on their handling of soft and hard information in dealing with different types of credit demand. Through assembling a novel dataset on banks’ investment in information technologies (IT), this paper…
We provide a liquidity-based theory for the dominant use of the US dollar as the unit of denomination in global debt contracts. Firms need to trade their revenue streams for the assets required to extinguish their debt obligations…
A higher U.S. government debt/output ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current debt/output ratio…
This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup…
We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and…
We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010…
We survey public employees across the United States about their preferences regarding retirement plan options, and in particular at what employer contribution rate public employees would agree to switch to a defined contribution…
The designs of many new blockchains are inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume most system nodes behave honestly, we recognize that blockchains are deployed in environments…
New approaches to corporate purpose have emerged in recent years that hold out the promise of addressing concerns about corporate social responsibility (CSR) through shareholder governance, rather than in spite of it, by…
We reassess the pattern of Euro Area financial integration adjusting for the role of “onshore offshore financial centers” (OOFCs) within the Euro Area. While the Euro Area records large levels of international investment both…
Public finance and real estate are uniquely intertwined in China, where local governments also serve as monopolist sellers of land. We shed new light on how land sale decisions and land prices depend on local governments’…
We analyze U.S. banks’ asset exposure to a recent rise in the interest rates with implications for financial stability. The U.S. banking system’s market value of assets is $2.2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of…
We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent…
We explore the evolution of financial innovation, using 24,000 U.S. finance patents applied for and granted over last two decades. Patented financial innovations are substantial and economically important, with annual grants…
Using cross-border holding data from all custodians in China’s Stock Connect, we provide evidence that Chinese mainland insiders tend to evade the see-through surveillance by round-tripping via the Stock Connect program. After the…