Working Papers

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 and the Rock Center.

You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.

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Evolutionary View of Strategy-making

Robert A. Burgelman, Sasanka Sekhar Chanda
2026

The evolutionary view posits that the intraorganizational ecology of strategy-making comprises two distinct types of strategic action. Induced strategic action involves initiatives on the part of operational and middle-level managers that fit…

Financial Regulation and AI: A Faustian Bargain?

Christopher Clayton, Antonio Coppola
2026

We study whether AI methods applied to large-scale portfolio holdings data can improve financial regulation. We build a state-of-the-art, graph-based deep learning model tailored to security-level data on the holdings of financial intermediaries…

Gun-Use Regulation and Firearm Mortality: Evidence from Deer Hunting Season

Adam Rosenberg
2026

This paper studies gun-use regulation and firearm mortality. I gather historical schedules of deer hunting season in North Carolina and Virginia and pair them with morgue records at county-day frequency. Hunters increase firearm use during deer…

How to Reduce Lead Emissions from a Lead-Acid Battery Circular Economy with Formal and Informal Processes

Erica Plambeck, Qiong Wang, Amrita Kundu
2026

Problem Definition: Bangladesh suffers from massive lead emissions from its circular Lead-Acid Battery (LAB)

industry. Informal smelting of scrap lead from Used Lead-Acid Batteries (ULAB) is especially emission-intensive…

Regulating Firearm Markets: Evidence from California

Adam Rosenberg
2026

This paper studies demand, fatalities, and regulation in firearm markets. I assemble 20 years of administrative data from California, recording all licit handgun purchases and fatalities. Leveraging variation from the entry timing of firearm…

Second-Best Amendment: Market Power and Tax Design in the Firearms Industry

Luis Armona, Adam Rosenberg
2026

This paper studies the roles of market power and taxes in determining market surplus and social welfare in the U.S. consumer firearms industry. Using microdata from Massachusetts and aggregate data from other states, we estimate an equilibrium…

Two-Sided Flexibility in Platforms

Daniel Freund, Sébastien Martin, Kamessi Zhao
2026

Flexibility is a cornerstone of operations management, crucial to hedge stochasticity in product demands, service requirements, and resource allocation. In two-sided platforms, flexibility is also two-sided and can be viewed as the compatibility…

A Unified Theory of Delegated Capital Management

Jonathan B. Berk, Peter M. DeMarzo
December182025

We develop a unified theory of delegated capital management by extending the paradigm of Berk and Green (2004) from mutual funds to alternative assets. With competitive markets and rational investors, we derive the optimal contract and account…

A Dynamic Model of the Racial Wealth Gap

Sylvain Catherine, Ellen Jiayang Lu, James D. Paron
December162025

What explains wealth and portfolio differences between Black and White Americans? We find that disparities in economic factors explain portfolios well, but only partly explain the wealth gap. In a dynamic setting, economic factors often change…

When Silence Speaks: Dynamic Learning and Hidden Action in Attorney-Client Relationships

Steven Grenadier, Brian Grenadier
December162025

We model the attorney-client relationship as a dynamic moral hazard problem where the client faces a difficult inference challenge. Clients learn about case quality by “learning from silence,” but silence is a noisy signal: it can mean the case…

Scaling Clinician-Grade Feature Generation from Clinical Notes with Multi-Agent Language Models

Jiayi Wang, Jacqueline Jil Vallon, Nikhil V. Kotha, Neil Panjwani, Xi Ling, Margaret Redfield, Sushmita Vij, Sandy Srinivas, John Leppert, Mark K. Buyyounouski, Mohsen Bayati
December122025

Developing accurate clinical prediction models is often bottlenecked by the difficulty of generating meaningful predictive features from unstructured data. While electronic health records (EHRs) contain rich narrative information, extracting a…

Profitable Misconduct, Corporate Governance, and Law Enforcement

Anat R. Admati, Nathan Atkinson, Paul Pfleiderer
December52025

This paper analyzes interactions between corporate governance and law enforcement practices, focusing on cases where deterrence is weak and harmful misconduct is profitable. We show how managerial compensation contracts, including stock-based…

Patent Privateering

Jinhwan Kim, Kristen Valentine, Jenny Li Zhang, Yuxiang Zheng
December22025

In a patent privateering strategy, firms sell patents to a non-practicing entity (NPE) with the expectation that the NPE sues the seller’s rivals for patent infringement. We examine whether firms under competitive pressure and facing barriers to…

Optimal Redistribution via Income Taxation and Market Design

Paweł Doligalski, Piotr Dworczak, Mohammad Akbarpour, Scott Duke Kominers
December12025

Policymakers often distort goods markets to effect redistribution—for example, via price controls, differential taxation, or in-kind transfers. We investigate the optimality of such policies alongside the (optimally-designed) income tax. In our…

Patent Disclosures, Examiners, and Greenwashing

Christopher S. Armstrong, Jinhwan Kim, Jalal Sani, Terrence Tianshuo Shi
December2025

We examine how patent disclosures influence technology classification decisions by patent examiners and how firms strategically tailor these disclosures to affect classification outcomes. Using a novel machine learning approach, we construct a…

Rational and Irrational Belief in the Hot Hand: Evidence from “Jeopardy!”

Anthony J. Kukavica, Sridhar Narayanan
December2025

We use a play-by-play dataset from the game show “Jeopardy!” to study the hot hand phenomenon, whereby people appear to exhibit “hot” states of elevated performance in domains with repeat trials. We first demonstrate that Jeopardy contestants…

What Would it Cost to End Extreme Poverty?

Roshni Sahoo, Joshua Blumenstock, Paul Niehaus, Leo Selker, Stefan Wager
December2025

We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23…

A Simple Threshold Captures the Social Learning of Conventions

Douglas R. Guilbeault, Spencer Caplan, Charles Yang
November212025

A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories…

Beyond Black-Box: Structuring Landing Page Recommender Systems Using Predicted Intents

Yuyan Wang, Cheenar Banerjee, Samer Chucri, Minmin Chen
October302025

Modern recommender systems rely on black-box machine learning models to predict consumer choices. However, because these models do not explicitly represent the underlying data-generating process (DGP), they often struggle to generalize beyond…

Simulating and Experimenting with Social Media Mobilization Using LLM Agents

Sadegh Shirani, Mohsen Bayati
October302025

Online social networks have transformed the ways in which political mobilization messages are disseminated, raising new questions about how peer influence operates at scale. Building on the landmark 61-million-person Facebook experiment, we…