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 Emergence of Cost Effective Battery Storage
Energy storage will be key to overcoming the intermittency and variability of renewable energy sources, like wind and solar power. This paper proposes a cost metric for measuring the cost of energy storage and for identifying optimally sized…
Disruptions, Resilience and Performance of Emerging Market Entrepreneurs: Evidence from Uganda
We examine the effect of firm-specific business disruptions on the performance of small firms in emerging markets. We study the impact of both managerial disruptions (which result in the absence of the entrepreneur-owner or more broadly a key…
When Losses Turn Into Loans: The Cost of Weak Banks
Winner 2017 BlackRock Applied Research Award
AQR Top Finance Graduate Award 2018
We provide evidence that a weak banking sector contributed to low productivity following the European debt crisis. An…
How Often Do Firms Rebalance Their Capital Structures? Evidence from Corporate Filings
This paper shows that the frequency of capital structure adjustment varies significantly across firms. The most active 25% of firms account for 51% of leverage adjustments, while the least active 50% of firms account for only 19% of such events.…
Stable Predictions across Unknown Environments
In many important machine learning applications, the training distribution used to learn a probabilistic classifier differs from the testing distribution on which the classifier will be used to make predictions. Traditional methods correct the…
Going Green: Environment Protest, Policy and CO2 Emissions, in U.S. States, 1990-2007
A major goal of the environmental movement is to conserve or improve the natural environment, but evidence showing that environmental mobilization produces positive environmental outcomes is mixed. This paper addresses a fundamental question…
The Gender Earnings Gap in the Gig Economy: Evidence from over a Million Rideshare Drivers
The growth of the “gig” economy generates worker flexibility that, some have speculated, will favor women. We explore one facet of the gig economy by examining labor supply choices and earnings among more than a million rideshare drivers on Uber…
Sustaining Rainforests and Smallholders by Eliminating Payment Delay in a Commodity Supply Chain—It takes a Village
Millions of poor smallholder farmers produce global commodities, often through illegal deforestation. Multinational commodity buyers have committed to halt illegal deforestation and improve farmers’ livelihoods in their supply chains. We propose…
The Long-Term-Care Insurance Puzzle: Modeling and Measurement
Individuals face significant late-in-life risks, including needing long-term care (LTC). Yet, they hold little long-term care insurance (LTCI). Using both “strategic survey questions,” which identify preferences, and stated demand questions, this…
The Big Thumb on the Scale: An Overview of the Proxy Advisory Industry
Proxy advisory firms have significant influence over the voting decisions of institutional investors and the governance choices of publicly traded companies. However, it is not clear that the recommendations of these firms are correct and…
Promoting Consumption Experiences by Positive Incidental Affect: The Interplay of Valence and Arousal in Incidental Affect Infusion Processes
Much research in consumer psychology has investigated how affective reactions unrelated to a decision at hand (i.e., incidental affect) influence consumers’ preconsumption preferences. Most of this research has approximated the incidental affect…
Valuing Peace: The Effects of Financial Market Exposure on Votes and Political Attitudes
Can participation in financial markets lead individuals to re-evaluate the costs of conflict, change their political attitudes and even their votes? Prior to the 2015 Israeli elections, we randomly assigned Palestinian and Israeli financial…
Inducing Exploration in Service Platforms
Crowd-sourced content in the form of online product reviews or recommendations is an integral feature of most Internet-based service platforms and marketplaces, including Yelp, TripAdvisor, Netflix, and Amazon. Customers may find such information…
Learning by Trading
How can we help individuals handle financial decisions in an increasingly complex environment? We explore an easily scalable avenue for improving financial understanding: learning by online trading in stocks. We randomly assign 1345 adults…
Learning and Risk Premiums in an Arbitrage-free Term Structure Model
We study the evolution of risk premiums on US Treasury bonds from the perspective of a real-time Bayesian learner RA who updates her beliefs using a dynamic term structure model. Learning about the historical dynamics of yields led to…
Netflix Approach to Governance: Genuine Transparency with the Board
The hallmark of good corporate governance is an independent board of directors to oversee management. However, it is not clear that independent directors receive the information they need to make fully informed decisions on all key matters.…
Do Banks have an Edge?
We decompose bank activities into passive and active components and evaluate the performance of the active components of the bank business model by controlling for passive maturity transformation strategies that can be executed in the capital…
Making the Right Assignment: Optimal Contracting for Post-Hire Selection
We study the contracting problem of a principal who chooses between motivating an agent to exert effort or taking her outside option. The agent is privately informed about his ability, where a higher-ability agent faces a lower cost of exerting…
Local News and National Politics
The level of journalistic resources dedicated to coverage of local politics is in a long term decline in the US news media, with readership shifting to national outlets. We investigate whether this trend is demand- or supply-driven, exploiting a…