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 the Rock Center.

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Geoeconomic Pressure

Christopher Clayton, Antonio Coppola, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger
April2025

Geoeconomic pressure — the use of existing economic relationships by governments to achieve geopolitical or economic ends — has become a prominent feature of global power dynamics. This paper introduces a methodology using large language models (…

Managers’ Risk-Return Trade-offs and Corporate Investment

Christopher S. Armstrong, Oscar Timmermans
April2025

Allocating capital to investment projects is one of a manager’s most critical responsibilities. However, such decisions are shaped by managers’ own beliefs and risk preferences, which can differ from those of diversified shareholders. To study…

A Theory of Disclosure Timing

Seung Y. Lee , Iván Marinovic
April2025

We develop a model of disclosure timing in which the firm can commit to disclose its revenues at a fixed date (a time-based disclosure policy) or after a certain number of transactions have occurred (a news arrival-based disclosure policy). We…

A Theory of Economic Coercion and Fragmentation

Christopher Clayton, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger
April2025

Hegemonic powers, like the United States and China, exert influence on other countries by threatening the suspension or alteration of financial and trade relationships. Mechanisms that generate gains from integration, such as external economies…

Sustainability and Strategic Differentiation in Unregulated Consumer Goods Markets

Kristina Brecko, Yewon Kim
March2025

Motivated by the disconnect between regulatory discussions and industry reports on voluntary sustainability investments, we examine the market equilibrium for sustainable products in the absence of regulation, focusing on firms’ strategic…

The Blessing of Reasoning: LLM-Based Contrastive Explanations in Black-Box Recommender Systems

Yuyan Wang, Pan Li, Minmin Chen
February232025

Modern recommender systems use machine learning (ML) models to predict consumer preferences based on consumption history. Although these “black-box” models achieve impressive predictive performance, they often suffer from a lack of transparency…

Judicial Proficiency and Contract Design: The Role of Business Courts in Shaping Supply Contracts

Christopher S. Armstrong, Sterling Huang, Yanping Xu
February2025

We examine whether access to specialized business courts that are more proficient in resolving contractual disputes influences the design of firms’ supply contracts. We use the staggered creation of these courts in different states at different…

The Pass-through of Corporate Tax Cuts to Consumer Loans: Evidence from the TCJA

Joao Granja, Fabian Nagel, Arndt Weinrich
January312025

Using data from TransUnion, a large U.S. credit bureau, we analyze whether and how cuts in bank income taxation are passed through to the interest rates and size of consumer loans. Exploiting the change in bank corporate income taxation from the…

Losing is Optional: Retail Option Trading and Expected Announcement Volatility

Tim de Silva, Eric C. So, Kevin Smith
January152025

We document the growth of retail options trading and provide evidence that retail investors are drawn to options by anticipated spikes in volatility. Retail investors purchase options in a concentrated fashion before earnings announcements,…

Public Firm Disclosures, Patent Licensing, and the Diffusion of Technology

Jinhwan Kim, Guoman She, Kristen Valentine
January152025

We examine the spillover effects of public firm disclosures on patent licensing, a key mechanism for technology diffusion. An interquartile increase in public firm presence, our proxy for peer disclosures, is linked to a 20.7% higher likelihood…

Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the US and Ghana

Erika Kirgios, Susan Athey, Angela L. Duckworth, Dean Karlan, Michael Luca, Katherine L. Milkman, Molly Offer-Westort
January2025

Effective information sharing is critical for the success of organizations and governments. Because information that is easy to access is more likely to be adopted, leaders often minimize friction in information delivery. However, one type of…

Financial Regulation and AI: A Faustian Bargain?

Antonio Coppola
2025

We examine whether and how granular, real-time predictive models should be integrated into central banks’ macroprudential toolkit. First, we develop a tractable framework that formalizes the tradeoff regulators face when choosing between…

Policy Brief: Generative Artificial Intelligence: Opportunities for the Future of Work in Chile

Gabriel Weintraub, Victor Morales, Juan Eduardo Carmach, Alvaro Soto
2025

We study the impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in Chile, focusing on opportunities for task acceleration-specifically, the reduction of execution time for tasks within the hundred most common jobs in the country, corresponding…

Price Experimentation and Interference

Wassim Dhaouadi, Ramesh Johari, Orrie B. Page, Gabriel Weintraub
2025

In this paper, we examine biases arising in A/B tests where firms modify a continuous parameter, such as price, to estimate the global treatment effect of a given performance metric, such as profit. These biases emerge in canonical experimental…

Switchback Price Experiments with Forward-Looking Demand

Yifan Wu, Ramesh Johari, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Gabriel Weintraub
2025

We consider a retailer running a switchback experiment for the price of a single product, with infinite supply. In each period, the seller chooses a price from a set of predefined prices that consist of a reference price and a few discounted…

Tax Avoidance as an R&D Subsidy: The Use of Cost Sharing Agreements by US Multinationals

Lysle Boller, Clare Doyle, Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato
2025

We use administrative corporate tax data from the IRS to study a particular form of tax avoidance for US multinational corporations (MNCs). This strategy relies on cost sharing agreements (CSAs), which govern joint R&D efforts conducted with…

When Does Interference Matter? Decision-Making in Platform Experiments

Ramesh Johari, Hannah Li, Anushka Murthy, Gabriel Weintraub
2025

This paper investigates decision-making in A/B experiments for online platforms and marketplaces. In such settings, due to constraints on inventory, A/B experiments typically lead to biased estimators because of interference; this phenomenon has…

How Does Internal Communication Technology Affect Internal Information: Theory and Evidence

Ehsan Azarmsa, Lisa Yao Liu, Suzie Noh
December152024

We study how enhanced internal communication technology influences firms’ internal information production. By developing a model with a headquarters manager and several divisional managers, we formalize two competing economic forces—information…

Associative Learning and Representativeness

Michael Kahana, James D. Paron, Jessica Wachter
November222024

The representativeness heuristic constitutes a striking departure from Bayesian updating. According to a strong form of the heuristic, agents reverse a conditioning argument: for example inferring that a patient is more likely than not to have a…

Aligning Model Properties via Conformal Risk Control

William Overman, Jacqueline Jil Vallon, Mohsen Bayati
November42024

AI model alignment is crucial due to inadvertent biases in training data and the underspecified machine learning pipeline, where models with excellent test metrics may not meet end-user requirements. While post-training alignment via human…