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.
A Tilt Toward Equality? Gender and Allocation in Horizontal Organizations
This paper tackles the intersection of two trends, the increasing prevalence of flat, so-called horizontal organizations and the greater gender diversity of the workers that such organizations employ. We investigate why these organizations may be…
Political Legacies
Politicians are widely perceived to lose significance upon leaving office. Yet media accounts often highlight politicians’ legacies as a source of influence that endures even after they retire. This article assesses these contrasting views by…
Sponsorship Disclosure and Consumer Deception: Experimental Evidence from Native Advertising in Mobile Search
Recent advances in advertising technology have lead to the development of “native advertising”, which is a format of advertising that mimics the other non-sponsored content on the medium. While advertisers have rapidly embraced the format on a…
Economic Reasoning with a Racial Hue: Is the Immigration Consensus Purely Race Neutral?
Leading research is converging upon the finding that citizens from immigrant-receiving nations strongly prefer the entry of high-skilled to low-skilled immigrants. Prior studies have largely interpreted this “skill premium” as deriving from…
Managerial Flexibility in Levelized Cost Measures: A Framework for Incorporating Uncertainty in Energy Investment Decisions
Many irreversible long-run capital investments entail opportunities for managers to respond flexibly to changes in the economic environment. However, common levelized cost measures used to guide decision-making, such as the levelized cost of…
Carbon Capture and Utilization in the Industrial Sector
The fabrication and manufacturing of industrial commodities such as iron, glass and cement is carbon-intensive. A major reason capture of carbon dioxide from flue gases of industrial processes has not been widely adopted as a climate mitigation…
Financial Markets with Trade on Risk and Return
Forthcoming in The Review of Financial Studies
I analyze a model in which risk-averse investors trade on signals regarding both a stock’s expected payoffs and its risk. These investors may trade in the stock and a derivative…
Health Savings Accounts: Consumer Contribution Strategies & Policy Implications
A Health Savings Account (HSA) is a tax-advantaged savings account available only to households with high-deductible health insurance. This paper provides initial answers to two questions related to HSAs: 1) How should a household determine its…
Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests
Many scientific and engineering challenges — ranging from personalized medicine to customized marketing recommendations — require an understanding of treatment effect heterogeneity. In this paper, we develop a non-parametric causal forest for…
Generalized Random Forests
We propose generalized random forests, a method for non-parametric statistical estimation based on random forests (Breiman, 2001) that can be used to fit any quantity of interest identified as the solution to a set of local moment equations.…
Facilitating the Search for Partners on Matching Platforms: Restricting Agents’ Actions
Two-sided matching platforms, such as those for labor, accommodation, dating, and taxi hailing, can control and optimize over many aspects of the search for partners. To understand how the search for partners should be designed, we consider a…
A Skeptical View of Financialized Corporate Governance
Financialized corporate governance as commonly practiced causes significant inefficiencies and harm. Corporations and governments routinely fail to design and enforce rules that reduce the opacity of corporations, create effective commitments…
Dynamic Coordination and Intervention Policy
We model a dynamic economy with strategic complementarity among investors and endogenous government interventions that mitigate coordination failures. We establish equilibrium existence and uniqueness, and show that one intervention can affect…
KDPI-Dependent Ranking Policies: Shaping the Allocation of Deceased-Donor Kidneys in the New Era
The deceased-donor kidney transplant candidates in the US are ranked according to characteristics of both the donor and the recipient. We seek the ranking policy that achieves the best efficiency-equity tradeoff, taking into account patients’…
Cultivating Optimism: How to Frame Your Future During a Health Challenge
Research shows that optimism can positively impact health, but when and why people feel optimistic when confronting health challenges is less clear. Findings from six studies show that the frames people adopt when thinking about health challenges…
Indirect Information Measure and Dynamic Learning
I study the robust predictions of optimal dynamic learning strategy when the measure of signal informativeness is an indirect measure from sequential cost minimization. I first show that an indirect information measure is supported by sequential…
Sampling-Based vs. Design-Based Uncertainty in Regression Analysis
Previously titled: Finite Population Causal Standard Errors
Consider a researcher estimating the parameters of a regression function based on data for all 50 states in the United States or on data for all visits to a website. What…
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…
Natural Disasters and Political Engagement: Evidence from the 2010–11 Pakistani Floods
How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question, given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to…
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…