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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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…
Retired or Fired: How Can Investors Tell If a CEO Was Pressured to Leave?
CEO succession at many companies occurs in a black box. Shareholders are not privy to boardroom discussions prior to the announcement of a CEO departure, and press releases announcing the change contain boilerplate language that does not make it…
Complex Asset Markets
We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of complex asset markets with endogenous entry and exit in which the investment technology of investors with more expertise is subject to less asset-specific risk. The joint equilibrium distribution of…
Robo-Journalism and Capital Markets
In 2014, the Associated Press (AP) began using algorithms to write media articles about firms’ earnings announcements. These “robo-journalism” articles synthesize information from firms’ press releases, analyst reports, and stock performance, and…
Repatriation Taxes and Foreign Cash Holdings: The Impact of Anticipated Tax Reform
We examine whether anticipation of a repatriation tax reduction affects the amount of cash U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) hold overseas. We find that U.S. MNCs most likely to benefit from a repatriation tax reduction accumulated…
Taking Aim: Corporate Opportunity Structures and Activists’ Selection of Corporate Targets
Scholars agree that the tenor of a firms’ past interactions with contentious activists - which represent a strong signal of the openness of a firm’s opportunity structures - impacts the likelihood that the firm will be targeted in the future.…
Stock Price Management and Share Issuance: Evidence from Equity Warrants
We address whether firms manage stock prices in anticipation of share issuances. A literature in finance attributes negative returns following share issuances to market timing, whereas studies in accounting interpret similar return patterns as…
The Cross-Section and Time-Series of Stock and Bond Returns
We show that bond factors, which predict future U.S. economic activity at business cycle horizons, are priced in the cross-section of U.S. stock returns. High book-to-market stocks have larger exposures to these bond factors than low book-to-…
Capital Share Dynamics When Firms Insure Workers
Although the aggregate capital share for U.S. firms has increased, the firm-level capital share has decreased on average. The divergence is due to the largest firms. While these mega-firms now produce a larger output share, their labor…
Bias in Cable News: Real Effects and Polarization
We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and…
Bank Earnings and Regulatory Capital Management using Available for Sale Securities
Based on a large sample of publicly listed and non-listed US commercial banks from 1996 to 2011, we find robust evidence consistent with banks using realized available for sale (AFS) securities gains and losses to smooth earnings and increase low…
Do MBAs Pick Winning Stocks When Choosing Their First Job?
Every summer and fall, freshly minted MBAs and MBA summer interns take new positions at companies. We analyze whether their choices have any predictive power on the success of those companies. We show that MBAs tend to join companies that have…
Does Competition Reduce Racial Discrimination in Lending?
This paper examines whether increases in bank competition reduce discriminatory practices in mortgage lending. Lenders are significantly less likely to approve Black applicants’ loan applications despite facing similar credit risk. However,…
A Re-examination of the Informational Role of Earnings Announcements
No abstract available
Relating Product Prices to Long-Run Marginal Cost: Evidence from Solar Photovoltaic Modules
A basic tenet of microeconomics is that for a competitive industry in equilibrium the market price of a product will be equal to its marginal cost. This paper develops a model framework and a corresponding empirical inference procedure for…
The Economic Consequences Associated with Integrated Report Quality: Capital Market and Real Effects
The International Integrated Reporting Council’s Framework identifies two goals for integrated reporting: improved information for outside providers of financial capital and better internal decision making. We extend prior research that finds a…
The Jilting Effect: Antecedents, Mechanisms, and Consequences for Preference
This research explores how the experience of a jilt — the anticipation and subsequent inaccessibility of a highly desirable, aspirant option — influences preference for incumbent and non-incumbent options. We conceptualize jilting as a multi-…
From Boardroom to C-Suite: Why Would a Company Pick a Current Director as CEO?
Many observers consider the most important responsibility of the board of directors its responsibility to hire and fire the CEO. To this end, an interesting situation arises when a CEO resigns and the board chooses neither an internal nor…