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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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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…
Mortgage Design in an Equilibrium Model of the Housing Market
How can mortgages be redesigned to reduce housing market volatility, consumption volatility, and default? How does mortgage design interact with monetary policy? We answer these questions using a quantitative equilibrium life cycle model with…
Evolution in Value Relevance of Accounting Information
We find the value relevance of accounting information has increased between 1962 and 2014. The information we consider comprises twelve accounting amounts plus ten industry indicators. Regarding individual accounting amounts, we find that…
Alignment at Work: Using Language to Distinguish the Internalization and Self-Regulation Components of Cultural Fit in Organizations
Cultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an elusive, poorly measured construct. Recent research draws on computational linguistics to measure cultural fit but…
Asymmetric Timeliness and the Resolution of Investor Disagreement and Uncertainty at Earnings Announcements
This study finds that greater asymmetric timeliness of earnings is associated with slower resolution of investor disagreement and uncertainty at earnings announcements. These findings indicate that a potential cost of asymmetric timeliness is…
Fintech, Regulatory Arbitrage, and the Rise of Shadow Banks
We study the rise of fintech and non-fintech shadow banks in the residential lending market. The market share of shadow banks in the mortgage market has nearly tripled from 2007-2015. Shadow banks gained a larger market share among less…
Firm Selection and Corporate Cash Holdings
Among stock market entrants, more firms over time are R&D–intensive with initially lower profitability but higher growth potential. This sample-selection effect determines the secular trend in U.S. public firms’ cash holdings. A stylized firm…
Multilateral Trade Bargaining: A First Peek at the GATT Bargaining Records
This paper empirically examines recently declassified data from the GATT/WTO on tariff bargaining. Focusing on the Torquay Round (1950-51), we document six stylized facts about these interconnected high-stakes international negotiations.…