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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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When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct
We examine gender discrimination in the financial advisory industry. We study a less salient mechanism for discrimination, firm discipline following missteps. There are substantial differences in the punishment of misconduct across genders.…
Mutual Funds and Short-Sellers: Why does short-sale volume predict stock returns?
Daily directional trading by mutual funds (MFs) is highly-persistent and price-destabilizing, leading to return reversals lasting months. This effect is distinct from the “flow-induced trading” phenomenon in prior studies. At the same…
Big Data and Marketing Analytics in Gaming: Combining Empirical Models and Field Experimentation
Efforts on developing, implementing and evaluating a marketing analytics framework at a real-world company are described. The framework uses individual-level transaction data to fit empirical models of consumer response to marketing efforts, and…
Unification versus Separation of Regulatory Institutions
Why might a country choose to aggregate regulatory information into a single government agency? And what might reverse this choice? We consider an oversight setting in which the institutional structure affects access to information. A regulator…
Group Affiliation and Default Prediction
Using a large sample of business groups from several countries around the world, we show that group information matters for parent and subsidiary default prediction. Group firms may support each other when in financial distress. Potential group…
Nash-in-Nash Tariff Bargaining with and without MFN
We provide an equilibrium analysis of the efficiency properties of bilateral tariff negotiations in a three-country, two-good general equilibrium model of international trade when transfers are not feasible. We consider “weak-rules” …
The Contribution of Bank Regulation and Fair Value Accounting to Procyclical Leverage
Our analytical description of how banks’ responses to asset price changes can result in procyclical leverage reveals that for banks with a binding regulatory leverage constraint, absent differences in regulatory risk weights across assets,…
Debt Contracts in the Presence of Performance Manipulation
Empirical and survey evidence suggest that firms often manipulate reported numbers to avoid debt covenant violations. The theoretical literature, by and large, has ignored the consequences of this phenomenon on debt contracting. Departing from a…
The Impact of News Aggregators on Internet News Consumption: The Case of Localization
A policy debate centers around the question whether news aggregators such as Google News decrease or increase traffic to online news sites. One side of the debate, typically espoused by publishers, views aggregators as substitutes for traditional…
Solving Heterogeneous Estimating Equations with Gradient Forests
We propose a method for non-parametric statistical estimation, based on random forests (Breiman, 2001), that can be used to fit any heterogeneous parameter of interest identified as the solution to a set of local estimating equations. Following…
The JOBS Act and Information Uncertainty in IPO Firms
This study examines the effect of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) on information uncertainty in IPO firms. The JOBS Act creates a new category of issuer, the Emerging Growth Company (EGC), and exempts EGCs from several…
Competition and Interdependent Costs in Highway Procurement
I investigate the effect of competition on bidder behavior and procurement cost using highway auction data from Michigan. While a bidder’s distance to a project location is important in explaining participation and bid levels, there is no…
Information, Credit and Organizations
This paper investigates the effect of a change in informational environment of borrowers on the organizational design of bank lending. We use micro-data from a large multinational bank and exploit the sudden introduction of a credit registry, an…
Learning in Repeated Auctions with Budgets: Regret Minimization and Equilibrium
In online advertising markets, advertisers often purchase ad placements through bidding in repeated auctions based on realized viewer information. We study how budget-constrained advertisers may compete in such sequential auctions in the presence…
Matrix Completion Methods for Causal Panel Data Models
In this paper we develop new methods for estimating causal effects in settings with panel data, where a subset of units are exposed to a treatment during a subset of periods, and the goal is estimating counterfactual (untreated) outcomes for the…
Mostly Exploration-Free Algorithms for Contextual Bandits
The contextual bandit literature has traditionally focused on algorithms that address the exploration-exploitation tradeoff. In particular, greedy algorithms that exploit current estimates without any exploration may be sub-optimal in…
Rethinking Time: Implications for Well-Being
How people think about and use their time has critical implications for happiness and well-being. Extant research on time in the consumer behavior literature reveals a predominantly dichotomized perspective of time between the present and future…
Shadow of the Future: Race, Tryouts, and Hiring of College Educated Workers
Preparing for submission