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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The Impact of News Aggregators on Internet News Consumption: The Case of Localization

Susan Athey, Mark Mobius
January112017

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

Susan Athey, Julie Tibshirani, Stefan Wager
January2017

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

Mary E. Barth, Wayne R. Landsman, Daniel J. Taylor
January2017

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

Paulo Somaini
2017

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

Jose Maria Liberti, Amit Seru, Vikrant Vig
2017

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

Santiago Balseiro
2017

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

Susan Athey, Mohsen Bayati, Nick Doudchenko, Guido W. Imbens, Khashayar Khosravi
2017

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

Hamsa Bastani, Mohsen Bayati, Khashayar Khosravi
2017

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

Cassie Mogilner, Hal E. Hershfield, Jennifer Aaker
2017

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…

Shared Education Affiliations and Workplace Relationships

C. Rider
2017

Preparing for submission

The Costs of Sovereign Default: Evidence from Argentina

Benjamin Hébert, Jesse Schreger
2017

Forthcoming in American Economic Review

We estimate the causal effect of sovereign default on the equity returns of Argentine firms. We identify this effect by exploiting changes in the probability of Argentine sovereign default…

Moral Hazard and the Optimality of Debt

Benjamin Hébert
December232016

I show that, in a benchmark model, debt securities minimize the welfare losses associated with the moral hazards of excessive risk-taking and lax effort. For any security design, the variance of the security payoff is a statistic that summarizes…

The Coevolution of Organizational Knowledge and Market Technology

Elizabeth Pontikes, William P. Barnett
December82016

A coevolutionary perspective on knowledge strategy is developed, where variant positions in knowledge space are predicted to result in differential advantages in product space.  In particular, advantages to being both consistent and…

Dynamic Trading: Price Inertia and Front-Running

Yuliy Sannikov, Andrzej Skrzypacz
December72016

We build a linear-quadratic model to analyze trading in a market with private information and heterogeneous agents. Agents receive private taste/inventory shocks and trade continuously. Agents differ in their need for trade as well as the cost to…

Bankruptcy in Groups

William H. Beaver (1940–2024), Stefano Cascino, Maria Correia, Maureen McNichols
December2016

We examine bankruptcy within business groups. Groups have incentives to support financially distressed subsidiaries as the bankruptcy of a subsidiary may impose severe costs on the group as a whole. In several countries around the world,…

Firm Financing Over the Business Cycle

Juliane Begenau, Juliana Salomao
December2016

Under revision for the Review of Financial Studies

We study the investment and financing policies of public U.S. firms. Large firms substitute between debt- and equity financing over the business cycle whereas small firms’…

How to Write an Effective Referee Report and Improve the Scientific Review Process

Jonathan B. Berk, Cambell R. Harvet, David A. Hirshleifer
November292016

Drawing on insights of current and past editors of top economics and finance journals, we provide guidelines for reviewers in preparing referee reports and cover letters for journals. Peer review is fundamental to the progress of science and we…