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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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Where Experts Get It Wrong: Independence vs. Leadership in Corporate Governance
Over the last few decades, researchers have taken a thorough and critical look at corporate governance from various perspectives. For the most part, they have found that structural features of corporate governance have little or no relation to…
Exploration for Human Capital: Evidence from the MBA Labor Market
We empirically investigate the effect of uncertainty on corporate hiring. Using novel data from the labor market for MBA graduates, we show that uncertainty regarding how well job candidates fit with a firm’s industry hinders hiring, and that…
Dynamically Eliciting Unobservable Information
We answer the following question: At t = 1, an expert has (probabilistic) information about a random outcome X. In addition, the expert will obtain further information about X as time passes, up to some time t = T + 1 at which X will be publicly…
Central Clearing and Collateral Demand
We use an extensive data set of bilateral exposures on credit default swap (CDS) to estimate the impact on collateral demand of new margin and clearing practices and regulations. We decompose collateral demand for both customers and dealers into…
Dynamic Information Asymmetry, Financing, and Investment Decisions
We reexamine the classic yet static information asymmetry model of Myers and Majluf (1984) in a fully dynamic market. A firm has access to an investment project and can finance it by debt or equity. The market learns the quality of the firm over…
Cashing-In Credibility
This paper studies a dynamic communication game in which the seller of an asset, whose credibility is unknown to the market, reports changes in the asset value during multiple periods before selling the asset. We characterize the strategy by…
Social Media and News Consumption
This paper analyzes how the audience for internet news varies with the source of the referral, comparing the audience when users navigate directly to news outlets to that when users are referred by social media. On average, the audience referred…
Competition for Talent Under Performance Manipulation: CEOs on Steroids
We study how competition for talent affects CEO compensation, taking into consideration that CEO decisions and CEO skills or talent are not observable, and CEOs can manipulate performance as measured by outsiders. Firms compete by offering…
Disruption Risk and Optimal Sourcing in Multi-tier Supply Networks
We study sourcing in a supply chain with three levels: a manufacturer, Tier 1 suppliers, and Tier 2 suppliers prone to disruption from, e.g., natural disasters like earthquakes or floods. The manufacturer may not directly dictate which Tier 2…
Forecasting Emergency Department Wait Times
This paper proposes a Combined Method (combining fluid model estimators and statistical learning) to forecast the wait time for low-acuity patients in an Emergency Department, and describes the implementation of the…
Gandhi's Gift: Lessons for Peaceful Reform from India's Struggle for Democracy
In this overview article, we summarize recent research in progress that examines the potential and limitations of non-violent civil disobedience through the lens of the evolution of an iconic success: India’s struggle for democratic self-rule. We…
Improving the Prediction of Emergency Department Waiting Times.
Measurement and Improvement of Social and Environmental Performance under Voluntary versus Mandatory Disclosure
Governments are beginning to mandate that firms disclose information about social and environmental impacts in their supply chains (e.g., regarding conflict minerals and greenhouse gas emissions). This paper shows that such a mandate will…
Money in the Bank: Feeling Powerful Increases Saving
Across five studies, this research reveals that feeling powerful increases saving. This effect is driven by the desire to maintain one’s current state. When the purpose of saving is no longer to accumulate money, but to spend it on a status-…
Multi-Sourcing and Miscoordination in Supply Chain Networks
This paper studies the endogenous formation of supply chain networks when procurement is subject to disruption risk. We argue that the presence of non-convexities in the chain (e.g., due to non-convex production technologies or financial…
Operationalizing Financial Covenants
We study the interplay between financial covenants and the operational decisions of a retailer that obtains financing through a secured, inventory-based lending contract. We characterize how leverage affects dynamic inventory decisions, and…
Optimization in Online Content Recommendation Services: Beyond Click-Through Rates
A new class of online services allows internet media sites to direct users from articles they are currently reading to other content they may be interested in. This process creates a “browsing path” along which there is potential for repeated…
Risking Other People's Money: Gambling, Limited Liability, and Optimal Incentives
We consider optimal incentive contracts when managers can, in addition to shirking or diverting funds, increase short term profits by putting the firm at risk of a low probability “disaster.” To
avoid such risk-taking, investors…
'Unfinished Business': Historic Complementarities, Political Competition and Ethnic Violence in Gujarat
I examine how the historical legacies of inter-ethnic complementarity and competition interact with contemporary electoral competition in shaping patterns of ethnic violence. Using local comparisons within Gujarat, a single Indian state known for…