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.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
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…
Advertising Expensive Mortgages
We use a unique dataset that combines information on advertising and mortgages originated by subprime lenders to study whether advertising helped consumers find cheaper mortgages. Lenders who advertise more within a region sell more expensive…
Disentangling Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Changes in Enforcement
We discuss “Mandatory IFRS Reporting and Changes in Enforcement” by Christensen, Hail, and Leuz (CHL, 2013). We begin by discussing CHL in the context of prior literature, and subsequently discuss the research design, results, and inferences. CHL…
The Hot Hand Fallacy: Cognitive Mistakes or Equilibrium Adjustments? Evidence from Baseball
We test for a ‘hot hand’ (i.e., short-term streakiness in performance) in Major League Baseball using panel data. We find strong evidence for its existence in all ten statistical categories we consider. The magnitudes are significant; being…
Fallacies, Irrelevant Facts, and Myths in the Discussion of Capital Regulation: Why Bank Equity is Not Expensive
We examine the pervasive view that “equity is expensive,” which leads to claims that high capital requirements are costly for society and would affect credit markets adversely. We find that arguments made to support this view are fallacious,…
Catch-Up and Fall-Back Through Innovation and Imitation
Will fast growing emerging economies sustain rapid growth rates until they “catch-up” to the technology frontier? Are there incentives for some developed countries to free-ride off of innovators and optimally “fall-back” relative to the…
The Politics of Accounting Standard Setting: A Review of Empirical Research
We provide an overview of the empirical literature on the politics of accounting standard setting, focusing on the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). Although it is clear from casual observation that politics sometimes plays a…
Does it Pay to Invest in Art? A Selection-Corrected Returns Perspective
This paper shows the importance of correcting for sample selection when investing in illiquid assets with endogenous trading. Using a large sample of 20,538 paintings that were sold repeatedly at auction between 1972 and 2010, we find that…
Dimensions of Political Homophily: Isolating Choice Homophily along Political Characteristics
How do political predispositions shape the social relationships individuals create? To address these issues, we leverage the domain of online dating, in which we can observe people’s political identities and preferences before they express a…
Market-Based Bank Capital Regulation
Today’s regulatory rules, especially the easily-manipulated measures of regulatory capital, have led to costly bank failures. We design a robust regulatory system such that (i) bank losses are credibly borne by the private sector (ii)…
Time of Use Pricing and the Levelized Cost of Intermittent Power Generation
Advertising Competition in Presidential Elections
Presidential candidates purchase advertising based on each state’s potential to tip the election. The structure of the Electoral College concentrates spending in battleground states, such that a majority of voters are ignored. We estimate an…
Financial Contracts with Recontracting
This paper presents a tractable model of dynamic moral hazard with purely pecuniary private benefits. To obtain a tractable but binding moral hazard problem, I introduce recontracting: the agent can offer a new continuation contract to the…