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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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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…
Levelized Product Cost: Concept and Decision Relevance
This paper examines a life-cycle cost concept that applies to both manufacturing and service industries in which upfront capacity investments are essential. Borrowing from the energy literature, we refer to this cost measure as the levelized…
Oblivious Equilibrium for Concentrated Industries
This paper explores the application of oblivious equilibrium to concentrated industries. We define an extended notion of oblivious equilibrium that we call partially oblivious equilibrium (POE) that allows for there to be a set of “dominant firms…
The Diversification Discount: Fundamentals or Accounting Rules?
No abstract available.
Deflation Risk
We study the nature of deflation risk by extracting the objective distribution of inflation from the market prices of inflation swaps and options. We find that the market expects inflation to average about 2.5 percent over the next 30 years.…
Time of Day Pricing and the Levelized Cost of Intermittent Power Generation
An important characteristic of most renewable energy sources is their intermittent pattern of electricity generation. Yet, intermittency is usually ignored in life-cycle cost calculations intended to assess the competitiveness of electric power…
Firm Volatility in Granular Networks
We propose a model of firm volatility based on customer-supplier connectedness. We assume that customers’ growth rate shocks influence the growth rates of their suppliers, larger suppliers have more customers, and the strength of a customer-…
Are Polls and Probabilities Self-Fulfilling Prophecies?
Psychologists have long observed that people conform to majority opinion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as the “bandwagon effect.” In the political domain people learn about prevailing public opinion via ubiquitous polls, which may…
Effects on Comparability and Capital Market Benefits of Voluntary Adoption of IFRS by US firms: Insights from Voluntary Adoption of IFRS by Non-US Firms
This study determines whether voluntary adoption of IFRS is associated with increased comparability of accounting amounts and attendant capital market benefits. After “adopting” firms voluntarily adopt IFRS, their accounting amounts become…