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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Dissemination, Direct-Access Information Technology and Information Asymmetry
Firm disclosures often reach only a portion of investors, which results in information asymmetry among investors, and therefore lower market liquidity. This issue is particularly salient for firms that are not highly visible, as they tend not to…
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…
Estimating Causal Installed-Base Effects: A Bias-Correction Approach
New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the installed-base - has a causal effect…
Fair value accounting for financial instruments: Does it improve the association between bank leverage and credit risk?
Many have argued that financial statements created under an accounting model that measures financial instruments at fair value would not fairly represent a banks business model. In this study we examine whether financial statements using fair…
Games with Unawareness
We provide a tool to model and solve strategic situations where players’ perceptions are limited, in the sense that they may only be aware of, or model, some of the aspects of the strategic situations at hand, as well as situations where players…
Gridlock and Delegation in a Changing World
Fixed statutes and regulations often have variable consequences over time. If left unattended, such drift can severely erode the performance of government as an institution of representation. To better understand the mechanics of policy-making in…
Legislative Organization and Ideal-Point Bias
Four pure types of legislative organization are characterized as data generating processes for commonly used measures of preferences or, in the spatial vernacular, ideal points. The types of legislative organization are differentiated by their…
Not Only What But also When: A Theory of Dynamic Voluntary Disclosure
We study a dynamic strategic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of information. Such situations are prevalent in real life, e.g., in corporate disclosure environments that are characterized by information asymmetry between the firm…
Ranking Friends
We investigate the scope for cooperation within a community engaged in repeated reciprocal interactions. Players seek the help of others and approach them sequentially according to some fixed order, that is, a ranking profile. We study the…
Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life
Being happy and finding life meaningful overlap, but there are important differences. A large survey revealed multiple differing predictors of happiness (controlling for meaning) and meaningfulness (controlling for happiness). Satisfying ones…
Strategic Dynamics: Three Key Themes
We study the evolution of industries in terms of three interrelated key themes that together form an analytical lens. The first-theme strategy and strategic dynamics raises the question of how companies can gain, sustain, or regain profitable…
The Economic Evaluation of Time: Organizational Causes and Individual Consequences
People acquire ways of thinking about time partly in and from work organizations, where the control and measurement of time use is a prominent feature of modern management an inevitable consequence of employees selling their time for money. In…
The Effect of Income on the Importance of Money: Survey and Experimental Evidence
The authors investigate how both the amount and source of income affects the importance placed on money using a longitudinal analysis of the British Household Panel Survey and evidence from two laboratory experiments. Larger amounts of money…
The Efficacy of Shareholder Voting: Evidence from Equity Compensation Plans
This study examines the effects of shareholder support for equity compensation plans on subsequent chief executive officer (CEO) compensation. Using cross-sectional regression, instrumental variable, and regression discontinuity research designs…
The Relation Between Equity Incentives and Misreporting: The Role of Risk-Taking Incentives
Prior research argues that a manager whose wealth is more sensitive to changes in the firms stock price has a greater incentive to misreport. However, if the manager is risk-averse and misreporting increases both equity values and equity risk,…
The Voter's Blunt Tool
When do voters win? In this paper we derive conditions under which a democracy will produce policies that favor the voter over special interests. We show that increasing political competition, increasing office holding benefits, decreasing…
Toward an Ecology of Market Categories
This paper proposes that social categorization is driven by an ecological dynamic that operates in two planes: feature space and category space. It develops a theoretical model that links positions in feature space to label assignments in…
Variability in Emissions Cost: Implications for Facility Location, Production and Trade.
We incorporate a stochastic cost for emissions into Venables’ widely-used model of international trade for a single product. Region 1 has climate policy and Region 2 does not. Each region has a distinct variable cost…
Who Has Voice in a Deliberative Democracy? Evidence from Transcripts of Village Parliaments In South India
The role of deliberation among citizens to determine and forge agreement on policy is often seen as a crucial feature of democratic government. This paper provides the first large-N empirical evidence on the credibility of voice in a deliberative…
Women in the Boardroom: Symbols or Substance?
The central argument for increasing the number of women on corporate boards of directors has been the so-called business case for diversity which proposes that women and minorities add valuable new perspectives that result in enhanced corporate…