Working Papers

For three years after the typical developing country opens its stock market to inflows of foreign capital, the average annual growth rate of the real wage in the manufacturing sector increases by a factor of seven. No such increase occurs in a…

For fossil fuel power plants to be built in the future, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer the potential for significant reductions in CO₂ emissions. We examine the break-even value for CCS adoptions, that is, the critical value…

This paper presents a theory of common agency lobbying in which policy-interested lobbies can first influence the choice of a governing coalition and then influence the legislative bargaining over policies. Equilibria can involve active lobbying…

Efficient allocation of a stochastic stream of financial income is characterized by an explicit stochastic differential equation for the case that each agent has stationary preferences and the probability law of the stochastic process is known.…

We examine the question of how competition between governments within metropolitan areas affects economic growth outcomes. Using data on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States, we find that the number of county governments is…

This paper studies information aggregation in dynamic markets with a finite number of partially informed strategic traders. It shows that for a broad class of securities, information in such markets always gets aggregated. Trading takes place in…

There is surprisingly little evaluation of business school or, for that matter, company leadership development efforts. What evidence exists suggests that business schools have not been particularly effective, overall, in their leadership…

We study the impact of limited records on reputation dynamics, that is, how the set of equilibria and equilibrium payoffs changes in a model in which one long-lived player faces a sequence of short-lived players who observe only limited…

This paper introduces modal logics to a sociological audience. We first provide an overview of the formal properties of this family of models and outline key differences with classical first-order logic. We then build a model to represent…

An experiment was conducted to determine if the decision-making process for choosing between alternative job offers by Stanford MBA’s is affected by a task requiring an individual to evaluate hypothetical combinations of a limited number of job…

Despite the very long history of research on heritable traits, we still know very little about genetic effects on judgment and choice, including consumer decision making. Building on recent advances in epigenetics, we hypothesize that people…

According to what criteria do citizens make political decisions, and what do these criteria say about democratic competence? An impressive body of evidence suggests that voters competently evaluate diagnostic information such as macroeconomic…

This paper offers a perspective on how Ilya Prigogine‘s theoretical ideas rooted in the physical sciences can inform and inspire organization theory and strategic management scholars. To that end, the next section of this paper provides a brief…

The paper reports the research done in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business 2008 Bass Seminar Strategic Thinking in Action - In Business and Beyond: The United States Quest for Energy Resilience, taught by Professors Robert A.…

This paper estimates a three-equation structural model based on a theory that relates corporate financial performance (CFP), corporate social performance (CSP), and social pressure. CFP is found to be independent of CSP and decreasing in social…

Recent research argues that differences in the structure of top executive compensation plans and/or corporate culture explain cross-sectional variation in tax avoidance. However, this research does not link tax planning to the incentives of the…

An examination of emotions reported on 12 million personal blogs along with the results of three experiments reveal that the meaning of happiness is not fixed; instead, it shifts as people age. Whereas younger people are more likely to associate…

We calculate learning rates when agents are informed through both public and private observation of other agents actions. We provide an explicit solution for the evolution of the distribution of posterior beliefs. When the private learning…

We examine how the practice of accounting for ones times that work can be billed or charged to specific clients or projects affects the decision to allocate time to volunteer activities. Using longitudinal data collected from law students…

A number of recent marketing studies examine the stock markets response to the release of American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) scores. The broad purpose of these studies is to investigate the stock markets valuation of customer…