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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Informing Entrepreneurs? Initial Public Offerings and New Business Formation
We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about new…
Novelty in Content Creation: Experimental Results Using Image Recognition on a Large Social Network
Social networks utilize award recognition and front pages to motivate user content creation, facilitate consumer discovery of content, and provide attention and recognition to the best content. Past research shows that such attention and…
Proportional Response: Contextual Bandits for Simple and Cumulative Regret Minimization
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains…
The Digital Banking Revolution: Effects on Competition and Stability
How does the digital revolution affect bank competition and financial stability? I use hand- collected data and a novel identification strategy to show that after adopting digital platforms, banks branchlessly operate in more markets,…
What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment
How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…
Area Conditions and Positive Incentives: Engaging Local Communities to Protect Forests
Tropical deforestation for agriculture causes alarming CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. To prevent this, various governments and multinational commodity-buyers offer a positive incentive for locals conditional on no…
Interest-rate Risk and Household Portfolios
How are households exposed to interest-rate risk? When rates fall, households face lower future expected returns but those holding long-term assets— disproportionately the wealthy and middle-aged—experience capital gains. We study the hedging…
Corporate Tax Policy in Developed Countries and Economic Activity in Africa
This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares…
Machine Learning Who to Nudge: Causal vs Predictive Targeting in a Field Experiment on Student Financial Aid Renewal
In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000 college…
The Price of Power: How Managerial Taxes Affect Debt Contract Provisions
We study price and non-price provisions of debt contracts to gauge how creditors evaluate changes in senior executives’ personal income taxes (“managerial taxes”) of their borrowers. Because managers’ personal income taxes can exacerbate…
What Drives Variation in the U.S. Debt/Output Ratio? The Dogs that Didn’t Bark
A higher U.S. government debt/output ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current debt/output ratio. The market…
The Sociology of Interpretation
Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We…
Standardization and Innovation in Venture Capital Contracting: Evidence from Startup Company Charters
This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup’s Series A…
The Digital Welfare of Nations: New Measures of Welfare Gains and Inequality
Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries…
Conservation by Lending
This project analyzes how a principal can motivate an agent to conserve rather than exploit a depletable resource. This dynamic problem is relevant for tropical deforestation as well as for other environmental problems. It is shown that the…
The Zero-Beta Rate
We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and volatile. In…
Breaking Down Information Inequality: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Technology Industry
The under-representation of women in the technology industry has long been recognized as a concern, and the provision of gender-specific information on job search platforms has emerged as a potential solution. In this research, we study how…
ESG Assurance in the United States
We provide the first, large sample evidence on third-party verification of firms’ environmental and social metrics in ESG reports (“ESG assurance”) in the United States. Focusing on S&P 500 firms from 2010-2020, we document a striking…
Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence — But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured
Cognitive differences can catalyze social learning through the process of one-to-one social influence. Yet the learning benefits of exposure to the ideas of cognitively dissimilar others often fail to materialize. Why do cognitive differences…
Internalizing Peer Firm Proprietary Costs: Evidence from Supply Chain Relations
We examine whether the proprietary costs of economically linked peers influence focal firms’ merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions, which often involve extensive transfers of proprietary information across merging entities. Using data on…