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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Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service
ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define,…
What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Investment and the Cost of Capital
We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, regulators evaluating…
Decomposing Changes in the Gender Wage Gap over Worker Careers
A large literature in labor economics seeks to decompose observed gender wage gaps (GWGs) into different sources, including portions explained by cross-gender differences in education, occupation, and experience. This paper provides new methods…
Digital Traffic, Financial Performance, and Stock Valuation
[Preparing for third round review at The Accounting Review.]
We examine the economic implications of digital traffic.
The Heterogeneous Earnings Impact of Job Loss Across Workers, Establishments, and Markets
Using generalized random forests and rich Swedish administrative data, we show that the earnings effects of job displacement due to establishment closures are extremely heterogeneous across workers, establishments, and markets. The decile of…
The Impact of Money in Politics on Labor and Capital: Evidence from Citizens United v. FEC
We examine whether corporate money in politics benefits or hurts labor using the 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United, which rendered bans on political election spending unconstitutional. In difference-in-difference analyses, affected states…
Torch-Choice: A PyTorch Package for Large-Scale Choice Modelling with Python
The torch-choice is an open-source library for flexible, fast choice modeling with Python and PyTorch. torch-choice provides a ChoiceDataset data structure to manage databases flexibly and memory-efficiently. The paper demonstrates constructing a…
Contingent Trade Agreements (R&R, Economic Journal)
How can trade motivate environmental conservation? I develop a model that combines trade-specific investments (e.g., deforestation) with environmental externalities. Traditional trade agreements raise investments and thus deforestation.…
How Much Do Public Employees Value Defined Benefit versus Defined Contribution Retirement Benefits?
We survey public employees across the United States about their preferences regarding retirement plan options, and in particular at what employer contribution rate public employees would agree to switch to a defined contribution (DC) plan on a…
Trade and Trees
International trade and tropical deforestation interact in multiple ways. This paper first presents a dynamic model whereby the South (S) depletes to export the extracted units (timber) or the produce (beef) from land available after…
An Economic Model of Consensus on Distributed Ledgers
The designs of many new blockchains are inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume most system nodes behave honestly, we recognize that blockchains are deployed in environments where nodes are…
Corporate Social Responsibility through Shareholder Governance
New approaches to corporate purpose have emerged in recent years that hold out the promise of addressing concerns about corporate social responsibility (CSR) through shareholder governance, rather than in spite of it, by reconceptualizing…
The Geography of Capital Allocation in the Euro Area
We reassess the pattern of Euro Area financial integration adjusting for the role of “onshore offshore financial centers” (OOFCs) within the Euro Area. While the Euro Area records large levels of international investment both within and outside…
Zoning for Profits: How Public Finance Shapes Land Supply in China
Public finance and real estate are uniquely intertwined in China, where local governments also serve as monopolist sellers of land. We shed new light on how land sale decisions and land prices depend on local governments’ financing objectives.…
Market Re-Design of Framework Agreements in Chile Reduces Government Procurement Spending
Framework agreements (FAs) are procurement mechanisms used in private and public organizations by which a central procurement agency selects an assortment of products, typically through auctions, and then affiliated organizations can purchase…
Monetary Tightening and U.S. Bank Fragility in 2023: Mark-to-Market Losses and Uninsured Depositor Runs?
We analyze U.S. banks’ asset exposure to a recent rise in the interest rates with implications for financial stability. The U.S. banking system’s market value of assets is $2.2 trillion lower than suggested by their book value of assets…
On Frequentist Regret of Linear Thompson Sampling
This paper studies the stochastic linear bandit problem, where a decision-maker chooses actions from possibly time-dependent sets of vectors in ℝd and receives noisy rewards. The objective is to minimize regret, the difference between the…
The Importance of Financial Literacy: Opening a New Field
We undertake an assessment of our two decades of research on financial literacy, building on our empirical research and theoretical work casting financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital. We also draw on recent data to…
Advances in Power-to-Gas Technologies: Cost and Conversion Efficiency
Widespread adoption of hydrogen as an energy carrier is widely believed to require continued advances in Power-to-Gas (PtG) technologies. Here we provide a comprehensive assessment of the dynamics of system prices and conversion efficiency for…
Economics of Grid-Scale Energy Storage in Wholesale Electricity Markets
I investigate the incentives for investing and operating grid-scale energy storage in electricity markets and the need for policies to complement investments with renewables. I develop a new dynamic equilibrium framework that allows for storage’s…