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.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
An extensive literature examines whether senior executives’ contractual incentives influence their financial reporting decisions. However, little is known about whether — and how — the incentives of lower-level (or “rank-and-file”…
Income differences across US cities are well documented, but little is known about the level of standard of living in each city — defined as the amount of market-based consumption that residents are able to afford. In this paper…
We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage…
The lack of board diversity is one of the most controversial topics in corporate board governance. We investigate one important influence on diversity by studying whether shareholders value diversity on corporate boards in…
This study investigates whether investors are willing to trade-off wealth for societal benefits. We take advantage of unique institutional features of the municipal securities market to provide insight into this question. Since…
We examine the selection of peer groups that boards of directors use when setting the level of CEO compensation. This choice is controversial because it is difficult to ascertain whether peer groups are selected to (i) attract and…
We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Prior papers document positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically…
Firms’ inability to commit to future funding choices has profound consequences for capital structure dynamics. With debt in place, shareholders pervasively resist leverage reductions no matter how much such reductions may enhance…
This paper examines the relation between political connections and informed trading by corporate insiders in the context of the Financial Crisis. The unprecedented magnitude of government intervention, the substantial impact of…
Based on two samples of high quality personality data for chief executive officers (CEOs), we use linguistic features extracted from conferences calls and statistical learning techniques to develop a measure of CEO personality in…
Keller Williams is one of the most successful real estate franchises in the world. The leaders of the company attribute its growth in large part to a cultural model that emphasizes profit sharing, interdependence, and success…
CEO compensation is a highly controversial subject. While most company directors believe that CEO pay is not a problem, the majority of the American public believes that it is. The difficulties that boards face in justifying CEO…
This paper examines the approaches accounting researchers use to draw causal inferences using observational (or non-experimental) data. The vast majority of accounting research papers draw causal inferences notwithstanding the…
Researchers in accounting, corporate finance, economics, and law regularly evaluate the impact of corporate governance provisions on firm performance and managerial actions. Many of these studies rely on publicly available…
The extreme fragility of the financial system that gives rise to systemic risk and crises is rooted in the incentives of people within this system and the failure of regulation to counter these incentives. The same forces that…
In a noisy rational expectations framework with costly information, some agents expend resources to become informed, and earn a return for their efforts by trading with the uninformed. Applying this insight, we examine the…
We examine the link between corporate governance, managerial incentives, and corporate tax avoidance. Similar to other investment opportunities that involve risky expected cash flows, unresolved agency problems may lead managers…
This paper examines whether insiders at leading financial institutions anticipated the effect of government intervention during the Financial Crisis on their firms’ share prices. While we find no evidence that insiders anticipated…
Forthcoming in the Journal of Law and Economics. This paper examines changes in executive compensation programs made by firms in response to proxy advisory firm say-on-pay voting policies. Using proprietary models, proxy advisory…
Performance appraisal is one of the cornerstones of management control systems. Although this topic has been the subject of considerable prior research, most of this work is based on a single observation per firm or performance…