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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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Veto Players and Policy Development
We analyze the effects of veto players when the set of available policies isn’t exogenously fixed, but rather determined by policy developers who work to craft new high-quality proposals. If veto players are moderate, there is active competition…
Federated Offline Policy Learning
We consider the problem of learning personalized decision policies from observational bandit feedback data across multiple heterogeneous data sources. In our approach, we introduce a novel regret analysis that establishes finite-sample upper…
Human Capital Disclosure and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Regulation S-K
We examine the labor market consequences of the 2020 Regulation S-K requiring human capital disclosure in 10K filings. Using large-sample job-level data, we observe that public firms subject to the regulation increase their disclosure of…
Qini Curves for Multi-Armed Treatment Rules
Qini curves have emerged as an attractive and popular approach for evaluating the benefit of data-driven targeting rules for treatment allocation. We propose a generalization of the Qini curve to multiple costly treatment arms that quantifies the…
What Happens When Anyone Can Be Your Representative? Studying the Use of Liquid Democracy for High-Stakes Decisions in Online Platforms
Since the 19th century, political reformers have proposed broadening civic and corporate governance by allowing voters to delegate to any other voter — sometimes known as liquid democracy. Today, systems like liquid democracy have become an…
Estimating Wage Disparities Using Foundation Models
One thread of empirical work in social science focuses on decomposing group differences in outcomes into unexplained components and components explained by observable factors. In this paper, we study gender wage decompositions, which require…
Interest Rate Risk in Banking
We develop a theoretical and empirical framework to estimate bank franchise value. In contrast to regulatory guidance and some existing models, we show that sticky deposits combined with low deposit rate betas do not imply a negative duration for…
Price Experimentation and Interference
In this paper, we examine biases arising in A/B tests where firms modify a continuous parameter, such as price, to estimate the global treatment effect of a given performance metric, such as profit. These biases emerge in canonical experimental…
Service Quality in the Gig Economy: Empirical Evidence about Driving Quality at Uber
The rise of marketplaces for goods and services has led to changes in the mechanisms used to ensure high quality. We analyze this phenomenon in the Uber market, where the system of pre-screening that prevailed in the taxi industry has been…
The Spiderweb of Partnership Tax Structures
U.S. partnerships control more than $40 trillion in assets, vastly outnumber U.S. public firms, and contribute significantly to the U.S. tax non-compliance of pass-through entities, which is larger than the non-compliance of publicly traded…
Going Beyond Black-Box Models by Leveraging Behavioral Insights: an Intent-Based Recommendation Framework
Modern recommender systems, which rely on large-scale machine learning (ML) models to predict the next item a consumer will engage with, often lack generalizability and understanding of consumer behaviors due to their black-box nature. To address…
Assessing the Costs of Industrial Decarbonization
Companies in various industries are under growing pressure to assess the costs of decarbonizing their operations. This paper develops a generic abatement cost concept to identify the cost-efficient combination of technological and operational…
Can U.S. Treasury Markets Add and Subtract?
The CBO cost releases of legislative proposals contain valuable news about surpluses priced in by Treasury investors. Using daily event windows, we find that cost releases with large negative cash flows lowered Treasury valuations by more than 20…
Fair Market Valuation of Electric Vehicle Batteries in Second Life Applications
The rapidly growing number of lithium-ion battery packs deployed in electric vehicles (EVs) entails enormous economic potential for used EV batteries to be redeployed in a second life application, e.g., for behind-the-meter stationary energy…
Government Debt in Mature Economies. Safe or Risky?
Governments and central banks can protect either taxpayers or bondholders from government spending shocks. When they choose to insulate taxpayers, government bond yields need to increase in response to unfunded fiscal expansions as the government…
Present Bias in Politics and Self-Committing Treaties
We study how international agreements can take advantage of domestic time-inconsistency problems in the context of environmental policies. For example, policymakers will prefer future policies to be sustainable, but find it tempting to raise…
The Incentives to (Not) Debate in Low-Information Races
Why are there few debates in low-information elections where they have the greatest potential to inform vote choices? Consistent with weak incentives to reveal qualifications or make policy commitments, we find only a quarter of Parliamentary…
Do Mergers and Acquisitions Improve Efficiency? Evidence from Power Plants
Using rich data on hourly physical productivity and thousands of ownership changes from U.S. power plants, we study the effects of acquisitions on efficiency and underlying mechanisms. We find a 2% average increase in efficiency for acquired…
The Consequences of Limiting the Tax Deductibility of R&D
We study the tax payment and innovation consequences of limiting the tax deductibility of research and development (“R&D”) expenditures. Beginning in 2022, U.S. companies are required to capitalize and amortize R&D rather than immediately…
The Gas Trap: Outcompeting Coal vs. Renewables
We analyze a fundamental dilemma and time-inconsistency problem facing a climate coalition producing natural gas. In the short term, it is tempting to export more to outcompete coal. When this policy is anticipated, however, investments in…