Publications

We address whether and why a firm’s operational effectiveness, OpEff, has information content for investors and what role that information plays in the price discovery process at quarterly earnings announcements. We measure OpEff using the cash…

Technology has an increasing influence over consumer lifestyles and behaviors that contribute to the rising prevalence of chronic disease. An opportunity therefore exists for consumer technology companies to use their outsized influence on…

This case study uses a hospital family safety reporting intervention, coproduced with key partners, with the aim to garner lessons for developing complex, hospital-based interventions. Health equity, communication science, health literacy, and…

This paper analyzes interactions between corporate governance and law enforcement practices, focusing on cases where deterrence is weak and harmful misconduct is profitable. We show how managerial compensation contracts, including stock-based…

In a patent privateering strategy, firms sell patents to a non-practicing entity (NPE) with the expectation that the NPE sues the seller’s rivals for patent infringement. We examine whether firms under competitive pressure and facing barriers to…

Policymakers often distort goods markets to effect redistribution—for example, via price controls, differential taxation, or in-kind transfers. We investigate the optimality of such policies alongside the (optimally-designed) income tax. In our…

In fall 2025, Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Governance of Organizations Working Group at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University hired Prolific to conduct a nationwide survey of 2,653 individual investors — broadly…

We show how to measure the welfare effects arising from increased data availability. When lenders have more data on prospective borrower costs, they can charge prices that are more aligned with these costs. This increases total social welfare and…

We propose a comprehensive model of how experiences are encoded and retrieved from memory. At the core of the model is a dynamic retrieval process incorporating two essential mechanisms: iterative retrieval, whereby information is sequentially…

We examine how patent disclosures influence technology classification decisions by patent examiners and how firms strategically tailor these disclosures to affect classification outcomes. Using a novel machine learning approach, we construct a…

We construct a measure of consumption-equivalent welfare for Black and White Americans that incorporates life expectancy, incarceration, consumption, leisure, and inequality. Based on this incomplete list of factors, welfare for Black Americans…

We use a play-by-play dataset from the game show “Jeopardy!” to study the hot hand phenomenon, whereby people appear to exhibit “hot” states of elevated performance in domains with repeat trials. We first demonstrate that Jeopardy contestants…

Research on the effects of online advertising on consumer welfare is limited due to challenges in running large-scale field experiments. We analyze a long-running field experiment on Facebook in which a random subset of users received no ads in…

Gender research in organizational behavior has primarily focused on understanding and addressing the disadvantages women face in masculine work environments. While this body of work has been essential to understanding gender inequality in the…

We study poverty minimization via direct transfers, framing this as a statistical learning problem while retaining the information constraints faced by real-world programs. Using nationally representative household consumption surveys from 23…

Cognitive technologies are socially shared and culturally evolved systems whose function is principally cognitive. Throughout human history and prehistory, they have aided in classifying, organizing, or managing information and knowledge,…

Innovative public firms sell significantly more patents in the last month of their fiscal year compared to earlier in the year. Consistent with reporting incentives driving these sales, final month patent sales are disproportionately internally…

A persistent puzzle throughout the cognitive and social sciences is how people manage to learn social conventions from the sparse and noisy behavioral data of diverse actors, without explicit instruction. Here, we show that the dominant theories…

Social networks utilize award recognition and front pages to motivate user content creation, facilitate consumer discovery of content, and provide attention and recognition to high-quality content. Past research shows that such attention and…

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) into medical devices has underscored the need for transparency in regulatory reporting. In 2021, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued Good Machine…