Publications

Gary Becker was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. He advanced social science by introducing economic thinking into areas that were thought to be off limits. Because his theory was motivated by his desire to explain the world, his…

We examined the consequences of contractual or ownership relationships between hospitals and physician practices, often described as vertical integration. Such integration can reduce health spending and increase the quality of care by…

What will happen if a new tool is introduced to different cultures? What if the tool can potentially bridge those cultures? Will it be used in the same way across cultures and contribute to a decrease in cultural differences? Or will it be used…

A portion of the global wealth portfolio is directed towards a safe and liquid reserve asset, which recently has been the US Treasury bond. Our model links the determination of reserve asset status to relative fundamentals and relative debt sizes…

I develop a simple hold-up model of political risk, which can be used to explore firms’ strategic options when their investments are subject to the threat of government expropriation. In the model, a firm decides whether to invest and then the…

We present a theory in which the key driver of short-term debt issued by the financial sector is the portfolio demand for safe and liquid assets by the non-financial sector. This demand drives a premium on safe and liquid assets that the…

This chapter evaluates the nature, relative incidence, and drivers of software piracy. The authors measure piracy for a specific product — Windows 7 — which was associated with a significant level of private sector investment. Using…

A fixed cost investment in home automation technology can eliminate consumers’ marginal costs of responding to changing demand conditions. We estimate the welfare effects of a home automation technology using a field experiment run by a large…

In fall 2014, the Stanford Graduate School of Business, in collaboration with BoardSource and GuideStar, surveyed 924 directors of nonprofit organizations about the composition, structure, and practices of their boards.

The skills,…

Religiosity and participation in religious activities have been linked with decreased risky behavior. In the current research, we hypothesized that exposure to the concept of God can actually increase people’s willingness to engage in…

Social media can be beneficial in detecting early signs of emotional difficulty. We utilized the Satisfaction with Life (SWL) index as a cognitive health measure and presented models to predict an individual’s SWL. Our models considered ego,…

Corporate leaders pay considerable attention to the strategy and finances of their organizations but often less attention to organizational features that impact whether their strategy is successful, including the decision-making structure and the…

How should leaders construct and communicate their messages to most effectively motivate their employees? We offer an integrative framework to address the diverging and complementary nature of two established approaches to employee motivation:…

In this paper we study the problems of estimating heterogeneity in causal effects in experimental or observational studies and conducting inference about the magnitude of the differences in treatment effects across subsets of the population. In…

In social hierarchies, moral stigma spreads down more than up. Across four vignette studies, exposure to the immoral behaviors of higher (vs. lower) ranking group members led online participants to report greater moral suspicion toward…

This paper examines whether protest associated with the “long protest wave” of the 1960s and 1970s positively influenced private-sector union support. Past research has found no such influence. We use measures designed to more closely represent…

Two key features of the government bailout programs implemented in the 2008- 2009 financial crisis were: first, the general opposition of voters to these programs and second, the implementation of a variety of interventions, ranging from targeted…

We hypothesized that threats to people’s social (i.e., group) identity can trigger deviant attitudes and behaviors. A correlational study and five experiments showed that experiencing or recalling situations associated with the devaluation…

There are large racial disparities in school discipline in the United States, which, for Black students, not only contribute to school failure but also can lay a path toward incarceration. Although the disparities have been well documented, the…