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Tax Policy and Local Labor Market Behavior
Since 2002, the U.S. government has encouraged business investment using accelerated depreciation policies that significantly reduce investment costs. We provide the first in-depth analysis of this stimulus on employment and earnings. Our local…
The Effects of Medicare Advantage on Opioid Use
Despite a vast literature on the determinants of prescription opioid use, the role of health insurance plans has received little attention. We study how the form of Medicare beneficiaries’ drug coverage affects the volume of opioids they consume…
The Impact of COVID-19 on Latino-Owned Businesses
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Two weeks later, the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative administered a survey to 224 mostly scaled ($1 million+ revenue) Latino-owned businesses in the United…
The Misuse of Tobin’s q
In recent years, scholars have addressed the most important topics in corporate law based on a flawed assumption: that the ratio of the market value of a corporation’s securities to their book value is a valid measure of the value of the…
Survey Bandits with Regret Guarantees
We consider a variant of the contextual bandit problem. In standard contextual bandits, when a user arrives we get the user’s complete feature vector and then assign a treatment (arm) to that user. In a number of applications (like health…
Analysis of Gender Perceptions in Health Technology: A Call to Action
Gender diversity has been linked to positive business results. Yet limited data exist to characterize the gender landscape in health technology, a field that draws employees from both biomedical engineering and medicine. To better understand the…
Market Fragmentation
We model a simple market setting in which fragmentation of trade of the same asset across multiple exchanges improves allocative efficiency. Fragmentation reduces the inhibiting effect of price-impact avoidance on order submission. Although…
Adaptivity of Stochastic Gradient Methods for Nonconvex Optimization
Adaptivity is an important yet under-studied property in modern optimization theory. The gap between the state-of-the-art theory and the current practice is striking in that algorithms with desirable theoretical guarantees typically involve…
Being “Good” or “Good Enough”: Prosocial Risk and the Structure of Moral Self-Regard
The motivation to feel moral powerfully guides people’s prosocial behavior. We propose that people’s efforts to preserve their moral self-regard conform to a moral threshold model. This model predicts that people are primarily concerned with…
Choosing a Good Toolkit, II: Bayes-Rule Based Heuristics
We study heuristics for a class of complex multi-armed bandit problems, the period-by-period choice of a set of objects or “toolkit” where the decision maker learns about the value of tools within the chosen toolkit. This paper studies heuristics…
Choosing a Good Toolkit, I: Prior-Free Heuristics
The dynamic problem of choosing subsets of objects or “toolkits” when their value distribution is unknown is a multi-armed bandit problem with non-independent arms. Accordingly, except for very simple specifications, this problem cannot (…
Conceit and Deceit: Lying, Cheating, and Stealing Among Grandiose Narcissists
The personality of leaders has been shown to have important effects on their followers. Recently, organizational researchers have become increasingly concerned with the potentially destructive consequences of narcissistic leadership. Evidence…
Confidence Intervals for Policy Evaluation in Adaptive Experiments
Adaptive experiment designs can dramatically improve statistical efficiency in randomized trials, but they also complicate statistical inference. For example, it is now well known that the sample mean is biased in adaptive trials. Inferential…
Coordination of Electricity Transmission and Generation Investments
For over twenty years, electricity market liberalization has advanced short-term market efficiency in wholesale markets, but little progress has been made on coordinated transmission and generation investments. With fast penetration of renewables…
Having Less, Giving More? Two Preregistered Replications of the Relationship between Social Class and Prosocial Behavior
In the present report, we describe two planned direct replications of studies on the relationship between social class and prosocial behavior. In the original studies, individuals with higher socioeconomic status have been shown to behave less…
Increased Market Response to Earnings Announcements in the 21st Century: An Empirical Investigation
We examine the role of concurrent information in the striking increase in investor response to earnings announcements from 2001 to 2016, as measured by return variability and volume following Beaver (1968). We find management guidance, analyst…
Local Economic Benefits Increase Positivity Toward Foreigners
Can exposure to discernible economic benefits associated with the presence of a high-socioeconomic status immigrant group reduce xenophobic and antiforeigner attitudes? We explore this question using the case of Chinese internationals in the…
PTV Gap: A New Measure of Party Identification Yielding Monotonic Partisan Attitudes and Supporting Comparative Analysis
Despite the cornerstone role of party identification for analyzing voting behavior in the United States, its measurement (in terms of the classic American National Electoral Studies, or ANES, seven-point scale) is affected by a systematic problem…
Privacy in the Age of Psychological Targeting
Psychological targeting describes the practice of extracting people’s psychological profiles from their digital footprints (e.g. their Facebook Likes, Tweets or credit card records) in order to influence their attitudes, emotions or behaviors…
The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population
In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or a growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women…