Working Papers

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.

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Testing for Outliers with Conformal p-values

Stephen Bates, Emmanuel Candès, Lihua Lei, Yaniv Romano, Matteo Sesia
May2022

This paper studies the construction of p-values for nonparametric outlier detection, taking a multiple-testing perspective. The goal is to test whether new independent samples belong to the same distribution as a reference data set or are…

Exorbitant Privilege Gained and Lost: Fiscal Implications

Zefeng Chen, Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Mindy Z. Xiaolan
April282022

We study three centuries of UK fiscal history. Before World War I, when the UK dominated global bond markets, the UK’s government debt was not always fully backed by its future surpluses. As predicted by theories of safe asset determination,…

Unstable Inference from Banks' Stable Net Interest Margins

Juliane Begenau, Erik Stafford
April12022

This paper shows that stable net-interest margins of banks are uninformative about banks’ interest rate exposure. We show that neither deposits nor market power are essential for achieving stable net-interest margins (NIM) in long-short fixed…

Bargaining and International Reference Pricing in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Pierre Dubois, Ashvin Gandhi, Shoshana Vasserman
April2022

The United States spends twice as much per person on pharmaceuticals as European countries, in large part because prices are much higher in the US. This fact has led policymakers to consider legislation for price controls. This paper assesses the…

Conformalized Survival Analysis

Emmanuel Candès, Lihua Lei, Zhimei Ren
April2022

Existing survival analysis techniques heavily rely on strong modelling assumptions and are, therefore, prone to model misspecification errors. In this paper, we develop an inferential method based on ideas from conformal prediction, which can…

Firm-specific Information and Proprietary Costs: Evidence from Mandated Integrated Reports

Mary E. Barth, Steven F. Cahan, Li Chen, Elmar R. Venter
April2022

Our study addresses whether integrated report quality, IRQ, is negatively associated with stock price synchronicity, an inverse measure of firm-specific information, and the extent to which the relation between IRQ and synchronicity is attenuated…

Internationalizing Like China

Christopher Clayton, Amanda Dos Santos, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger
April2022

We empirically characterize how China is internationalizing the Renminbi by selectively opening up its domestic bond market and propose a dynamic reputation model to explain China’s internationalization strategy. While previously closed to…

Learn then Test: Calibrating Predictive Algorithms to Achieve Risk Control

Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Stephen Bates, Emmanuel J. Candès, Michael I. Jordan, Lihua Lei
April2022

We introduce a framework for calibrating machine learning models so that their predictions satisfy explicit, finite-sample statistical guarantees. Our calibration algorithm works with any underlying model and (unknown) data-generating…

Voluntary Disclosure and Personalized Pricing

S. Nageeb Ali, Greg Lewis, Shoshana Vasserman
April2022

Firms have ever increasing access to consumer data, which they use to personalize their advertising and to price discriminate. This raises privacy concerns. Policymakers have argued in response that consumers should be given control over…

Measuring U.S. Fiscal Capacity using Discounted Cash Flow Analysis

Zhengyang Jiang, Hanno Lustig, Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, Mindy Z. Xiaolan
March252022

We use discounted cash flow analysis to measure a country’s fiscal capacity. Crucially, the discount rate applied to projected cash flows includes a GDP risk premium. We apply our valuation method to the CBO’s projections for the U.S. federal…

Public Firm Disclosures and the Market for Innovation

Jinhwan Kim, Kristen Valentine
March242022

We examine the spillover effect of public firm innovation disclosures on the patent trading market. Relative to equity markets, the patent market is decentralized and rife with information frictions, yet it serves as an important mechanism…

A General Theory of the Stochastic Linear Bandit and Its Applications

Nima Hamidi, Mohsen Bayati
March2022

Recent growing adoption of experimentation in practice has led to a surge of attention to multiarmed bandits as a technique to reduce the opportunity cost of online experiments. In this setting, a decision-maker sequentially chooses among a set…

How do Private Equity Fees Vary across Public Pensions?

Juliane Begenau, Emil Siriwardane
March2022

We study how investment fees vary within private-capital funds. Net-of-fee return clustering suggests that most funds have two tiers of fees, and we decompose differences across tiers into both management and performance-based fees. Managers of…

Patient-Level Clinical Expertise Enhances Prostate Cancer Recurrence Predictions with Machine Learning

Jacqueline Vallon, Neil Panjwani, Xi Ling, Sushmita Vij, Sandy Srinivas, John Leppert, Mohsen Bayati, Mark K. Buyyounouski
March2022

With rising access to electronic health record data, application of artificial intelligence to create clinical risk prediction models has grown. A key component in designing these models is feature generation. Methods used to generate features…

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Greedy Algorithms in Multi-Armed Bandit with Many Arms

Mohsen Bayati, Nima Hamidi, Ramesh Johari, Khashayar Khosravi
March2022

We study a Bayesian k-armed bandit problem in many-armed regime, when k ≥ √ T, with T the time horizon. We first show that subsampling is critical for designing optimal policies. Specifically, the standard UCB…

Transparency on the Path to Net-Zero

Stephen D. Comello, Julia Reichelstein, Stefan J. Reichelstein
March2022

We propose and describe a corporate carbon reporting framework intended to strengthen the credibility and transparency of the existing net-zero pledges. We refer to this framework as the Time-Consistent Corporate Carbon Reporting (TCCR…

Markets under Siege: How Differences in Political Beliefs can Move Financial Markets

Saumitra Jha, Peter Koudijs, Marcos Salgado
February142022

Can differences in beliefs about politics, particularly the benefits of war and peace, move markets? During the Siege of Paris by the Prussian army (1870–71) and its aftermath, we document that the price of the French 3% sovereign bond (rente)…

Polarization and State Legislative Elections

Cassandra Handan-Nader, Andrew C. W. Myers, Andrew B. Hall
February52022

U.S. state legislatures are critical policymaking bodies and the major pipeline of candidates to national office. Polarization in state legislatures has increased substantially in recent decades, yet we understand little about the role of…

How Does Private Firm Disclosure Affect Demand for Public Firm Equity? Evidence from the Global Equity Market

Jinhwan Kim, Marcel Olbert
February22022

Conditionally accepted at the Journal of Accounting and Economics.

We investigate the relationship between private firms’ disclosures and the demand for the equity of their publicly traded peers. Using data on the global…

Do Jobseekers Value Diversity Information? Evidence from a Field Experiment

Jung Ho Choi, Joseph Pacelli, Kristina M. Rennekamp, Sorabh Tomar
February2022

We examine how information about the diversity of a potential employer’s workforce affects individuals’ job-seeking behavior, and whether workers’ preferences explain corporate disclosure decisions. We embed a field experiment in job…