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.
You may search for authors and topics and download copies of the work there.
Financial Flexibility and Corporate Employment
We study the role of financial flexibility on COVID-19 employment actions. Using daily data from March through May 2020 for 354 of the largest U.S. employers, we find that firms facing a negative demand shock were 28.8 percentage points more…
Interference, Bias, and Variance in Two-Sided Marketplace Experimentation: Guidance for Practitioners
Two-sided marketplace platforms often run experiments to test the effect of an intervention before launching it platform-wide. A typical approach is to randomize individuals into the treatment group, which receives the intervention, and the…
Redrawing the Map of Global Capital Flows: The Role of Cross-Border Financing and Tax Havens
Cross-border capital flows are often opaque. Global firms commonly finance themselves through foreign subsidiaries, including shell companies in tax havens, making it difficult to observe the true economic linkages between investors and borrowers…
The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Agricultural Workers
The Affordable Care Act substantially increased the share of farmworkers with medical insurance, but it had little effect on employer-provided benefits, including health care insurance. Eligible workers with pre-existing health conditions…
Financial and Total Wealth Inequality with Declining Interest Rates
Financial wealth inequality and long-term real interest rates track each other closely over the post-war period. Faced with lower returns on financial wealth, households with high levels of financial wealth must increase savings to afford the…
Fraudulent Financial Reporting and the Consequences for Employees
We combine U.S. Census data with SEC enforcement actions to examine employees’ outcomes, such as wages and turnover, before, during, and after periods of fraudulent financial reporting. We find that fraud firms’ employees lose about 50…
Informative Activism vs. Lobbying
Both the market and the regulator have incomplete information regarding the products’ characteristics, but non-governmental organizations or activists often have expertise or motivation to investigate and acquire more information. Negative…
A Kinky Consistency: Experimental Evidence of Behavior Under Linear and Non-Linear Budget Sets
Individuals face non-linear budget constraints in myriad situations. We test a fundamental assumption of economic analysis in such settings: that individuals display stable preferences when facing linear and non-linear incentives. We use a…
Margin Trading and Leverage Management
We use granular data covering regulated (brokerage-financed) and unregulated (shadow-financed) margin trading during the 2015 market turmoil in China to provide the first systematic analysis of margin investors’ characteristics, leverage…
Platform Annexation
The article offers information about the platform annexation, and the logic using basic principles from platform economics. It analyzes the platform annexation to the traditional antitrust categories in the market. It mentions that a platform…
What Determines the Government’s Funding Costs when r=g? Unpleasant Fiscal Asset Pricing Arithmetic
Using MBA textbook finance, we look at three simple examples to illustrate why the r-g measure of the fiscal cost of deficits is incomplete. We start by considering the case of risky government debt. Second, we consider the case of risk-free debt…
Adapting to Misspecification in Contextual Bandits with Offline Regression Oracles
Computationally efficient contextual bandits are often based on estimating a predictive model of rewards given contexts and arms using past data. However, when the reward model is not well-specified, the bandit algorithm may incur unexpected…
Uncovering Interpretable Potential Confounders in Electronic Medical Records
In medicine, randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for informing treatment decisions. Observational comparative effectiveness research is often plagued by selection bias, and expert-selected covariates may not be sufficient to adjust…
Trading Stocks Builds Financial Confidence and Compresses the Gender Gap
Many studies document low rates of financial literacy and suboptimal levels of participation in financial markets. These issues are particularly acute among women. Does this reflect a self-reinforcing trap? If so, can a nudge to participate in…
Preparing for a Pandemic: Accelerating Vaccine Availability
Vaccinating the world’s population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches…
When Dad Can Stay Home: Fathers’ Workplace Flexibility and Maternal Health
We study how fathers’ access to workplace flexibility affects maternal postpartum health. We use variation from a Swedish reform that granted new fathers more flexibility to take intermittent parental leave during the postpartum period and…
Government and Private Household Debt Relief During Covid-19
We follow a representative panel of US borrowers to study the suspension of household debt payments (debt forbearance) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Between March and October of 2020, loans worth $2 trillion entered forbearance. On average,…
Quantifying U.S. Treasury Investor Optimism
When the government commits to a debt policy, the future value of government primary surpluses at all horizons is dictated by the debt dynamics under the risk-neutral measure. We compare the present discounted value of future surpluses implied by…
Family Spillover Effects of Marginal Diagnoses: The Case of ADHD
The health care system commonly relies on information about family medical history in the allocation of screenings and in diagnostic processes. At the same time, an emerging literature documents that treatment for “marginally diagnosed”…
Analyst Forecast Revision Consistency and Bias in Earnings Forecast Revisions
We address whether analysts bias earnings forecast revisions and convey the bias using forecast revision consistency, i.e., the extent to which analyst reports with earnings forecast revisions include stock recommendation and target price…