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.
The Roots of Health Inequality and the Value of Intra-Family Expertise
Do differences in health literacy contribute to the widely documented health-income gradient? In the context of Sweden, we document a strong relationship between exposure to health-related expertise — captured by the presence of a health…
Causally Driven Incremental Multi Touch Attribution Using a Recurrent Neural Network
This paper describes a practical system for Multi Touch Attribution (MTA) for use by a publisher of digital ads. We developed this system for JD.com, an eCommerce company, which is also a publisher of digital ads in China. The approach has…
Optimal Dynamic Information Acquisitioned
I study a dynamic model in which a decision-maker acquires information about the payoffs of different alternatives prior to making her decision. The key feature of the model is the flexibility of information: the decision-maker can choose any…
A Unified Model of Distress Risk Puzzles
We build a dynamic model to link two empirical patterns: the negative failure probability-return relation (Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi, JF, 2008) and the positive distress risk premium-return relation (Friewald, Wagner, and Zechner, JF, 2014…
Capital Requirements, Risk Choice, and Liquidity Provision in a Business Cycle Model
Accepted at the Journal of Financial Economics
This paper develops a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model in which households’ preferences for safe and liquid assets constitute a violation of Modigliani and Miller. I…
The Insurance is the Lemon: Failing to Index Contracts
We model the widespread failure of contracts to share risk using available indices. A borrower and lender can share risk by conditioning repayments on an index. The lender has private information about the ability of this index to measure the…
Non-Answers During Conference Calls
We construct a novel measure of disclosure choice by firms. Our measure uses linguistic analysis of conference calls to flag a manager’s response as providing an explicit “non-answer” to an analyst’s question. Using our measure, about 11% of…
Climate Change and Long-Run Discount Rates: Evidence From Real Estate
Revise and Resubmit at the Journal of Political Economy
We explore what private market data can tell us about the appropriate discount rates for valuing investments in climate change abatement. We estimate the term structure of…
Making Time Matter: A Review of Research on Time and Meaning
In this conceptual paper, we review three decades of research on time and meaning in consumer research and psychology to identify key themes that have emerged, build frameworks that integrate past research, and reveal areas of potential for…
Not All Debt is Created Equal: On the Mental Accounting of Debt Forms
Abstract coming soon.
The Effect of Payment Frequency on Spending Behavior
Abstract coming soon.
Scaling Up: The Implementation of Corporate Governance in Pre-IPO Companies
Companies are required to have a reliable system of corporate governance in place at the time of IPO in order to protect the interests of public company investors and stakeholders. Yet, relatively little is known about the process by which they…
Debt Relief and Slow Recovery: A Decade after Lehman
We follow a representative panel of millions of consumers in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017 and document several facts on the long-term effects of the Great Recession. There were about six million foreclosures in the ten-year period after Lehman’s…
Estimation Considerations in Contextual Bandits
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to difficult…
What Do Donors Want? Heterogeneity by Party and Policy Domain (Research Note)
Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data documents what donors actually want from government; and existing research largely neglects donors’ views on individual issues. We…
Redistribution Through Markets
When macroeconomic tools fail to respond to wealth inequality optimally, regulators can still seek to mitigate inequality within individual markets. A social planner with distributional preferences might distort allocative efficiency to achieve a…
Food Deserts and the Causes of Nutritional Inequality
We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among households with…
Risk Disclosure, Liquidity, and Investment Efficiency
In this paper, I study the impact of a firm’s risk disclosure on investors’ desire to acquire information about the firm. I first show that risk disclosure complements private learning by enabling sophisticated investors to acquire information…
Option Prices and Disclosure: Theory and Measurement
In this paper, I develop an option-pricing model that formally incorporates a disclosure event. Using the model, I first theoretically examine how two properties of the disclosure — its overall informativeness and its informativeness given good…