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.
Bidders’ Responses to Auction Format Change in Internet Display Advertising Auctions
We study actual bidding behavior when a new auction format gets introduced into the marketplace. More specifically, we investigate this question using a novel dataset on internet display advertising auctions that exploits a staggered adoption by…
Creating a Beautiful Life
In this paper, I share a few insights on our remarkable field to explore what creates a beautiful life. I conceptualize that the idea of a “beautiful life” is defined not by transient moments of happiness, but by a profound sense of meaning and…
Fading Corporate Survival Prospects: Impact of Co-selection Bias in Resource Allocation on Strategic Intent
Research Summary: Our field study of new business development in a German-based global pharmaceutical company reveals that the emergence of co-selection bias in project-level state-gate resource allocation engendered a corporate-…
GDP-B: A New Well-Being Metric in the Era of the Digital Economy
Gross Domestic Product (GDP), though often used as a proxy for economic well-being, was not designed for this purpose and is inadequate. In our current research, we are building new metrics for measuring changes in consumer well-being that…
Markets under Siege: How Political Beliefs Move Financial Markets
Can political beliefs, particularly about benefits of war versus peace, move thick financial markets? We document that following an unlikely victory by French citizen-soldiers during the German Siege of Paris (1870), prices of the highly liquid…
Political Trenches: War, Partisanship and Polarization
We study the dynamics between local segregation, partisanship, and political polarization. We exploit large-scale, exogenous and high-stakes peer assignment due to universal conscription of soldiers assigned from each of 34,947 municipalities to…
Corporate Carbon Accounting: Balance Sheets and Flow Statements
Current corporate disclosures regarding carbon emissions lack commonly accepted accounting rules. The carbon accrual accounting system described here takes the rules of historical cost accounting for operating assets as a template for generating…
Fintech Failure: Examining B2B and B2C Solutions for Two-Sided Platform Adoption
Across emerging economies, physical cash is the ubiquitous means of transaction for retailers and their consumers. Despite the widespread availability, affordability and benefits of Fintech solutions for digital payments in these regions, there…
Impact Matters for Giving at Checkout
We conducted two experiments on PayPal’s Give at Checkout feature to learn about the effect of 1) information about charity outcomes on donations, and 2) exposure to these point-of-sale microgiving requests on subsequent giving. In this “…
Information-Based Pricing in Specialized Lending
We study specialized lending in a credit market competition model with private information. Two banks, equipped with similar data processing systems, possess “general” signals regarding the borrower’s quality. However, the specialized bank gains…
Market Design for Surface Water
Many proposed surface water transfers undergo a series of regulatory reviews designed to mitigate hydrological and economic externalities. While these reviews help limit externalities, they impose substantial transaction costs that also limit…
Political Trenches: War, Partisanship, and Polarization
We study the dynamics between local segregation, partisanship, and political polarization. We exploit large-scale, exogenous and high-stakes peer assignment due to universal conscription of soldiers assigned from each of 34,947 municipalities to…
Implications of Asset Market Data for Equilibrium Models of Exchange Rates
We characterize the relation between exchange rates and their macroeconomic fundamentals without committing to a specific model of preferences, endowment or menu of traded assets. When investors can trade home and foreign currency risk-free bonds…
Credit Cycles, Firms, and the Labor Market
We use administrative data from the U.S. Census Bureau to estimate the causal effects of loose credit conditions on firm employment and worker earnings. To obtain quasi-random variation in firms’ exposure to credit booms, we exploit the…
Evaluating Treatment Prioritization Rules via Rank-Weighted Average Treatment Effects
There are a number of available methods for selecting whom to prioritize for treatment, including ones based on treatment effect estimation, risk scoring, and handcrafted rules. We propose rank-weighted average treatment effect (RATE) metrics as…
Generative AI at Work
New AI tools have the potential to change the way workers perform and learn, but little is known about their impacts on the job. In this paper, we study the staggered introduction of a generative AI-based conversational assistant using data from…
Informing Entrepreneurs? Initial Public Offerings and New Business Formation
We examine the relationship between public firm disclosure and aggregate new business formation. Consistent with the notion that public company disclosures provide information spillovers that reduce the extent of uncertainty about new…
Novelty in Content Creation: Experimental Results Using Image Recognition on a Large Social Network
Social networks utilize award recognition and front pages to motivate user content creation, facilitate consumer discovery of content, and provide attention and recognition to the best content. Past research shows that such attention and…
Proportional Response: Contextual Bandits for Simple and Cumulative Regret Minimization
In many applications, e.g. in healthcare and e-commerce, the goal of a contextual bandit may be to learn an optimal treatment assignment policy at the end of the experiment. That is, to minimize simple regret. However, this objective remains…
The Digital Banking Revolution: Effects on Competition and Stability
How does the digital revolution affect bank competition and financial stability? I use hand- collected data and a novel identification strategy to show that after adopting digital platforms, banks branchlessly operate in more markets,…