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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What Kinds of Incentives Encourage Participation in Democracy? Evidence from a Massive Online Governance Experiment
How can we democratically govern the AI, social media, and online platforms of the future? Today, low participation is a major barrier to community governance online. We leverage a digital quasi-experiment that allows us to study the links…
Area Conditions and Positive Incentives: Engaging Local Communities to Protect Forests
Tropical deforestation for agriculture causes alarming CO2 emissions and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. To prevent this, various governments and multinational commodity-buyers offer a positive incentive for locals conditional on no…
Corporate Tax Policy in Developed Countries and Economic Activity in Africa
This paper studies whether tax policies in developed nations affect developing economies. We study firm investment responses to a major reform that reduced the corporate income tax rate for U.K.-based firms. Our identification strategy compares…
Machine Learning Who to Nudge: Causal vs Predictive Targeting in a Field Experiment on Student Financial Aid Renewal
In many settings, interventions may be more effective for some individuals than others, so that targeting interventions may be beneficial. We analyze the value of targeting in the context of a large-scale field experiment with over 53,000 college…
The Price of Power: How Managerial Taxes Affect Debt Contract Provisions
We study price and non-price provisions of debt contracts to gauge how creditors evaluate changes in senior executives’ personal income taxes (“managerial taxes”) of their borrowers. Because managers’ personal income taxes can exacerbate…
What Drives Variation in the U.S. Debt/Output Ratio? The Dogs that Didn’t Bark
A higher U.S. government debt/output ratio does not forecast higher surpluses or lower returns on Treasurys in the future. Neither future cash flows nor discount rates account for the variation in the current debt/output ratio. The market…
The Sociology of Interpretation
Recent years have seen a growing sociological interest in meaning. In fact, some argue that sociology cannot confront its foundational questions without addressing meaning. Yet sociologists mean many things when they talk about meaning. We…
Standardization and Innovation in Venture Capital Contracting: Evidence from Startup Company Charters
This study examines the standardization of venture capital (VC) contracts since the release of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) model charter in 2003. Using nearly 5,000 charters issued in connection with a startup’s Series A…
The Digital Welfare of Nations: New Measures of Welfare Gains and Inequality
Digital goods can generate large benefits for consumers, but these benefits are largely unmeasured in the national accounts, including GDP and productivity. In this paper, we measure welfare gains from 10 popular digital goods across 13 countries…
Conservation by Lending
This project analyzes how a principal can motivate an agent to conserve rather than exploit a depletable resource. This dynamic problem is relevant for tropical deforestation as well as for other environmental problems. It is shown that the…
The Zero-Beta Rate
We use equity returns to construct a time-varying measure of the interest rate that we call the zero-beta rate: the expected return of a stock portfolio orthogonal to the stochastic discount factor. The zero-beta rate is high and volatile. In…
Breaking Down Information Inequality: Evidence from a Field Experiment in the Technology Industry
The under-representation of women in the technology industry has long been recognized as a concern, and the provision of gender-specific information on job search platforms has emerged as a potential solution. In this research, we study how…
ESG Assurance in the United States
We provide the first, large sample evidence on third-party verification of firms’ environmental and social metrics in ESG reports (“ESG assurance”) in the United States. Focusing on S&P 500 firms from 2010-2020, we document a striking…
Exposure to the Views of Opposing Others with Latent Cognitive Differences Results in Social Influence — But Only When Those Differences Remain Obscured
Cognitive differences can catalyze social learning through the process of one-to-one social influence. Yet the learning benefits of exposure to the ideas of cognitively dissimilar others often fail to materialize. Why do cognitive differences…
Internalizing Peer Firm Proprietary Costs: Evidence from Supply Chain Relations
We examine whether the proprietary costs of economically linked peers influence focal firms’ merger and acquisition (M&A) decisions, which often involve extensive transfers of proprietary information across merging entities. Using data on…
Targeting, Personalization, and Engagement in an Agricultural Advisory Service
ICT is increasingly used to deliver customized information in developing countries. We examine whether individually targeting the timing of automated voice calls meaningfully increases engagement in an agricultural advisory service. We define,…
What Gets Measured Gets Managed: Investment and the Cost of Capital
We study the impact of government-led incentive systems by examining a staggered reform in the Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE) performance evaluation policy. To improve capital allocative efficiency, starting in 2010, regulators evaluating…
Decomposing Changes in the Gender Wage Gap over Worker Careers
A large literature in labor economics seeks to decompose observed gender wage gaps (GWGs) into different sources, including portions explained by cross-gender differences in education, occupation, and experience. This paper provides new methods…
Digital Traffic, Financial Performance, and Stock Valuation
[Preparing for third round review at The Accounting Review.]
We examine the economic implications of digital traffic.
The Heterogeneous Earnings Impact of Job Loss Across Workers, Establishments, and Markets
Using generalized random forests and rich Swedish administrative data, we show that the earnings effects of job displacement due to establishment closures are extremely heterogeneous across workers, establishments, and markets. The decile of…