Publications Supported by Stanford Leadership Institute

Great powers are increasingly using their economic and financial strength for geopolitical aims. This rise of “geoeconomics” has the potential to reshape the international trade and financial system. This paper examines the role of domestic…

We develop and estimate a two-sided matching model of auditors and clients. We find evidence that auditors and clients engage in matching based on their preferences on both observable and unobservable characteristics. This matching appears to…

Hegemonic powers, like the United States and China, exert influence on other countries by threatening the suspension or alteration of financial and trade relationships. Mechanisms that generate gains from integration, such as external economies…

While the mechanism design paradigm emphasizes notions of efficiency based on agent preferences, policymakers often focus on alternative objectives. School districts emphasize educational achievement, and transplantation communities focus on…

What if “old wine in new bottles” is actually the secret to game-­changing innovation? The authors explore what they call precedents thinking, illustrating how radical breakthroughs such as Henry Ford’s assembly line and Reed Hastings’s…

Motivated by the disconnect between regulatory discussions and industry reports on voluntary sustainability investments, we examine the market equilibrium for sustainable products in the absence of regulation, focusing on firms’ strategic…

We examine if the effectiveness of business tax subsidies varies based on state disclosure laws. The prior accounting literature on government disclosure documents substantial variation in the quality of such disclosures, raising questions about…

Geoeconomic pressure—the use of existing economic relationships by governments to achieve geopolitical or economic goals—is a prominent feature of global power dynamics. This paper introduces a methodology using large language models (LLMs) to…

We assess Euro Area financial integration correcting for the role of “onshore offshore financial centers” (OOFCs) within the currency union. The OOFCs of Luxembourg, Ireland, and the Netherlands serve dual roles as hubs of investment fund…

We study how enhanced internal communication technology influences firms’ internal information production. By developing a model with a headquarters manager and several divisional managers, we formalize two competing economic forces—information…

Exploring social norms through a diversity perspective, this review examines whether minorities live in ‘tighter’ worlds, wherein they are subject to stricter rules and punishments. Integrating research from psychology, economics, and…

AI model alignment is crucial due to inadvertent biases in training data and the underspecified machine learning pipeline, where models with excellent test metrics may not meet end-user requirements. While post-training alignment via human…

In this paper, we argue that the New York City congestion pricing plan whose implementation was paused in the summer of 2024 had a major shortcoming: as designed, it would have had a much more severe impact on the drivers of personal vehicles…

Innovations bring many benefits to society, but they can also bring harm. We study the problem of a regulator deciding whether to approve an innovation where information about the impact of the innovation is held within the firms that are…

In recent years, U.S. public companies have increasingly begun to voluntarily disclose official workforce diversity data (i.e., EEO-1 reports), which they previously only confidentially filed with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission…

Eleven large language models (LLMs) were assessed using 40 bespoke false-belief tasks, considered a gold standard in testing theory of mind (ToM) in humans. Each task included a false-belief scenario, three closely matched true-belief control…

Can training police officers on how to best interact with the public actually improve their interactions with community members? This has been a challenging question to answer. Interpersonal aspects of policing are consequential but largely…

For an incompatible patient-donor pair, kidney exchanges often forbid receipt-before-donation (the patient receives a kidney before the donor donates) and donation-before-receipt, causing a double-coincidence-of-wants problem. Our proposed…

The CBO cost releases of legislative proposals contain valuable news about surpluses priced in by Treasury investors. Using daily event windows, we find that cost releases with large negative cash flows lowered Treasury valuations by more than 20…

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% of…

Governments and central banks can protect either taxpayers or bondholders from government spending shocks. When they choose to insulate taxpayers, government bond yields need to increase in response to unfunded fiscal expansions as the government…

Sharing experiences with racism (racial discrimination disclosure) has the power to raise awareness of discrimination and spur meaningful conversations about race. Sharing these experiences with racism on social media may prompt a range…

During an investigation using Forensic Investigative Genetic Genealogy, which is a novel approach for solving violent crimes and identifying human remains, reference testing—when law enforcement requests a DNA sample from a person in a partially…

Using rich data on hourly physical productivity and thousands of ownership changes from U.S. power plants, we study the effects of acquisitions on efficiency and underlying mechanisms. We find a 2% average increase in efficiency for acquired…