Research Projects

Jung Ho Choi joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Accounting in July 2017. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and earned a master’s degree in statistics from Columbia University. He worked as a financial adviser at PricewaterhouseCoopers in South Korea for five years after he graduated from Korea University with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 2005. His research interests are in real effects of accounting, earnings quality, aggregate earnings, voluntary disclosure, and macroeconomics.​’s research interests are in real effects of accounting, earnings quality, aggregate earnings, voluntary disclosure, and macroeconomics. 

Professor Choi’s current project studies the impact of accounting fraud on labor markets. Anecdotal evidence suggests that former employees of Enron suffered financially after the Enron accounting scandal broke. The question this project addresses is whether their labor market outcomes could have been different if Enron had not engaged in accounting fraud. Using the U.S. Census Bureau’s matched employer-employee panel dataset, this project investigates how accounting fraud influences labor markets.  

Brandon Gipper completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2016. He earned a B.S. in economics and mathematics and a Master in Accounting from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Gipper’s primary research focuses on empirical accounting topics, including the effects of disclosure on corporate governance, regulatory interaction in the audit industry and accounting standard setting, as well as economic questions related to auditing, the firm’s information environment, and capital formation.

Rebecca Lester joined the Stanford Graduate School of Business as an Assistant Professor of Accounting in July 2015. She studies the effects of accounting rules and tax policies on domestic and multinational firm investment and employment decisions. She received her PhD in Accounting from the MIT Sloan School of Management and both a B.A. and Masters of Accountancy from the University of Tennessee. Prior to her studies at MIT, she was a Manager in the M&A Transaction Services practice of Deloitte in Chicago, Illinois.

Professor Lester’s research focuses on the economic consequences of U.S. tax policies on multinational companies. Specifically, her work studies how accounting rules and tax policies affect firm investment and employment decisions. A recent project looked at the effect of the firm’s information environment on the choice between foreign outsourcing and integration.

Professor Athey’s research is in the areas of industrial organization, microeconomic theory, and applied econometrics. Her current research focuses on the design of auction-based marketplaces and the economics of the internet, primarily on online advertising and the economics of the news media.

Professor Athey’s project uses data from internet browsing to show that abnormal volumes of ticker lookups at major finance sites is predictive of abnormal asset returns. Prior studies of this phenomena used Google Trends data, which does not incorporate lookups at major finance sites and is too aggregate and noisy to provide precise identification of the effects of lookups, especially for medium and low-volume stocks. Her project examines the impact of lookups on returns over time and further studies the relationship between other types of browsing activities, such as visiting trading websites and financial news websites, and ticker lookups, in order to understand what drives ticker lookups, as well as to disentangle which types of traders seem to have the greatest impact on stock prices. She is also looking at asymmetries between lookups associated with declining or increasing stock prices to further understand the scenarios in which individual investor behavior impact price.

Rebecca Diamond is an Associate Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business where she teaches Data and Decisions. Her current research studies the causes and consequence of segregation of households by income and education level across neighborhoods and labor markets. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research from 2013 to 2014. She received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University in 2013 and her BS in Physics and Economics and Mathematics from Yale University in 2007.

Professor Diamond is an applied micro economist studying local labor and housing markets. Her recent research focuses on the causes and consequences of diverging economic growth across U.S. cities and its effects on inequality.A recent project analyzes why U.S. households have become increasingly geographically segregated by education level and how this segregation led to increased economic well-being inequality. Her work uses large datasets related to local labor and real-estate markets and a combination of structural and reduced-form estimation techniques.

Guido Imbens is The Applied Econometrics Professor and Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. After graduating from Brown University Guido taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He joined the GSB in 2012.

Guido Imbens does research in econometrics and statistics. His research focuses on developoing methods for drawing casual inferences in experimental and observational studies, including matching, instrumental variables, synthetic control and regression discontinuity designs. Recent projects include the use of generative adverserial networks to guide monte carlo studies

Paulo Somaini studies industrial organization, econometrics and microeconomic theory. His work shows how the behavior of agents in strategic environments can reveal their preferences and information. In “Competition and Interdependent Costs in Michigan Highway Procurement Auctions” he finds that contrary to naïve theoretical predictions, firms in Michigan did not bid more aggressively for projects closer to their competitors’ plants. He shows that firms’ response to competitive pressure reveals the extent and magnitude of the winner’s curse in this type of auctions.

Professor Somaini’s most recent work analyses the assignment mechanism used to assign Kindergarten students to schools in Cambridge, MA. This work shows that while parents have strong incentives to misreport their preferences to the school district, their reports provide valuable information about how much they like each school which is useful to simulate their welfare under alternative assignment rules.

Ali Yurukoglu is an Associate Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches Data and Decisions in the first year of the MBA program. He received a BA in economics and mathematics from Northwestern University, and a PhD in economics from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Professor Yurukoglu’s research is in the area of industrial organization. Recently, he used the tools of game theory and statistics to study pricing regulation in the cable and satellite television industry, and the effect of mergers between firms at different points on the supply chain. 

Anat R. Admati is the George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at Stanford University Graduate School of Business (GSB), a Director of the GSB Corporations and Society Initiative, and a senior fellow at Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. She has written extensively on information dissemination in financial markets, portfolio management, financial contracting, corporate governance and banking.

Admati’s current research, teaching and advocacy focus on the complex interactions between business, law, and policy with focus on governance and accountability.

Juliane Begenau is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Prior to that, she taught at Harvard Business School. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. 

Professor Begenau’s research focuses on the interplay of the real economy with financial markets and financial institutions. Her current work involves the study of cross-sectional differences in bank leverage, bank profitability and bank risk.

Laura Blattner is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research interests are banking, corporate finance, and macroeconomics. Laura recently earned her Ph.D. at Harvard University. She also holds a B.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and an M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University.research interests are financial economics, corporate finance, and macroeconomics.

Her current project addresses regional heterogeneity in the pass-through of monetary policy. Better understanding of the drivers of this regional heterogeneity is especially relevant in Europe given the lack of fiscal transfers to smooth out local business cycles. This project builds a comprehensive pan-European loan-level database (a) to study the extent and drivers of regional pass-through of monetary policy and (b) to analyze how recent regulatory policy changes have affected risk-sharing across Eurozone countries.

Greg Buchak is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Buchak earned his PhD in Financial Economics at the University Chicago’s Department of Economics and Booth School of Business. He also received a JD from the University of Chicago Law School. Before graduate school, he was a quantitative trader and portfolio manager at Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Canada. He received a BA in Mathematics and a BS in Economics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Buchak’s primary research field is in corporate finance. He is interested in issues related to financial technology, financial intermediation, consumer finance, and the interplay between the evolving industrial organization of the financial sector, regulation, and technological progress.

Peter Koudijs is an Associate Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He earned a PhD degree, summa cum laude, in Economics at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011. Peter Koudijs specializes in the history of financial markets.

In his research, Professor Koudijs studies relevant historical cases which yield important lessons for the world of today. In recent work he has used a unique natural experiment from the 18th century to study the role of news in financial markets and the impact of insider trading. In other work he examines earthquake shocks to isolate random variation in house prices.

Claudia Robles-Garcia is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Robles-Garcia earned a B.A. in economics from the University Carlos III of Madrid and a Masters in economics and finance from the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies. Subsequently, she received a PhD in economics from the London School of Economics and worked as a research analyst at the UK Financial Conduct Authority.

Her main areas of research are household finance, industrial organization and banking. In recent work, she studies the role of intermediaries as expert advisors and how their remuneration schemes can affect market outcomes. She is interested in issues related to financial intermediation and regulation, and the interaction of vertical relations with firm pricing decisions.

Jeffrey Zwiebel is the James C. Van Horne Professor of Finance at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. His research focuses on the fields of corporate finance, organizations, the theory of the firm, and microeconomic theory. Recent and ongoing research includes work on executive compensation, financial contracting, bargaining theory, mergers and acquisitions, persuasion bias in political and social belief formation and transmission, and the “hot-hand” in sports.

Jeffrey Zwiebel’s research focuses on the fields of corporate finance, organizations, the theory of the firm, and microeconomic theory. Particular topics of research interest include financial contracting, bargaining theory, intrafirm bargaining, contract theory, organizational design, political and social belief formation, corporate governance, executive compensation, capital structure, mergers and acquisitions, corporate valuation, and the economics of sports.

Steve joined Stanford GSB in the summer of 2015. Before returning for doctoral studies, he gained industry experience in the technology start-up space, working with entrepreneurs in product management and tech-transfer roles. This early interest in entrepreneurship has carried over to Steve’s present day research activities, only now he is focused on assisting entrepreneurs in emerging markets to innovate, find new customers and increase sales.

Steve’s research focuses on the role of marketing and entrepreneurship in emerging markets. In particular, he is interested in solutions that can enhance the productivity and performance of entrepreneurs running small firms. Most of Steve’s work uses randomized-controlled trials to rigorously evaluate what works in stimulating small business growth, and also to uncover how and why these changes occur. He has completed field studies in South Africa (on business training) and Ghana (on new methods for measuring firm performance). Moving forward, Steve is working with thousands of entrepreneurs to study the impact of solutions ranging from international ‘remote coaching’ models (Uganda) and mobile-based information and analytics tools (Rwanda) to managerial insourcing and outsourcing programs (Nigeria) and loan products for increasing investment in productive assets (Ghana). Through this research, Steve is also developing a data platform (ENTREinfo) to improve the measurement of financial/marketing information and the identification of growth-oriented entrepreneurs in emerging markets – which will (hopefully) assist policy makers and impact investors in designing and evaluating ‘enterprise development’ programs.

Jann Spiess holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University. Previously, Jann obtained a master’s degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School. His background is in mathematics with a focus on probability theory and combinatorics, which he studied at the University of Cambridge (Part III of the Mathematical Tripos) and the Technical University of Munich. Jann also studied and worked in Hangzhou, China and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Jann works on integrating techniques and insights from machine learning into the econometric toolbox. His research brings together microeconometric methods, statistical decision theory, and mechanism design to clarify the use of flexible prediction algorithms in causal inference and data-driven decision-making. He is particularly interested in the role of human and machine decisions in replicable and robust inferences from big data.

Gabriel Weintraub is an Associate Professor of Operations, Information & Technology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He holds a PhD in Management Science and Engineering and a MA in Economics, both from Stanford University. Before obtaining his Ph.D. at Stanford, Gabriel was a full-time instructor at the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Chile where he taught undergraduate courses and consulted for the Chilean government. After his Ph.D., he spent ten years at the faculty of Columbia Business School where he taught MBA and PhD courses in operations and game theory.

Gabriel Weintraub’s research is in the areas of operations, management science, industrial organization, computational economics, and market design. Most recently, he has become particularly interested in studying the operations, optimization, and economics of digital marketplaces.

Dr. Atwell studied mathematics, economics and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin while working in the food industry. He did a PhD in Sociology at the University of Michigan and then was a Data Science Fellow at Northwestern University. He is also external faculty with the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems at Northwestern University.

Dr. Atwell studies how groups of individuals communicate and consume social information. At the root of society is the creation of broadly-shared understandings of world but many features of the modern world present potential pitfalls for that creative process. Using simulations, large-group experiments, and natural language processing, Dr. Atwell analyzes how different dynamic social processes produce, distribute and aggregate the information necessary for large groups to create these essential shared understandings.

Julien Clement studies organization design and its impact on collaboration within and across organizations. He is generally interested in understanding the link between formal organizational structure and informal social relationships: how does an organization’s structure affect how its members form relationships and develop routines? How can it help them adapt these routines when environmental demands change? And when can organizations thrive without any formal structure?

Julien investigates these issues through a ‘micro-analytic’ approach: rather than study organizations as broad aggregates, he starts by observing social interactions among individuals and tries to understand how organizational structure enables these interactions to aggregate into organizational outcomes. His work has relied on a variety of analytical methods (network analysis, agent-based models, big-data analytics) applied in a variety of contexts including the television game-show industry, professional videogaming (e-Sports) and mobile healthcare in Africa. Most recently, Julien started studying how the deployment of artificial intelligence inside organizations may affect collaboration and learning among their members.

Professor Ranganathan studies questions of work and employment in the context of economic development. By applying novel methods that combine field-experimental and quantitative research designs with ethnography and interviews, her research investigates how low-income occupations in developing countries are governed, organized, seek meaning through their work and navigate the market. Through her research, Professor Ranganathan strives to advance our theoretical understanding of work, while informing the design of labor-market institutions and policy for the developing world.

Over the last year, Professor Ranganathan has been working with a large garment manufacturer in southern India and is investigating the impact of several internal organizational practices in the garment factories on worker outcomes. In particular, she is working with a research fellow to look at the impact of employer-sponsored childcare on working mothers’ labor force participation and is further investigating how this effect varies based on the gender composition of the working mothers’ children.

Professor Sterling investigates the ways organizations attract, manage, and retain high-value human capital in technology and business, the effect this has on the performance of employees and organizations, and the broader impact of these practices on inequality.

In a project using an online labor market, she is investigating how social status, quality, and the timing through which these are revealed to audiences affect the hiring of workers. Her project explores if and how employers enact arbitrage opportunities in labor markets, and how cultural fit may or may not affect selection of applicants.

Katherine Casey is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She teaches a Strategy Beyond Markets course for first year MBAs that is tailored to the particular opportunities and challenges facing firms investing in developing economies. Her current research examines how asymmetric information in electoral contests affects voting choice and public sector performance, and the impact of foreign aid on collective action and economic development. Katherine holds a PhD in Economics from Brown University and a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University. She has worked as a consultant for the World Bank in Madagascar, the Comoros and Indonesia, and has spent several years working with the Government of Sierra Leone. Her research explores political economy issues in developing countries. Her approach combines applied theory, original data collection and randomized trials.

One of Professor Casey’s current research projects looks at the long run impacts of institution building. Her current project is a long run follow-up to an experimental evaluation of a community driven development program in Sierra Leone.

Saumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and, by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law, in the Freeman-Spogli Institute and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Professor Jha’s research focuses on drawing new lessons from economic theory and history for fostering beneficial political reform and economic growth in developing societies. He is particularly interested in the role that can be played by organizational innovations in mitigating political risk, encouraging political reform and supporting peaceful co-existence between members of different ethnic, religious and social groups. His project explore the political effects of exposure to financial markets, including on voting decisions, attitudes towards peace and towards political integration.

Neil Malhotra is the Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Political Science. He serves as the Louise and Claude N. Rosenberg, Jr. Director of the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford GSB.

Professor Malhotra’s research covers diverse subjects, including government accountability, political polarization, and business and politics, and is widely covered in major media. A current project examines how various frictions and transaction costs make it more difficult for members of Congress to represent their constituents.