Research Projects

Jung Ho Choi joined Stanford Graduate School of Business as an assistant professor of accounting in July 2017. He completed his PhD 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.​ Choi’s research interests are in real effects of accounting, earnings quality, aggregate earnings, voluntary disclosure, and macroeconomics.

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 PhD at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2016. He earned a BS in economics and mathematics and a master’s 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.

John Kepler joined Stanford Graduate School of Business as an assistant professor of accounting in July 2019. He studies the interrelated nature that firms’ explicit and implicit contracts play in shaping firms’ financial reporting and corporate governance practices. His recent work has examined the role of executive bonus plans in facilitating cooperation among management team members. Other work examines how corporate insiders exploit their private information advantage about corporate audit findings for personal gain.

Kepler received his PhD in accounting from the the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in accounting and finance from the Foster School of Business of the University of Washington. Prior to his studies at Wharton, he worked in financial planning and analysis for Nordstrom in Seattle, Washington.

Kepler’s research relates to documenting and understanding the interrelated nature that firms’ contracts — both explicit and implicit — play in driving firms’ financial reporting and corporate governance practices.

Charles M. C. Lee is the Moghadam Family Professor of Management and professor of accounting at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Lee received his BMath from the University of Waterloo in 1981, and his MBA in 1989 and PhD in 1990 from Cornell University. He has been a faculty member at the Michigan Business School from 1990 to 1995 and the Johnson Graduate School of Management, Cornell University from 1996 to 2004. From 1995 to 1996, he was visiting economist at the New York Stock Exchange. At Cornell, he held the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professorship in Management and was director of the Parker Center for Investment Research.

From 2004 to July 2008, Lee was managing firector at Barclays Global Investors (BGI; now Blackrock). He joined Stanford GSB as visiting professor in July 2008 while continuing to serve as an exclusive senior consultant to BGI, and became a full-time faculty member in July 2009.

Broadly speaking, Dr. Lee is interested in the effect of human cognitive constraints on market participants and other factors that impact the efficiency with which market prices incorporate information. His publications have been in the areas of behavioral finance, equity valuation, financial analysis, quantitative investing, market microstructure, and security market regulation.

Rebecca Lester joined 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 BA 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.

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.

Susan 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.

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, economics, and mathematics from Yale University in 2007.

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 Stanford Graduate School of Business. After graduating from Brown University Guido taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He joined Stanford GSB in 2012.

Imbens does research in econometrics and statistics. His research focuses on developing 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 adversarial 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.

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.

Takuo Sugaya is an associate professor of economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches Managerial Economics. His current research focuses on dynamic games — repeated games, stochastic games, and dynamic Bayesian games — and the environments in which different sides will engage in cooperative long-run relationships. Takuo received his PhD in economics from Princeton University in 2012 and his MA in economics and BA in international relations from University of Tokyo.

Sugaya’s research is in the area of microeconomic theory. His work in game theory examines how entities with their own objectives and information can sustain cooperation in the long term. In a recent paper, he proposes a self-enforcing mechanism that incentivizes firms to maintain collaborative relationships although they are uncertain about the information and strategic behavior of the other parties.

Ali Yurukoglu is an associate professor at 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.

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 Graduate School of Business, a director of the Stanford 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 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.

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 Stanford Graduate School of Business. Her research interests are banking, corporate finance, and macroeconomics. Laura recently earned her PhD at Harvard University. She also holds a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and an M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University. Her 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 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.

Hanno Lustig joined Stanford GSB in 2015. Prior to that, he taught at the University of Chicago, the UCLA Economics department and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. He graduated in 2002 from Stanford University with a PhD in economics. He has been awarded the JP Morgan Award for the Best Paper on Financial Institutions and Markets in 2012 as well as the NASDAQ OMX Award for the Best Paper on Asset Pricing in 2010. Lustig is a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and an associate editor at the Journal of Finance and Econometrica. In 2019, Lustig joined the NBIM Allocation Advisory board which provides the CIO Allocation Strategies of the NBIM with input regarding key areas in economics and finance that pertain to asset allocation.

Hanno Lustig has worked at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance. Recently, his research has focused on understanding the forces that determine exchange rates in currency markets. His research has shown how currencies have different risk characteristics that are determined by a country’s role in the global economy. These risk characteristics help to understand the behavior of exchange rates. In addition, Lustig has explored the impact of government guarantees on the pricing of tail risk borne by large financial institutions. More recently, Lustig has also worked on understanding the determinants of a firm’s volatility (volatility of sales, cash flows, stock returns etc).

Matteo Maggiori is an associate professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. His research focuses on international macroeconomics and finance. His research topics have included the analysis of exchange rate dynamics, global capital flows, the international financial system, the role of the dollar as a reserve currency, tax havens, bubbles, expectations and portfolio investment, and very long-run discount rates. He is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley.

He is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2019 Carlo Alberto Medal for the best Italian Economist under the age of 40. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation (CAREER grant), selected for the 2012 Review of Economic Studies May Meetings (European Tour), and won the 2013 and 2018 AQR Insight Award, and the 2017 AQR Young Researcher Award.

Claudia Robles-Garcia is an assistant professor of finance at 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.

Chenzi Xu is an assistant professor of finance at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Xu earned a AB in economics from Harvard University, a MPhil in economics and social history from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Xu’s research is on the intersection of finance, international trade, and economic history.

Wesley Hartmann joined Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2003. He received a BA from UC Irvine, and MA and PhD degrees in Economics from UC Los Angeles.

Hartmann’s research empirically analyzes questions in marketing and economics. He studies advertising, pricing, reward programs, social interactions, switching costs and vertical integration.

Sridhar Narayanan is an associate professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2005 and has been at Stanford since July 2005. Before his PhD, he worked as a sales and marketing manager at Unilever, after receiving a BE in electrical engineering and an MBA, both from the University of Delhi, India.

Narayanan’s research focuses on empirical analysis of marketing problems, through the estimation of econometric models on behavioral data. One stream of his work has focused on consumer and firm decisions in situations of consumer uncertainty about new products. Specifically, his research has explored physician learning about new prescription drugs, the changes in the role and effectiveness of marketing communication for products over their life cycle, and the value of information to consumers in telecommunication markets. Another stream of his work has focused on measurement of casual effects. He has studied the application of regression discontinuity designs to marketing, and causal installed base effects in social contexts. In recent work, he has been looking at causal effects in online advertising. A particular area of interest is the application of Bayesian econometric methods to problems in marketing and empirical industrial organization.

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.

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.

Aruna 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, 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, 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.

Katherine Casey is an associate professor of political economy at 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 master’s 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 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 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.

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.