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.
Paper in preparation.
Companies are required to have a reliable system of corporate governance in place at the time of IPO in order to protect the interests of public company investors and stakeholders. Yet, relatively little is known about the process…
We follow a representative panel of millions of consumers in the U.S. from 2007 to 2017 and document several facts on the long-term effects of the Great Recession. There were about six million foreclosures in the ten-year period…
Contextual bandit algorithms are sensitive to the estimation method of the outcome model as well as the exploration method used, particularly in the presence of rich heterogeneity or complex outcome models, which can lead to…
Influential theories indicate concern that campaign donors exert outsized political influence. However, little data documents what donors actually want from government; and existing research largely neglects donors’ views on…
We examine how constraints on directors’ availability to serve on boards influence their labor market outcomes. We find that directors who lose (or leave) a board are more likely to subsequently gain a new board seat, regardless…
When macroeconomic tools fail to respond to wealth inequality optimally, regulators can still seek to mitigate inequality within individual markets. A social planner with distributional preferences might distort allocative…
We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry, household moves to healthier neighborhoods, and purchasing patterns among…
In this paper, I study the impact of a firm’s risk disclosure on investors’ desire to acquire information about the firm. I first show that risk disclosure complements private learning by enabling sophisticated investors to…
In this paper, I develop an option-pricing model that formally incorporates a disclosure event. Using the model, I first theoretically examine how two properties of the disclosure — its overall informativeness and its…
We study when and how intervention to stop a project is optimally used in a repeated relationship between a principal and a policymaker. The policymaker is privately informed about his ability, where a higher ability policymaker…
Prior to 2018, U.S. repatriation taxes motivated companies to retain cash offshore. Using confidential jurisdiction-specific data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, we find that firms with high tax-induced foreign cash have…
In many settings, a decision-maker wishes to learn a rule, or policy, that maps from observable characteristics of an individual to an action. Examples include selecting offers, prices, advertisements, or emails to send to…
We examine the long-term effects of interventions by activist hedge funds. Prior papers document positive equal-weighted long-term returns and operating performance improvements following activist interventions, and typically…
Older Americans, even those who are long retired, have strong willingness to work, especially in jobs with flexible schedules. For many, labor force participation near or after normal retirement age is limited more by a lack of…
We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration, and the impact of the arbitrator selection process on outcomes. We collect a novel data set containing roughly 9,000…
Certain markets are illicit because the supply is partly coerced, but little is known about the optimal regulation of such markets. We model a prostitution market with voluntary and coerced prostitutes and ask what regulation can…
We study which types of activities migrate to the shadow banking sector, why migration occurs in some sectors, and not others, and the quantitative importance of this migration. We explore this question in the $10 trillion US…
Two salient features of most online platforms are that they do not dictate the transaction prices, and use commissions/subscriptions for extracting revenues. We consider a platform that charges commission rates and subscription…