Economics

The economics academic area includes faculty that study a broad range of topics in their discipline, including economic theory, industrial organization, labor economics, macroeconomics, econometrics, environmental economics, and international trade.

The economic faculty bring ideas from economic research (both their own and those from the broader community of economic scholars) to the classroom.

The group teaches principles of economics and statistics in managerial foundations classes, as well as applications of economics in classes on strategy, public policy, human resource management, global management, and other topics.

The rigorous application of economic principles permeates the MBA, Stanford MSx, and Executive Education curricula. The economics area extends its impact beyond Stanford by publishing, by educating PhD students, and by influencing public policy.

Recent Journal Articles in Economics

John Ameriks, Joseph Briggs, Andrew Caplin, Matthew Shapiro, Christopher Tonetti
Journal of Political Economy. June
2020, Vol. forthcoming

Older wealthholders spend down assets much more slowly than predicted by classic life-cycle models. This paper introduces health-dependent utility into a model with incomplete markets in which preferences for bequests,...

David M. Kreps, Alejandro Francetich
Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control. February
2020, Vol. 111, Issue 103813

The dynamic problem of choosing subsets of objects or “toolkits” when their value distribution is unknown is a multi-armed bandit problem with non-independent arms. Accordingly, except for very simple specifications,...

Paul R. Milgrom, Ilya Segal
Journal of Political Economy. January
2020, Vol. 128, Issue 1, Pages 1-31

We study the class of multiround, multiproduct clock procurement auctions that reduce offered prices at each round. When prices stop declining, the remaining bidders become the winning sellers. For single-minded...

Paul Gompers, Will Gornal, Steven N. Kaplan, Ilya A. Strebulaev
Journal of Financial Economics. January
2020, Vol. 135, Issue 1, Pages 169-190

We survey 885 institutional venture capitalists (VCs) at 681 firms to learn how they make decisions. Using the framework in Kaplan and Strömberg (2001), we provide detailed information on VCs’...

John Ameriks, Joseph Briggs, Andrew Caplin, Minjoon Lee, Matthew Shapiro, Christopher Tonetti
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.
2020, Vol. 12, Issue 1
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...
Stefan Wager, David A. Hirshberg
Journal of Business & Economic Statistics. December
20 , 2019, Vol. 38, Issue 1, Pages 19-24

There has recently been a considerable amount of interest in developing methods for statistical inference in high-dimensional regimes with more covariates than data points (Javanmard and Montanari 2014; van de...

Susan Athey, Michael Luca
Journal of Economic Perspectives. December
2019, Vol. 33, Issue 1, Pages 209-230

As technology platforms have created new markets and new ways of acquiring information, economists have come to play an increasingly central role in tech companies-tackling problems such as platform design,...

Hunt Allcott, Rebecca Diamond, Jean-Pierre Dube, Jessie Handbury, Ilya Rahkovsky, Molly Schnell
The Quarterly Journal of Economics. November
2019, Vol. 134, Issue 4, Pages 1793-1844

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy eat more healthfully than the poor in the United States. Exploiting supermarket entry and household moves to healthier neighborhoods, we...

Chang-Tai Hsieh, Eric Hurst, Charles I. Jones, Pete Klenow
Econometrica. September
30 , 2019, Vol. 87, Issue 5

In 1960, 94 percent of doctors and lawyers were white men. By 2010, the fraction was just 62 percent. Similar changes in other highly‐skilled occupations have occurred throughout the U.S....

Christopher P. Chambers, Nicolas S. Lambert, Paul J. Healy
Games and Economic Behavior. September
2019, Vol. 117, Pages 322-341

Proper scoring rules incentivize truthful probability reports from risk-neutral individuals. For individuals with much more general preferences (including risk and ambiguity aversion) we use duality techniques to characterize the optimal...