Over the past year, faculty and students in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences applied for and received research grants from The Linde Institute. The following projects were funded:
- Colin Camerer, Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair, used Linde Institute funding to support a research project he summarized as follows: The human brain creates fast, low-cost habits when choices are frequent and provide stable rewards. Based on evidence from animal learning and cognitive neuroscience, we are testing a theory of habit and deliberative (goal-directed) choice called "habit preference" (or HP), using a large sample of field data on household consumer purchases. The project combines ideas from economics and methods from computer science to study a business problem.
- Social science graduate student Jun Chen worked on constructing a new dataset that covers all outside equity issues of California firms from 2002 to 2015 for use in studying important questions regarding the angel financing market and the whole early-stage equity market.
- Michael Ewens, associate professor of finance and entrepreneurship, used Linde Institute funds to purchase a financial data subscription to facilitate a project with two objectives: 1) to estimate the impact of venture capital contracts terms (most importantly, participation, liquidation preference, and anti-dilution provisions) on the value of a startup, and 2) to estimate the extent to which these terms are value-added (e.g., by providing better incentives to the entrepreneur or VCs) versus a wealth transfer between VC and entrepreneur.
- Jonathan Katz, Kay Sugahara Professor of Social Sciences and Statistics, received a grant to investigate the challenge of measuring a multi-dimensional construct, which empirical researchers interested in understanding corporate governance face. Katz and graduate student Silvia Kim examined proposed index measures of corporate governance using recent developments in the statistics of causal inference and as well as advancements in measurement models.
- Social science graduate student Pengfei Sui examined how the interaction between household sentiment and intermediary capital constraints determines the asset price dynamics during financial crises.