James D. Paron
Assistant Professor of Finance
Stanford Graduate School of Business
This page collects James Paron's research papers, with full abstracts and machine-readable full text. The linked PDF is the definitive version of each paper.
Working Papers
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Making Room on an Empty Planet: The Spatial Consequences of Depopulation
We study the effects of population decline on the spatial distribution of economic activity. Empirically, we document that population growth is negatively associated with changes in spatial concentration, both across and within countries. We then show theoretically that an aggregate population de…
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The Wealth of Stagnation: Falling Growth, Rising Valuations
Over the last half-century, economic growth stagnated but stock-market wealth boomed. I present evidence that declining innovation productivity reconciles these trends. At the macro level, I document that R&D spending has fallen relative to value, while M&A spending has doubled relative to R&D. A…
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Who Gains When Interest Rates Fall?
We study the interest-rate sensitivity of household wealth in a realistic life-cycle model. The model predicts that middle-aged and wealthier households should hold more long-term assets, as observed in the US data. Consequently, optimal portfolio rules imply that falling interest rates increase …
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U.S. Treasury Investors Are Long in AI
The U.S. federal government’s tax revenue is highly sensitive to long-run productivity growth but its mandatory spending commitments are not. As a result, U.S. Treasury investors have acquired a long position in AI. Using the CBO’s 30-year budget projections, elasticities, and interest rate pass-…
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Associative Learning and Representativeness
Across varied experimental settings, subjects determine the probability of a hypothesis according to the representativeness heuristic, a striking departure from Bayesian updating. Rather than assessing the odds of a hypothesis given data simply by using the likelihood multiplied by the prior, sub…
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Heterogeneous-Agent Asset Pricing: Timing and Pricing Idiosyncratic Risks
This paper studies the importance of idiosyncratic endowment shocks for aggregate asset prices in a generalized continuous-time framework that accommodates both jumps and recursive preferences. I show that, regardless of the presence of jumps, countercyclical cross-sectional risk is irrelevant to…
Publications
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Sovereign Default and the Decline in Interest Rates
Sovereign debt yields have undergone a historic decline over the last half-century. Standard explanations, including aging populations and increases in asset demand from abroad, encounter difficulties when confronted with the full range of evidence. We propose an explanation based on a decline in…
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A Dynamic Model of the Racial Wealth Gap
What explains wealth and portfolio differences between Black and White Americans? We find that disparities in economic factors explain portfolios well, but only partly explain the wealth gap. In a dynamic setting, economic factors often change optimal saving rates in ways that offset their effect…