My name is Paul Vicinanza and welcome to my personal website. I am a PhD candidate in the Organizational Behavior department at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. My research studies how social structures shape the emergence, spread, and evolution of knowledge and culture with novel methodologies rooted in natural language processing and deep learning. One paper (forthcoming, American Sociological Review) traces the origins of conspiratorial beliefs on twitter to mortality threat and their spread to the further social reinforcement of extreme belief. Another research project (conditional acceptance PNAS Nexus, demonstrates prescient ideas—those which are incommensurate with existing logics but later reach widespread acceptance—emerge from peripheral actors in fields as diverse as politics, law, and business. In my job market paper, I analyze over 50,000 quarterly earnings calls between sell-side analysts and the executives of publicly traded firms. I theoretically frame the interaction as a type of "interrogation game" and demonstrate how asymmetric acts of conversational deference and alignment by executives predict future analyst stock upgrades and stock returns. A separate series of papers examines the structural origins of financial misconduct among U.S. financial advisors and entrepreneurial ventures.

 

 

Contact me at pvicinan (@) stanford.edu