Publications des institutions partenaires
De-biasing strategic communication
This paper studies the effect of disclosing conflicts of interest on strategic communication when the sender has lying costs. I present a simple economic mechanism under which such disclosure often leads to more informative, but at the same time also to more biased messages. This benefits rational receivers but exerts a negative externality from them on naive or delegating receivers...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Growth and welfare effects of intellectual property rights when consumers differ in income
This paper analyzes how changing the expected length of intellectual property (IP) protection affects economic growth and the welfare of rich and poor consumers. The analysis is based on a product-variety model with non-homothetic preferences and endogenous markups in which, in accordance with empirical evidence, rich households consume a larger variety of goods than poorer ones. The...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Beyond sorting: a more powerful test for cross-sectional anomalies
Many researchers seek factors that predict the cross-section of stock returns. The standard methodology sorts stocks according to their factor scores into quantiles and forms a corresponding long-short portfolio. Such a course of action ignores any information on the covariance matrix of stock returns. Historically, it has been difficult to estimate the covariance matrix for a large...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Numeracy and the quality of on-the-job decisions: Evidence from loan officers
We examine how the numeracy level of employees influences the quality of their on-the-job decisions. Based on an administrative dataset of a retail bank we relate the performance of loan officers in a standardized math test to the accuracy of their credit assessments of small business borrowers. We find that loan officers with a high level of numeracy are more accurate in assessing...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Investor Attention and Sentiment: Risk or Anomaly?
Are stocks' varying sensitivies to changing investor attention and sentiment priced? Employing internet search-based proxies for both, I find novel results that are consistent with theory. Stocks that co-vary negatively with increased investor attention to the stock market outperform in the following months in a behavior consistent with a risk premium. The pricing of co-...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
A neural link between generosity and happiness
Generous behaviour is known to increase happiness, which could thereby motivate generosity. In this study, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a public pledge for future generosity to investigate the brain mechanisms that link generous behaviour with increases in happiness. Participants promised to spend money over the next 4 weeks either on others (experimental group)...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Will Awe Trump Rules? The 21st GTA Report
Not since the London Summit of in April 2009 has protectionism had such a high profile in the run-up to a G20 Leader’s Summit. President Trump’s America First policies have drawn sharp criticism from leaders of other G20 governments. Accusations and counter-accusations of unfair trading practices have become a regular occurrence. So as to shed light on competing claims, this Global...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/07/2017
Firm-value effects of CSR disclosure and CSR performance
We examine in this paper the effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and CSR performance on firm value for S&P 500 firms from 2011 to 2014. We find that CSR disclosure is positively associated with firm value and that the effect of CSR disclosure on firm value is larger than the effect of CSR performance. On average, the overall firm value increase for one...
Institution partenaire
English / 30/06/2017
Tail Risk in Hedge Funds: A Unique View from Portfolio Heldings
We develop a new tail risk measure for hedge funds to examine the impact of tail risk on fund performance and to identify the sources of tail risk. We find that tail risk affects the cross-sectional variation in fund returns, and investments in both, tail-sensitive stocks as well as options, drive tail risk. Moreover, managerial incentives and discretion as well as exposure to...
Institution partenaire
English / 27/06/2017
Brain versus brawn: the realization of women's comparative advantage
In the last decades the US economy experienced a rise in female labor force participation, a reversal of the gender education gap and a closing of the gender wage gap. Importantly, these changes occurred at a substantially different pace over time. During the same period, workers in the US faced a considerable shift in labor demand from more physical to more intellectual skill...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Systematic consumption risk in currency returns
We sort currencies into portfolios by countries’ past consumption growth. The excess return of the highest- over the lowest-consumption-growth portfolio – our consumption carry factor – compensates for negative returns during world-wide downturns and prices the cross-section of portfolio-sorted and of bilateral currency returns. Empirically, sorting currencies on consumption growth...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Voting with public information
We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in committees, where members can have both common and conflicting interests. In the presence of public information, the simple and efficient vote-your-signal strategy profile no longer constitutes an equilibrium under the commonly-used simultaneous voting rules, while the intuitive but inefficient follow-the-...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
On linear transformations of intersections
For any linear transformation and two convex closed sets, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for when the transformation of the intersection of the sets coincides with the intersection of their images. We also identify analogous conditions for non-convex sets, general transformations, and multiple sets. We demonstrate the usefulness of our results via an application to...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Inducing variety: a theory of innovation contests
This paper analyzes the design of innovation contests when the quality of an innovation depends on the research approach, but the best approach is unknown. Inducing a variety of research approaches is desirable because it generates an option value. We show that suitable contests can induce such variety. The optimal contest is a bonus tournament, where suppliers can choose only...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Job mobility and creative destruction: flexicurity in the land of Schumpeter
This paper evaluates the 2003 Austrian severance-pay reform, often advocated as a role model for structural reforms in countries plagued by inflexible labor markets and high unemployment. The reform replaced a system with tenure-based severance payments after a layoff (but not after a quit) by payments into pension accounts that accrue to workers after a layoff as well as after a...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Valuation of the flexibility of power-to-gas facilities
Power-to-gas (P2G) is a technology that converts electrical power to gas fuels like methane for storage in the natural gas grid. Due to the low efficiency, the production of synthetic methane is only profitable if electricity is sufficiently cheap. However, P2G facilities are flexible consumers and can benefit from short-term price fluctuations on the electricity spot market. We use...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Gender differences in willingness to compete: the role of public observability
A recent literature emphasizes the importance of the gender gap in willingness to compete as a partial explanation for gender differences in labor market outcomes. However, whereas experiments investigating willingness to compete typically do so in anonymous environments, real world competitions often have a more public nature, which introduces potential social image concerns. If...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Hunting unicorns? Experimental evidence on predatory pricing policies
We study the anticompetitive effects of predatory pricing and the efficacy of three policy responses. In a series of experiments where an incumbent and a potential entrant interact, we compare prices, market structures and welfare. Under a laissez-faire regime, the threat of post-entry price cuts discourages entry, and allows incumbents to charge monopoly prices. Current U.S. policy...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Multiple testing of one-sided hypotheses: combining Bonferroni and the bootstrap
In many multiple testing problems, the individual null hypotheses (i) concern univariate parameters and (ii) are one-sided. In such problems, power gains can be obtained for bootstrap multiple testing procedures in scenarios where some of the parameters are 'deep in the null' by making certain adjustments to the null distribution under which to resample. In this paper, we...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
Mortality inequality in Canada and the U.S.: divergent or convergent trends?
Mortality is a crucial dimension of wellbeing and inequality in a population, and mortality trends have been at the core of public debates in many Western countries. In this paper, we provide the first analysis of mortality inequality in Canada and compare its development to trends in the U.S. We find strong reductions in mortality rates across both genders and at all ages, with the...
Institution partenaire
English / 01/06/2017
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