infonet-economy

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)…

The economic return to public and private R&D is of enormous interest to academics and policy makers. First, private returns to R&D appear to be large and larger than the returns to alternative investments. Second, private R&D and R&D subsidies are positively correlated and there is no evidence for crowding out effects. Third, R&D cooperation increases private R…

Ideas are essential for innovation and for the continuous renewal of a firm’s product offerings. Previous research has argued that online communities contain such ideas. Therefore, online communities such as forums, Facebook groups, blogs etc. are potential gold mines for innovative ideas that can be used for boosting the innovation performance of the firm. However, the nature of…

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…

The occurrence of some events can impact asset prices and produce losses. The amplitude of these losses are partly determined by the degree of predictability of those events by the market investors, as risk premiums build up in an asset price as a compensation of the anticipated losses. The aim of this paper is to propose a general framework where these phenomena can be properly…

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…

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…

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…

A new approach for multivariate modelling and prediction of asset returns is proposed. It is based on a two-component normal mixture, estimated using a fast new variation of the minimum covariance determinant (MCD) method made suitable for time series. It outperforms the (shrinkage-augmented) MLE in terms of out-of-sample density forecasts and portfolio performance. In addition to…