infonet-economy

Risk-based portfolio strategies, such as minimum variance, maximum diversification, equal weight and risk parity, to name the most famous, have become increasingly popular in the investment industry. This paper aims to help investors better understand the commonalities and differences between these strategies.We offer a general unifying analytical framework, allowing the discussion…

The nexus between ownership and competition in the banking sector is a major concern to policymakers around the world but one that is rarely comprehensively examined. For 131 countries and 13 years we match bank ownership with over 50,000 bank-year estimates of individual bank market power. We find that ownership does not explain market power at the individual bank level. However, at…

We study whether employment history can provide information about a worker’s non-cognitive skills - in particular, about “work attitude,” or the ability to work well and cooperatively with others. We conjecture that, holding all else equal, a worker’s frequent job changes can indicate poorer work attitude, and that this information is transmitted in labor markets through employment…

This paper studies the impact of the presence of human subjects in the role of a seller on bidding in experimental second-price auctions. Overbidding is a robust finding in second- price auctions, and spite among bidders has been advanced as an explanation. If spite extends to the seller, then the absence of human sellers who receive the auction revenue may bias upwards the bidding…

Gift-giving customs are ubiquitous in social, political, and business life. Legal regulation and industry guidelines for gifts are often based on the assumption that large gifts have the potential to influence behavior and create confl of interest, but small gifts do not. However, scientific evidence on the impact of small gifts on business relationships is scarce. We conducted a…

We test the impact of a peer group savings program on precautionary savings, through two randomized field experiments among 2,687 microcredit clients. The first experiment finds that the Peer Group Treatment, which combines public goal setting, monitoring in the group, and non-financial rewards, increases savings in a new savings account significantly. The number of deposits grows 3.…

In the United States, Ayn Rand’s (1905–1982) novels still appeal to a large readership, in spite of their age and length. While many attribute Rand’s lasting popularity to her effect on the presumably young and impressionable, few have actually explored why her novels at times prove to be such a transformative reading experience. The article retraces Rand’s impact, through the lens…

Selecting the right people for the right place the right way is vital to companies in the context of a fiercer war for talent nowadays. Many studies have shown that structured interviews have better predictive validity than unstructured interviews. Despite these repeated findings, most of the recruiters still prefer to use unstructured interviews notably because they allow more…

This article proposes a macroeconomic-oriented method to forecast hotel room demand in Switzerland for the period stretching from the third quarter of 1974 to the fourth quarter of 2013. The method increases accuracy by weighting characteristics of the inbound tourists’ economies for their relative contribution. It adopts the VECM technique, which produces reliable forecasts in both…