infonet-economy

This paper provides evidence that demand for equity index options has predictive power for
future volatility beyond current and lagged volatility in publicly available data. The predictive power increases prior to macroeconomic announcements and exhibits a positive relation with investor uncertainty about macroeconomic news. Straddle positions that trade on the volatility...

This study investigates the impact of finishing versus dropping out of college on selfesteem. Using data spanning three decades from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that dropping out of a four-year college significantly decreases selfesteem compared to graduating. In addition, two- and four-year college graduates have significant higher self-esteem than high...

This paper studies a large class of imperfectly discriminating contests, referred to as elastic contests, that induce players to either overbid a standing bid or to abstain from bidding altogether. Many common forms of contest are elastic. In any equilibrium of an elastic contest, there is complete rent dissipation for all but at most one player. This result is used to show that in...

We design a laboratory experiment to identify causal performance effects of top-down communication between managers and their subordinates. Our focus lies on communication that resolves uncertainty about the work environment but does not provide task-specific knowledge. Recent articles in the business press report a lack of such communication in real-world organizations and associate...

SBTC is a powerful mechanism in explaining the increasing gap between educated and uneducated wages. However, SBTC cannot mimic the US within-group wage inequality. This paper provides an explanation for the observed intra-college group inequality by showing that the top decile earners' significant wage growth is underpinned by the link between ex ante ability, math-heavy...

Differences in firm-level productivity explain international activities of non-financial firms quite well. We test whether differences in bank productivity determine international activities of banks. Based on a dataset that allows tracking banks across countries and across different modes of foreign entry, we model the ordered probability of maintaining a commercial presence abroad...

This paper shows how to design incentive-based capital requirements that would prevent the bank from manufacturing tail risk. In the model, the senior bank manager may have incentives to engage in tail risk. Bank shareholders can prevent the manager from taking on tail risk via the optimal incentive compensation contract. To induce shareholders to implement this contract, capital...