infonet-economy

We decompose broad-based measures of accruals into firm-specific and related-firm components. We find that the negative relation between accruals and future firm performance is almost entirely attributable to the firm-specific component. Standard risk-based explanations are hard to reconcile with this fact. To the extent expected returns have a common component spanning related firms...

Market liberalization of the German household electricity market has led to an excessive number of competitors (1,150 electricity providers) and volatile price dynamics on price comparison sites. To date, providers that are struggling to achieve a top ranking on price comparison sites do not appear to implement a consistent or elaborate strategy for attracting customers. We developed...

A strategy profile of a game is called robustly stochastically stable if it is stochastically stable for a given behavioral model independently of the specification of revision opportunities and tie-breaking assumptions in the dynamics. We provide a simple radius–coradius result for robust stochastic stability and examine several applications. For the logit-response dynamics, the...

We analyze intergenerational redistribution in emerging economies with the aid of an overlapping generations model with endogenous labor supply. Growth is initially high but declines over time. A version of the model calibrated to China is used to analyze the welfare effects of alternative pension reforms. Although a reform of the current system is necessary to achieve financial...

The notion of contracts as reference points provides the basis for a deeper understanding of important phenomena such as the employment contract, vertical integration, firm scope, authority and delegation. Previous experiments lend support to this notion but they ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and ex post renegotiation or revision. Here...

We study the implications of offshoring on innovation, technology, and wage inequality in a Ricardian model with directed technical change. Profit maximization determines both the extent of off-shoring and the direction of technological progress. A fall in the offshoring cost induces technical change with an ambiguous factor bias. When the initial cost of offshoring is high, an...

Firms frequently attempt to increase profits by replacing some existing workers with new lower-wage workers. However, this strategy may be ineffective in an incomplete-contract environment because the new workers may provide lower effort in response to their lower wages and hiring new lower-wage workers may damage the remaining original workers' reciprocal relationship with the...

Systemic manipulations have shown that dopamine and serotonin systems are involved in risky decision making. However, how they work within the regions that implement risky choices remains unclear. The present study investigated the role of dopamine and serotonin in the rat anterior insular cortex (AIC) and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which make different contributions to risky...