infonet-economy

The chief strategy officer (CSO) position has recently been gaining prominence in European firms. However, little is known about this new executive role. In this article, the authors report some of their findings from a major research program that involved two surveys of CSOs and give a portrayal of the CSO’s role in continental European firms. The article further highlights how CSOs...

The ‘distance effect' measuring the elasticity of trade flows to distance has been found to be rising since the early 1970s in a host of studies based on the gravity model, leading observers to call it the ‘distance puzzle'. However, this puzzle is regularly challenged by new developments in the specification of the gravity equation or in its estimations. We propose an...

This paper provides evidence for a causal effect of equity prices on corporate investment and employment. We use fire sales by distressed equity funds during the 2007–2009 financial crisis to identify substantial exogenous underpricing. Firms whose stocks are most under- priced have considerably lower investment an d employment than industry peers not subject to any fire sale...

“Statistical models are like bikinis: what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.” Aaron Levenstein What is the role of lay deliberation – if any – in health-care rationing, and administration more generally? Two potential answers are suggested by recent debates on the subject. One, which I will call the technocratic answer, suggests that there is no distinctive...

Is forcing Catholic opponents of abortion to pay taxes for abortion coverage in health plans the same as forcing pacifists to fight? The answer, we’ll see is, is ‘no’, because of the nature of abortion, taxation, and democratic government. We will then examine the implications of these claims for the role of religious bodies in the provision of public services.

Research proposals on security sometimes involve plans to examine people’s perceptions of security. Innocuous though these may seem – especially compared to much security-related research which involves the development of devices for spying on people, for mining social networking sites, or the construction and testing of dangerous devices of one sort or another- surveys are less ‘...