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Articles 1 - 30 of 9917

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Forbidden Fruits: The Political Economy Of Science, Religion, And Growth, Roland Benabou, Davide Ticchi, Andrea Vindigni Jul 2022

Forbidden Fruits: The Political Economy Of Science, Religion, And Growth, Roland Benabou, Davide Ticchi, Andrea Vindigni

Andrea Vindigni

We study the coevolution of religion, science and politics. We first uncover, in international and U.S. data, a robust negative relationship between religiosity and patents per capita. The model then combines: (i) scientific discoveries that raise productivity but sometimes erode religious beliefs; (ii) a government that allows innovations to diffuse, or blocks them; (iii) religious institutions that can invest in doctrinal reform. Three long-term outcomes emerge. The “Western-European Secularization” regime has declining religiosity, unimpeded science, and high taxes and transfers. The “Theocratic” regime involves knowledge stagnation, unquestioned dogma, and high religious-public-goods spending. The “American” regime combines scientific progress and stable …

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A Community Of Practice For Chinese Ngos, Reza Hasmath, Jennifer Yj Hsu Jan 2020

A Community Of Practice For Chinese Ngos, Reza Hasmath, Jennifer Yj Hsu

Reza Hasmath

A community of practice represents an important resource for the sharing of sector-specific knowledge. It is a mechanism for Chinese NGOs to learn from each other, and collaborate. Drawing upon original data elicited from over 100 NGOs, this article examines the organizational capacity for Chinese NGOs to cultivate a mature community of practice. We find that there are inherent headwinds that Chinese NGOs will have to navigate to accomplish this goal. On the one hand, the majority of NGOs in our sample do not see themselves as part of a community of experts, which presents a huge challenge for the …

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A Regulatory Arbitrage Game: Off-Balance-Sheet Leverage And Financial Fragility., Dimitris Voliotis Jan 2019

A Regulatory Arbitrage Game: Off-Balance-Sheet Leverage And Financial Fragility., Dimitris Voliotis

Dimitris Voliotis

This study examines a simple banking system in a game-theoretic frameworkwherein banks act as self-interested agents to maximize leverage at the expenseof overall financial stability. The resultant strategic inefficiency raises concernsabout how banks manage the “financial stability” good, which is appropriated intoa “tragedy of the commons”. We conceptualize the inefficiency using the -priceof anarchy- introduced by Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou [2009].We seek the optimal regulatory framework that minimizes the -price of anarchy- or the degree offinancial fragility.

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Government Induced Bubbles, Danilo Lopomo Beteto Wegner Jan 2018

Government Induced Bubbles, Danilo Lopomo Beteto Wegner

Danilo Lopomo Beteto Wegner

A model to study how the possibility of government intervention during market crashes impacts the investment decision of agents is developed. With crashes representing bubble burst episodes and a government policy rule based on their magnitude, it is shown that the possibility of intervention creates incentives for investors to inflate bubbles, as large bubbles (i) maximize capital gains if they do not burst and (ii) make intervention more likely, thus minimizing losses. Bubbles should be larger the less fragile the economy, the less costly the intervention and the more liquid the asset. Intervention increases welfare in extremely fragile economies.

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International Reserves And Rollover Risk, Javier Bianchi, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, Leonardo Martinez Jan 2018

International Reserves And Rollover Risk, Javier Bianchi, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, Leonardo Martinez

Leonardo Martinez

No abstract provided.

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A Political Theory Of Kulturkampf: Evidence From Imperial Prussia & Republican Turkey, Ioannis N. Grigoriadis, Theocharis Grigoriadis Jan 2018

A Political Theory Of Kulturkampf: Evidence From Imperial Prussia & Republican Turkey, Ioannis N. Grigoriadis, Theocharis Grigoriadis

Theocharis Grigoriadis

No abstract provided.

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Why The World Needs A Reserve Asset With A Hard Anchor, Warren Coats, Dongsheng Di, Yuxuan Zhao Dec 2017

Why The World Needs A Reserve Asset With A Hard Anchor, Warren Coats, Dongsheng Di, Yuxuan Zhao

Warren Coats

From the 1970s, the global currency system has two features: the use of one or a few sovereign currencies as the global reserve asset and the floating exchange rate regime between major currencies.This paper points out that the costs of the dollar’s use as an international reserve currency exceed the benefits for both the US and the rest of the world. These costs include the exporting of American manufacturing as a byproduct of its current account deficit needed to supply its currency to the rest of the world. In addition to the detriment to trade from unpredictable exchange rate fluctuations, …

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Ceo Compensation And Risk-Taking At Financial Firms: Evidence From U.S. Federal Loan Assistance, Amar Gande, Swami Kalpathy Dec 2017

Ceo Compensation And Risk-Taking At Financial Firms: Evidence From U.S. Federal Loan Assistance, Amar Gande, Swami Kalpathy

Amar Gande

We examine whether risk-taking among the largest financial firms in the U.S. is related to CEO equity incentives before the 2008 financial crisis. Using data on U.S. Federal Reserve emergency loans provided to these firms, we find that the amount of emergency loans and total days the loans are outstanding are increasing in pre-crisis CEO risk-taking incentives – “vega”. Our results are robust to accounting for endogeneity in CEO equity incentives and selection of financial firms into emergency loan programs. We also rule out the possibility that our results are driven by a bank’s funding base, bank complexity, CEO overconfidence, …

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Partial Disability And Labor Market Adjustment: The Case Of Spain, José Ignacio Silva, Judit Vall Oct 2017

Partial Disability And Labor Market Adjustment: The Case Of Spain, José Ignacio Silva, Judit Vall

José Ignacio Silva


Although partially disabled individuals in Spain are allowed to combine disability benefits with a job, the empirical evidence shows that the employment rate of this group of individuals is very low because they have a much lower job finding and a higher job separation rates than nondisabled workers. Moreover, a decomposition analysis of the equilibrium employment rate shows that the differences in the job finding rates explain 85 percent of the disabled employment gap. To explain these facts, we construct a labor market model with search intensity and matching frictions to identify the incentives and disincentives to work in Spain …

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Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor Jul 2017

Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor

Felipe Balmaceda

This paper studies which social networks maximize trust and welfare when agreements are implicitly enforced. We study a repeated trust game in which trading opportunities arise exogenously and a social network determines the information each player has. We show that cohesive communities, modeled as social networks of complete components, emerge as the optimal community design. Cohesive communities generate some degree of common knowledge of transpired play that allows players to coordinate their punishments and, as a result, yield relatively high equilibrium payoffs. We also show that when news swiftly travel through the network, Pareto efficient networks are minimally connected: the …

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Competitive Intensity And Its Two-Sided Effect On The Boundaries Of Firm Performance, Joao Montez, Francisco Ruiz-Aliseda, Michael D. Ryall May 2017

Competitive Intensity And Its Two-Sided Effect On The Boundaries Of Firm Performance, Joao Montez, Francisco Ruiz-Aliseda, Michael D. Ryall

Michael D Ryall

The new perspective emerging from strategy's value-capture stream is that the effects of competition are two-fold: competition for an agent bounds its performance from below, while that for its transaction partners bounds from above. Thus, assessing the intensity of competition on either side is essential to understanding firm performance. Yet, the literature provides no formal notion of "competitive intensity" with which to make such assessments. Rather, some authors use added value as their central analytic concept, others the core. Added value is simple, but misses the crucial, for-an-agent side of competition. The core is theoretically complete, but difficult to interpret …

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Suppliers, Investors, And Equity Market Liberalizations, Martin Strieborny Mar 2017

Suppliers, Investors, And Equity Market Liberalizations, Martin Strieborny

Martin Strieborny

Allowing foreign investors to acquire equity stakes in domestic firms stimulates the real economy by promoting frictionless relationships between buyers and suppliers of intermediate goods. I combine insights from research on financial liberalization and relationship-specific investment to derive this hypothesis and then use a difference-in-difference empirical framework to test it. Results from panel-data and event-study estimations confirm that equity market liberalizations boost output growth particularly in suppliers-dependent industries that require a high share of specialized inputs in their production process. Financial openness can thus facilitate smooth interactions between firms and an important corporate stakeholder - suppliers of crucial production inputs.

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Costly Location In Hotelling Duopoly, Jeroen Hinloopen, Stephen Martin Mar 2017

Costly Location In Hotelling Duopoly, Jeroen Hinloopen, Stephen Martin

Jeroen Hinloopen

We introduce a cost of location into Hotelling’s (1929) spatial duopoly. We derive the general conditions on the cost-of-location function under which a pure strategy price-location Nash equilibrium exists. With linear transportation cost and a suitably specified cost of location that rises toward the center of the Hotelling line, symmetric equilibrium locations are in the outer quartiles of the line, ensuring the existence of pure strategy equilibrium prices. With quadratic transportation cost and a suitably specified cost of location that falls toward the center of the line, symmetric equilibrium locations range from the center to the end of the line.

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Research And Development Cooperatives And Market Collusion: A Global Dynamic Approach, Jeroen Hinloopen, Grega Smrkolj, Florian Wagener Mar 2017

Research And Development Cooperatives And Market Collusion: A Global Dynamic Approach, Jeroen Hinloopen, Grega Smrkolj, Florian Wagener

Jeroen Hinloopen

We present a continuous-time generalization of the seminal research and development model of d’Aspremont and Jacquemin (Am Econ Rev 78(5):1133–1137, 1988) to examine the trade-off between the benefits of allowing firms to cooperate in research and the corresponding increased potential for product market collusion. Weshow the existence of a solution to the optimal investment problem using a combination of results from viscosity theory and the theory of planar dynamical systems. In particular, we show that there is a critical level of marginal cost at which firms are indifferent between doing nothing and starting to develop the technology.We findthat colluding firms …

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Non-Defaultable Debt And Sovereign Risk, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, Leonardo Martinez, Yasin Kursat Onder Jan 2017

Non-Defaultable Debt And Sovereign Risk, Juan Carlos Hatchondo, Leonardo Martinez, Yasin Kursat Onder

Leonardo Martinez

No abstract provided.

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Serious Gamification: On The Redesign Of A Popular Paradox, Steffen Roth Jan 2017

Serious Gamification: On The Redesign Of A Popular Paradox, Steffen Roth

Dr. Steffen Roth

We challenge the idea of the paradoxical nature of the concept serious games and ask how researchers and designers need to conceive of serious games so that they at all appear paradoxical. To develop and answer this question, we draw on a theory–method that considers all forms of observation as paradoxical. We then use the tetralemma, a structure from traditional Indian logics, to resolve the paradox of serious games into this larger paradox of observation. Consequently, serious games may only be consid- ered a paradox if we presume realities and define games as deviations therefrom. The increasing gamification of society, …

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C.V. - Wojciech Budzianowski, Wojciech M. Budzianowski Jan 2017

C.V. - Wojciech Budzianowski, Wojciech M. Budzianowski

Wojciech Budzianowski

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Renewable Energy And Sustainable Development (Resd) Group, Wojciech M. Budzianowski Jan 2017

Renewable Energy And Sustainable Development (Resd) Group, Wojciech M. Budzianowski

Wojciech Budzianowski

No abstract provided.

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Call For Abstracts - Resrb 2017, June 19-21, 2017, Wrocław, Poland, Wojciech M. Budzianowski Jan 2017

Call For Abstracts - Resrb 2017, June 19-21, 2017, Wrocław, Poland, Wojciech M. Budzianowski

Wojciech Budzianowski

No abstract provided.

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Religion, Administration & Public Goods: Experimental Evidence From Russia, Theocharis N. Grigoriadis Jan 2017

Religion, Administration & Public Goods: Experimental Evidence From Russia, Theocharis N. Grigoriadis

Theocharis Grigoriadis

In this paper, I argue that religion matters for the provision of public goods. I identify three normative foundations of Eastern Orthodox monasticism with strong economic implications: 1. solidarity, 2. obedience, and 3. universal discipline. I propose and solve a public goods game with a three-tier hierarchy, where these norms are modeled as treatments. Obedience and universal discipline facilitate the provision of threshold public goods in equilibrium, whereas solidarity does not. Empirical evidence is drawn from public goods experiments run with regional bureaucrats in Tomsk and Novosibirsk, Russia. The introduction of the same three norms as experimental treatments produces different …

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Information, Competition, And The Quality Of Charities, Silvana Krasteva, Huseyin Yildirim Dec 2016

Information, Competition, And The Quality Of Charities, Silvana Krasteva, Huseyin Yildirim

Huseyin Yildirim

Drawing upon the all-pay auction literature, we propose a model of charity competition in which informed giving alone can account for the significant quality heterogeneity across similar charities. Our analysis identifies a negative effect of competition and a positive effect of informed giving on the equilibrium quality of charity. In particular, we show that as the number of charities grows, so does the percentage of charity scams, approaching one in the limit. In light of this and other results, we discuss the need for regulating nonprofit entry and conduct as well as promoting informed giving.

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Finance And Export Survival: The Case Of Mena Region And Sub-Saharan Africa, Melise Jaud, Madina Kukenova, Martin Strieborny Sep 2016

Finance And Export Survival: The Case Of Mena Region And Sub-Saharan Africa, Melise Jaud, Madina Kukenova, Martin Strieborny

Martin Strieborny

The paper looks at unique firm-product-destination export data collected by custom authoritiesin four countries from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) - Jordan,Kuwait, Morocco, Yemen as well as in six countries of Sub-Saharan Africa(SSA) - Ghana, Mali, Malawi, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda. We use these data toexamine to impact of financial development on the long-term success ofexports from developing countries. We find that those agricultural exportsthat face particularly costly implementation of Sanitary and PhytosanitaryStandards (SPS) are also the ones that disproportionately benefit from ahigher level of domestic financial development. This result confirms theprevious findings from a smaller SSA sample (Jaudetal. …

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Finance, Comparative Advantage, And Resource Allocation, Melise Jaud, Madina Kukenova, Martin Strieborny Sep 2016

Finance, Comparative Advantage, And Resource Allocation, Melise Jaud, Madina Kukenova, Martin Strieborny

Martin Strieborny

Can financial institutions and markets enhance the discipline imposed by competitive product markets and thus improve resource allocation in the real economy? We address this question in the context of international trade, using disaggregated product-level data from 71 countries exporting to the USA. We show that exported products exit the US market sooner if they stand far away from the exporting country's comparative advantage. This pattern is stronger when the exporting country has a well-developed banking system, but it is unaffected by the depth of stock markets. These results are in accordance with theories stressing the disciplining role of debt.

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Estimating The Income Loss Of Disabled Individuals: The Case Of Spain, Maria Cervini-Plá, José I. Silva, Judit Vall Sep 2016

Estimating The Income Loss Of Disabled Individuals: The Case Of Spain, Maria Cervini-Plá, José I. Silva, Judit Vall

José Ignacio Silva

In this paper we present a theoretical model along with an empirical model to identify the effects of disability on wages. From the theoretical model we derive the hypothesis that only the temporary component of the wage gap, which is due to assimilation costs, will diminish over time, whereas the permanent element, which is due to the productivity loss after the disabling condition, will in fact persist. We test this theoretical hypothesis using an exogenous disability shock (accident) and combine propensity score matching with a difference-in-differences method to account for observed and unobserved time-constant differences. In all our specifications we …

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Contract Structure For Joint Production: Risk And Ambiguity Under Compensatory Damages, Michael D. Ryall, Rachelle C. Sampson Jul 2016

Contract Structure For Joint Production: Risk And Ambiguity Under Compensatory Damages, Michael D. Ryall, Rachelle C. Sampson

Michael D Ryall

We develop a model in which the parties to a joint production project have a choice of specifying contractual performance in terms of actions or deliverables. Penalties for noncompliance are not specified; rather, they are left to the courts under the legal doctrine of compensatory damages. We analyze three scenarios of increasing uncertainty: Full Knowledge - where implications of partner actions are known; Risk - where implications can be probabilistically quantified; and, Ambiguity - where implications cannot be so quantified. Under Full Knowledge, action requirements dominate: they always induce the maximum economic value. This dominance vanishes in the Risk scenario. …

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Optimal Task Assignments, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof. Jul 2016

Optimal Task Assignments, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof.

Felipe Balmaceda

This paper studies optimal task assignments in a risk neutral principal-agent model in which agents are compensated according to an aggregated performance measure. The main trade-off involved is one in which specialization allows the implementation of any possible effort profile, while multitasking constraint the set of implementable effort profiles. Yet, the implementation of any effort profile in this set is less expensive than that under specialization. The principal prefers multitasking to specialization except when tasks are complements and the output after success is small enough so that it is not second-best optimal to implement high effort in each task. This …

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A Theory Of Political Entrenchment, Gilles Saint-Paul, Davide Ticchi, Andrea Vindigni Jun 2016

A Theory Of Political Entrenchment, Gilles Saint-Paul, Davide Ticchi, Andrea Vindigni

Davide Ticchi

We develop a theory of endogenous political entrenchment in a simple two-party dynamic model of income redistribution with probabilistic voting. A partially self-interested left-wing party may implement (entrenchment) policies reducing the income of its own constituency, the lower class, in order to consolidate its future political power. Such policies increase the net gain that low-skill agents obtain from income redistribution, which only the Left (but not the Right) can credibly commit to provide, and therefore may help offsetting a potential future aggregate ideological shock averse to the left-wing party. We demonstrate that political entrenchment by the Left occurs only if …

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Single-Firm Event Studies, Securities Fraud, And Financial Crisis: Problems Of Inference, Andrew Baker May 2016

Single-Firm Event Studies, Securities Fraud, And Financial Crisis: Problems Of Inference, Andrew Baker

Andrew Baker

Lawsuits brought pursuant to section 10(b) of the Securities and Exchange Actdepend on the reliability of a statistical tool called an event study to adjudicate issues ofreliance, materiality, loss causation, and damages. Although judicial acceptance of theevent study technique is pervasive, there has been little empirical analysis of the ability ofevent studies to produce reliable results when applied to a single company’s security.
Using data from the recent financial crisis, this Note demonstrates that the standardmodelevent study used in most court proceedings can lead to biased inferences sanctionedthrough the Daubert standard of admissibility for expert testimony. In particular, in thepresence …

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3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom Apr 2016

3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom

Evan R. Youngstrom

Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …

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The Bidder's Curse: Comment, Henry S. Schneider Apr 2016

The Bidder's Curse: Comment, Henry S. Schneider

Henry S Schneider

The prices of auctions on eBay often exceed eBay’s fixed-price “Buy-It-Now” prices. I investigate the causes of this overbidding, focusing on the interpretation in Malmendier and Lee (2011) that the observed overbidding cannot be explained “without allowing for nonstandard preferences or beliefs” and that the “strongest direct evidence points to limited attention.” Using data from their study and new data from eBay, I provide evidence that a key condition for identifying nonstandard behavior may not have been met, and that the observed overbidding is not inconsistent with standard behavior once we allow for the likely presence of search costs.

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