The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic halted economic activity worldwide, hurting firms and pushing many of them toward bankruptcy. This paper discusses four central issues that have emerged in the academic and policy debates related to firm financing during the downturn. First, the economic crisis triggered by the pandemic is radically different from past crises, with important consequences for optimal policy responses. Second, it is important to preserve firms’ relationships with key stakeholders (e.g., workers, suppliers, customers, and creditors) to avoid inefficient bankruptcies and long-term detrimental economic effects. Third, firms can benefit from “hibernation,” incurring the minimum bare expenses necessary to withstand the pandemic while using credit to remain alive until the crisis subdues. Fourth, the existing legal and regulatory infrastructure is ill-equipped to deal with an exogenous systemic shock like a pandemic. Financial sector policies can help channel credit to firms, but they are hard to implement and entail different trade-offs.

We approach the literature on housing and inequality from two angles. One is the impact of unequal endowments on housing. The second is the “memberships” inequality associated with neighborhoods, namely, households’ location in a geographic and social context. We elaborate on these two angles of inequality and focus on three distinctive features of housing: consumption, capital, and location. For owner-occupants, capital and consumption are bundled together in a single good. For both renters and owner-occupants, housing consumption inequality, access to good neighborhoods, and housing wealth follow from unequal endowments. Housing can propagate inequality by enabling owner-occupants to use it as collateral for other investments or to secure higher returns to human capital investments through the better schools in better neighborhoods. We use this approach to analyze key aspects of housing and inequality, paying special attention to the impacts of racial discrimination and segregation.

Edited by L.H. Klaassen, L.M. Koyck and H.J. Witteveen, Presented on the occasion of his 25 years jubilee as a professor at the Netherlands School of Economics at Rotterdam. (With a bibliography of professor Tinbergen's work).

This article proposes an empirically tractable way to incorporate intra-day noise into a VWAP trading rule. In volatile markets, news arrives unexpectedly and rapidly. This should influence a trader’s trading decisions. However, the literature has not incorporated such information into an algorithmic trading framework. Subsequently, this paper presents a Dynamic VWAP (DVWAP) framework that allows informed traders to utilize random news; and thus, improve trade-execution.

We combine two experiments and a survey to measure trust and trustworthiness—two key components of social capital. Standard attitudinal survey questions about trust predict trustworthy behavior in our experiments much better than they predict trusting behavior. Trusting behavior in the experiments is predicted by past trusting behavior outside of the experiments. When individuals are closer socially, both trust and trustworthiness rise. Trustworthiness declines when partners are of different races or nationalities. High status individuals are able to elicit more trustworthiness in others.

Decisions involving charitable giving often occur under the shadow of risk. A common finding is that potential donors give less when there is greater risk that their donation will have less impact. While this behavior could be fully rationalized by standard economic models, this paper shows that an additional mechanism is relevant: the use of risk as an excuse not to give. In a laboratory study, participants evaluate risky payoffs for themselves and risky payoffs for a charity. When their decisions do not involve tradeoffs between money for themselves and the charity, they respond very similarly to self risk and charity risk. By contrast, when their decisions force tradeoffs between money for themselves and the charity, participants act more averse to charity risk and less averse to self risk. These altered responses to risk bias participants towards choosing payoffs for themselves more often, consistent with excuse-driven responses to risk. Additional results support the existence of excuse-driven types.

This study complements and extends prior decision aid (DA) research by examining the DA reliance behavior of professional buy-side financial analysts in the context of their actual work environment. A large mutual fund company provided data on buy-side analysts' earnings forecasts over the course of one year, during which forecasts were made at the end of each quarter for the following four consecutive quarters. As part of the decision process, all analysts could voluntarily access a DA to assist them in forecasting earnings. Consistent with extant DA theory, the results indicate that analysts with greater performance-contingent incentives were less likely to rely on the DA and analysts with more complex portfolios were more likely to rely on the DA. Contrary to the results of most DA research and inconsistent with extant DA theory, analysts with greater task ability relied more on the DA than analysts with lesser ability. Finally, when DA reliance was high, analysts' forecast accuracy was also high, regardless of DA accuracy. The results provide valuable insight into the use of DAs by professional decision makers and the influence of DA reliance on their judgments in light of real-world pressures and performance consequences. The theoretical and practical implications of this study call for more research into why, how, and under what conditions highly skilled knowledge workers rely on the advice of DAs.

The management accounting and operations management literatures argue that the adoption of advanced manufacturing practices, such as just‐in‐time (JIT), necessitates complementary changes in a firm's management accounting and control systems. This study uses a sample of JIT and non‐JIT plants operating in the Canadian automotive parts manufacturing industry to study the interaction among performance outcomes, intensity of JIT practices, and productivity measurement. This study provides evidence that productivity measurement mediates the relationship between performance outcomes and intensity of JIT practices. Specifically, both JIT and non‐JIT plants that use a broader range of productivity measures are more efficient and profitable than other plants. Also, plants that employ industry‐driven productivity measures are more profitable and efficient than plants that employ idiosyncratic productivity measures, especially if the former are more JIT‐intensive than the latter. Furthermore, plants that employ quality productivity measures are less efficient and less profitable than those that do not, especially if they use more intensive JIT practices. The latter result is consistent with JIT‐intensive plants overinvesting in quality. This study also finds that plants that invest more in buffer stock are less efficient and less profitable, especially if they use more intensive JIT practices. Despite the fact that plant profitability and efficiency are highly correlated, JIT‐intensive plants are more profitable but less efficient than plants that are not JIT‐intensive, after controlling for productivity measures, plant size, and buffer stock. This result suggests that despite wasting resources, JIT‐intensive plants are still able to generate relatively higher profits than plants that are not JIT‐intensive.

This study establishes and tests, within the framework of a noisy rational expectations equilibrium model, the existence of a formal linear relationship between security prices, the average (consensus) and the dispersion of agents' expectations. Variations in the average and in the dispersion of agents' expectations, measured by the earnings forecasts produced by financial analysts, which are gathered and made available by The Institutional Brokers Estimate System (I/B/E/S) , have respectively a positive and negative effect on security prices. The difficulties raised by this estimation, as well as the institutional dimensions of the financial analysis industry are examined. The main results are the following: (1) the most important changes in consensus (in absolute value) correspond to the most important changes in dispersion in the analysts' forecasts, (2) the changes in the consensus and the dispersion of forecasts are respectively positively and negatively linked to Canadian security returns, but given the delay between the production and the public availability of the forecasts, an important part of the price adjustment occurs before the disclosure of forecast changes, (3) the effect on security returns of variations in the consensus dominates the effect of variations in the forecasts' dispersion. Thus, it seems that the impact of information arrival on security prices does not only depend on the direction and the magnitude of the expectations' average revision, but also depends on the direction and the magnitude of the change in the expectations' dispersion.

Being hired into a job depends not only on one’s own skill but also on that of other applicants. When another able applicant applies, a well-suited worker may be forced into unemployment or into accepting an inferior job. A model of this process defines over- and underqualification and provides predictions on its prevalence and on the wages of mismatched workers. It also implies that unemployment is concentrated among the least skilled workers, while vacancies are concentrated among high-skilled jobs. Four data sets are used to confirm the implications and establish that the hiring probability is low when competing applicants are able.