Martin Weitzman and, in particular, John Campbell for their comments. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Principal--agent models in which the agent has access to private information before a contract is signed are a cornerstone of contract theory. We have conducted an experiment with 720 participants to explore whether the theoretical insights are reflected by the behaviour of subjects in the laboratory and to what extent deviations from standard theory can be explained by social preferences. Investigating settings with both exogenous and endogenous information structures, we find that agency theory is indeed useful to qualitatively predict how variations in the degree of uncertainty affect subjects' behaviour. Regarding the quantitative deviations from standard predictions, our analysis based on several control treatments and quantal response estimations shows that agents' behaviour can be explained by social preferences that are less pronounced than in conventional ultimatum games. Principals' own social preferences are not an important determinant of their behaviour. However, when the principals make contract offers, they anticipate that social preferences affect agents' behaviour.

This paper describes estimation methods, based on the generalized method of moments (GMM), applicable in settings where time series have different starting or ending dates. We introduce two estimators that are more efficient asymptotically than standard GMM. We apply these to estimating predictive regressions in international data and show that the use of the full sample affects inference for assets with data available over the full period as well as for assets with data available for a subset of the period. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that reductions hold for small-sample standard errors as well as asymptotic ones.

Strategic performance measurement systems operationalize firm strategy with a set of performance measures. A consequence of such alignment is the tendency for managers to lose sight of the strategic construct(s) the measures are intended to represent, and subsequently act as though the measures are the constructs of interest, a phenomenon referred to as surrogation . We investigate how involvement in strategy selection affects managers’ propensity to exhibit surrogation. We predict and find that strategy selection reduces surrogation. Surprisingly, we do not find that engaging in strategy deliberation, a key process underlying strategy selection, reduces surrogation. Thus, managers’ involvement in the actual choice of strategy appears to be both a necessary and sufficient condition to mitigate surrogation. Our paper broadens understanding of factors that influence surrogation, such as the effects of different aspects of managers’ strategic involvement and buy‐in. Further, by documenting how managers behave within (as opposed to simply with ) strategic performance measurement systems, we highlight the potential for managers to endogenously influence the effectiveness of such systems.

We investigate changes to the ownership and control of East Asia's largest companies in 1996 and 2008. Newly compiled data for 1386 publicly traded companies at the end of 2008 are supplemented with existing data on 1,606 publicly traded companies at the end of 1996. Two main findings stand out. First, where status quo political arrangements persist, preexisting ownership arrangements go unchanged or become more entrenched. Where major political changes occurred, corporate ownership would undergo substantial changes. Second, the state has become increasingly important as an owner of domestic firms as well as foreign firms.

What preferences will prevail in a society of rational individuals when preference evolution is driven by the resulting payoffs? We show that when individuals' preferences are their private information, a convex combination of selfishness and morality stands out as evolutionarily stable. We call individuals with such preferences homo moralis. At one end of the spectrum is homo oeconomicus, who acts so as to maximize his or her own payoff. At the opposite end is homo kantiensis, who does what would be “the right thing to do,” in terms of payoffs, if all others would do likewise. We show that the stable degree of morality—the weight placed on the moral goal—is determined by the degree of assortativity in the process whereby individuals are matched to interact.

We explore a new dimension of fund managers' timing ability by examining whether they can time market liquidity through adjusting their portfolios' market exposure as aggregate liquidity conditions change. Using a large sample of hedge funds, we find strong evidence of liquidity timing. A bootstrap analysis suggests that top-ranked liquidity timers cannot be attributed to pure luck. In out-of-sample tests, top liquidity timers outperform bottom timers by 4.0–5.5% annually on a risk-adjusted basis. We also find that it is important to distinguish liquidity timing from liquidity reaction, which primarily relies on public information. Our results are robust to alternative explanations, hedge fund data biases, and the use of alternative timing models, risk factors, and liquidity measures. The findings highlight the importance of understanding and incorporating market liquidity conditions in investment decision making.

We provide a set of comparable estimates for the rates of inflow to and outflow from unemployment using publicly available data for fourteen OECD economies. Using a novel decomposition that allows for deviations of unemployment from its flow steady state, we find that fluctuations in both inflow and outflow rates contribute substantially to unemployment variation within countries. Anglo-Saxon economies exhibit approximately a 15:85 inflow-outflow split to unemployment variation, while continental European and Nordic countries display closer to a 45:55 split. In all economies, increases in inflows lead increases in unemployment, whereas outflows lag a ramp-up in unemployment.

We present a model of shadow banking in which banks originate and trade loans, assemble them into diversified portfolios, and finance these portfolios externally with riskless debt. In this model: outside investor wealth drives the demand for riskless debt and indirectly for securitization, bank assets and leverage move together, banks become interconnected through markets, and banks increase their exposure to systematic risk as they reduce idiosyncratic risk through diversification. The shadow banking system is stable and welfare improving under rational expectations, but vulnerable to crises and liquidity dry‐ups when investors neglect tail risks.

Traditional financing sources such as private and public equity may not be ideal for investment projects with low probabilities of success, long time horizons, and large capital requirements. Nevertheless, such projects, if not too highly correlated, may yield attractive risk-adjusted returns when combined into a single portfolio. Such “megafund” portfolios may be too large to finance through private or public equity alone. But with sufficient diversification and risk analytics, debt financing via securitization may be feasible. Credit enhancements (i.e., derivatives and government guarantees) can also improve megafund economics. We present an analytical framework and illustrative empirical examples involving cancer research.