A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.

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Results 556 resources

  • In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver's intention. Our findings question existing models of social preferences. They point to anthropological and sociological theories about gifts creating an obligation to reciprocate. We capture these effects in a simple extension of existing models. We show that common policy responses (disclosure, size limits) may be ineffective, consistent with our model. Financial incentives are effective but can backfire.

  • We examine the effects of trade liberalization in China on the evolution of markups and productivity of manufacturing firms. Although these dimensions of performance cannot be separately identified when firm output is measured by revenue, detailed price deflators make it possible to estimate the average effect of tariff reductions on both. Several novel findings emerge. First, cuts in output tariffs reduce markups, but raise productivity. Second, pro-competitive effects are most important among incumbents, while efficiency gains dominate for new entrants. Third, cuts in input tariffs raise both markups and productivity. We highlight mechanisms that explain these findings in the Chinese context.

  • We exploit a novel natural experiment to establish a causal relation between media attention and consumer investment behavior, independent of the conveyed information. Our findings indicate a 31% local average increase in quarterly capital flows into mutual funds mentioned in a prominent Wall Street Journal “Category Kings” ranking list, compared to those funds which just missed making the list. This flow increase is about seven times larger than extra flows due to the well-documented performance-flow relation. Other funds in the same fund complex receive substantial extra flows as well, especially in smaller complexes. There is no increase in flows when the Wall Street Journal publishes similar lists absent the prominence of the Category Kings labeling. We show mutual fund managers react to the incentive created by the media effect in a strategic way predicted by theory, and present evidence for the existence of propagation mechanisms including increased fund complex advertising subsequent to having a Category King and increased efficacy of subsequent fund media mentions.

  • The magnitude of and heterogeneity in systematic earnings risk has important implications for various theories in macro, labor, and financial economics. Using administrative data, we document how the aggregate risk exposure of individual earnings to GDP and stock returns varies across gender, age, the worker's earnings level, and industry. Aggregate risk exposure is U-shaped with respect to the earnings level. In the middle of the earnings distribution, aggregate risk exposure is higher for males, younger workers, and construction and durable manufacturing. At the top of the earnings distribution, aggregate risk exposure is higher for older workers and finance.

  • We analyze the impact of improved land inheritance rights for women in India on female empowerment by examining their educational attainment and the intergenerational effects of the reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the amendment to the Hindu Succession Act significantly increased education of women from landed households by 0.48 years. However, our results indicate a significant decrease in the educational attainment of children, especially boys of treated mothers. We attribute this decrease to treated mothers who are better educated and able to assess the higher opportunity cost of education for boys.

  • Financial regulators and investors have expressed concerns about high pay inequality within firms. Using a proprietary data set of public and private firms, this paper shows that firms with higher pay inequality—relative wage differentials between top- and bottom-level jobs—are larger and have higher valuations and stronger operating performance. Moreover, firms with higher pay inequality exhibit larger equity returns and greater earnings surprises, suggesting that pay inequality is not fully priced by the market. Our results support the notion that differences in pay inequality across firms are a reflection of differences in managerial talent.

  • We build an equilibrium model to explain why stock return predictability concentrates in bad times. The key feature is that investors use different forecasting models, and hence assess uncertainty differently. As economic conditions deteriorate, uncertainty rises and investors' opinions polarize. Disagreement thus spikes in bad times, causing returns to react to past news. This phenomenon creates a positive relation between disagreement and future returns. It also generates time‐series momentum, which strengthens in bad times, increases with disagreement, and crashes after sharp market rebounds. We provide empirical support for these new predictions.

  • Researchers measure crowd-out around one level of charity output to identify whether giving is motivated by altruism and/or warm-glow. However, crowd-out depends on output, implying first that the power to reject pure altruism varies, and second that a single measurement of incomplete crowd-out can be rationalized by many different preferences. By instead measuring crowd-out at different output levels, we allow both for identification and for a novel and direct test of impure altruism. Using a new experimental design, we present the first empirical evidence that, consistent with impure altruism, crowd-out decreases with output.

  • Despite the importance of banks’ role as delegated monitors, little is known about how non-price terms of loan contracts are structured to optimize information production in a lending relationship. Using a large sample of corporate loans, this paper examines the effect of relationship lending on covenant choice. Consistent with information asymmetry theories, covenant tightness is relaxed over the duration of a relationship, especially for opaque borrowers. In contrast, the effect of lending relationship intensity on the number of covenants included in a loan follows an inverted U shape. I discuss potential explanations for this finding.

  • To understand why investors hold socially responsible mutual funds, we link administrative data to survey responses and behavior in incentivized experiments. We find that both social preferences and social signaling explain socially responsible investment (SRI) decisions. Financial motives play less of a role. Socially responsible investors in our sample expect to earn lower returns on SRI funds than on conventional funds and pay higher management fees. This suggests that investors are willing to forgo financial performance in order to invest in accordance with their social preferences.

Last update from database: 5/16/24, 11:00 PM (AEST)