Electronic Finance: Reshaping the Financial Landscape Around the World

In recent years, the emergence of electronic finance—especially online banking and brokerage services, and new trading systems—has reshaped the financial landscape around the world. This paper reviews these developments and finds that they are greatly impacting the structure of and competition in financial services industries and will have a large impact on incumbents. Its assessment of how e-finance, and globalization more generally, affects countries highlights the need for changes in four financial sector policy areas—safety and soundness, competition policy, consumer and investor protection, and global public policies—to mitigate risks and reap as much as possible the potential benefits of e-finance.     

How far can reduced childcare prices push female labour supply?

Exploiting exogenous variation in childcare prices stemming from a childcare price reform, this paper estimates effects of reductions in childcare costs on female labour supply. The reform introduced a cap on childcare prices, and lead to considerable reductions in prices depending on family type and region of residence. Since the price is determined by a handful of observed characteristics, we are able to match households that are similar in all relevant aspects, but experienced quite different price changes. Our difference-in-differences regression matching estimates are very precise, and close to zero.     

Disposition effect and analyst forecast dispersion

Behavioral finance theories posit that behavioral biases are more pronounced when there is higher information uncertainty about fundamentals. This paper examines the relation between the disposition effect, the tendency to ride losses and realize gains, and dispersion in financial analysts’ earnings forecasts for a sample of large U.S. discount brokerage accounts from January 1991 to December 1996. I find that the disposition effect is exacerbated in stocks with higher analyst forecast dispersion. In particular, the disposition effect is 10% in stocks in the highest forecast dispersion quintile and not significant in the lowest forecast dispersion quintile. The driving factor behind these findings is investors’ higher propensity to realize gains when facing higher information uncertainty. The results are robust to controlling for firm size, analyst coverage, idiosyncratic volatility, turnover, and past market-adjusted returns. The results provide supportive evidence for a behavioral bias explanation of the disposition effect consistent with mean-reversion beliefs for winners and loss actualization avoidance for losers.     

Adaptive aspirations and performance heterogeneity: Attention allocation among multiple reference points

Organizations learn and adapt their aspiration levels based on reference points (prior aspiration, prior performance, and prior performance of reference groups). The relative attention that organizations allocate to these reference points impacts organizational search and strategic decisions. However, very little research has explored this. Therefore, we build a recursive feedback model of learning from organizational experience that explains heterogeneity of attention allocation to the reference points in adaptive aspirations. In a sample of the German magazine industry (1972–2010), we find when early in their life cycle and as they or their parent company age, organizations tend to focus more on their own aspirations; however, when at the verge of bankruptcy, they increase their attention to competitors' performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

INCOME TAXES AND THE COMPOSITION OF PAY: EVIDENCE FROM THE BRITISH HOUSEHOLD PANEL SURVEY

According to the standard principal‐agent model, the optimal composition of pay should balance the provision of incentives with the individual demand for insurance. Do income taxes alter this balance? We show that the relative share of Performance‐related pay (PRP), on total pay is reduced by higher average and marginal income taxes. Empirical evidence based on the British Household Panel Survey is consistent with the theoretical predictions of the tax–augmented principal‐agent model. Our estimates suggest that a 10% reduction in the marginal income tax rate, holding the average tax rate constant, increases the share of PRP in total pay by 2.25–3.02%, depending on the empirical specification. Similarly, a 10% reduction in the average income tax rate, holding the marginal tax rate constant, increases the share of PRP in total pay by 5.10–5.27%.