Changes in Implicit Prices of Prairie Pothole Habitat

I estimate changes in agricultural land value discounts due to prairie pothole habitat. The implicit prices of pothole habitat acreage are estimated from a series of hedonic models using Manitoba agricultural land transaction data from 1990 to 2009. I find that the discount on wetland acreage increased by at least 40%, suggesting that significant unanticipated increases in the benefits of converting wetlands emerged over the course of the study period. I also estimate a series of quantile regression hedonic models. The quantile regression models indicate that the land value discounts on prairie pothole acreage as a percent of per acre sales prices are constant across the land value distribution. These results have implications for the design of habitat conservation programs, particularly those involving long‐term agreements between landowners and conservation agencies.     

Sustainability policy as if people mattered: developing a framework for environmentally significant behavioral change

International climate accords like the Paris agreement set the broad agenda for climate action. To realize their potential however, it is vital to ‘get the context right’ so that environmentally significant behaviors can be repeated over time. This paper reviews the extant interdisciplinary literature to outline how a richer understanding of the interrelationships between individual and contextual factors is required to cultivate behavioral change. In this manner, 18 distinct behavioral determinants are identified. We argue that the likelihood of behavioral change and overall environmental impact are thereby reliant on the complex interaction between individual behavior and the multiple distinct layers of context that frame its expression. Our behavior-informed approach thus helps to explain processes of behavioral change more fully, establish the types of obstacles that exist, and delineate a fuller and more substantial role for individual-driven behavioral change that is able to build on the initial impetus of global-level frameworks.     

How Does Ambiguity Influence IPO Underpricing? The Role of the Signalling Environment

We explore the relationship between ambiguity, or low information clarity, in the IPO prospectus of newly public firms and their underpricing. Consistent with signalling theory, we find that IPO underpricing is low when the prospectus contains less ambiguous information that creates a more reliable signal conveying the quality of the IPO firm. However, the positive association between ambiguity and IPO underpricing is less pronounced when IPO firms display low strategic conformity with other firms in the industry, operate in industries with high valuation heterogeneity, or are medium‐sized. Using a sample of 398 IPOs between 1998 and 2007, our results support these predictions. This study shows the importance of the signalling environment influencing boundedly rational signal recipients interpreting ambiguous signals.     

Understanding applicant behavior in employment interviews: A theoretical model of interviewee performance

The purpose of this article is to present a theoretical model of interviewee performance in selection interviews. Our model positions the construct of interviewee performance as a central mediating variable between candidate attributes and interviewer ratings. The model includes six sets of factors that may influence interviewee performance, interviewer ratings, or both (e.g., interviewer–interviewee dynamics). This model promotes a fundamental shift in the way we think about employment interviews, from a focus on interviewer ratings to a focus on interviewee performance. Factors like culture and interview specific self-efficacy, while receiving little attention in current literature, take on greater significance when viewed through the lens of interviewee performance. A number of avenues for future research are developed and presented, which we hope will encourage future research in this area.     

Trade liberalization, antidumping, and safeguards: Evidence from India's tariff reform

This paper is the first to use product-level data to examine empirically whether countries use antidumping and safeguard exceptions to unwind commitments to lower tariffs in the face of domestic political-economic pressure. We focus on the case of India, a country that underwent a major exogenous tariff reform program in the early 1990s and subsequently initiated substantial use of safeguard and antidumping import restrictions. We first estimate structural determinants of India's import protection using the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model and provide evidence from its pre-reform tariff data of 1990 that is consistent with the theory. We then re-estimate the model on the Indian tariff data after the trade liberalization is complete and find that the model no longer fits, a result consistent with theory and evidence provided in other settings that India's 1991-1992 IMF arrangement can be interpreted as resulting in an exogenous shock to India's tariff policy. However, when we re-estimate the model on data from 2000-2002 that more completely reflects India's cross-product variation in import protection by including both its post-reform tariffs and its additional non-tariff barriers of antidumping and safeguard import protection, the significance of the Grossman and Helpman model determinant estimates is restored. We interpret these combined results as evidence that India unwound its commitment to reduce tariffs through use of antidumping and safeguard protection in the face of political-economic pressure. The estimates are also economically important and provide one explanation for separate results in the literature that the magnitude of import reduction associated with India's use of antidumping is similar to the initial import expansion associated with its tariff reform. Finally, we interpret the implications of our results for the burgeoning research literature examining the effects of liberalization on India's micro-level development.     

Assessing inherent model bias: An application to native displacement in response to immigration

There is a long-standing debate among academics about the effect of immigration on native internal migration decisions. If immigrants displace natives this may indicate a direct cost of immigration in the form of decreased employment opportunity for native workers. Moreover, displacement would also imply that cross-region analyses of wage effects systematically underestimate the consequences of immigration. The widespread use of such area studies for the US and other countries makes it especially important to know whether a native internal response to immigration truly occurs. This paper introduces a microsimulation methodology to test for inherent bias in regression models that have been used in the literature. We show that some specifications have built biases into their models, thereby casting doubt on the validity of their results. We then provide a brief empirical analysis with a panel of observed US state-by-skill data. Together, our evidence argues against the existence of native displacement. This implies that cross-region analyses of immigration’s effect on wages are still informative.     

Measuring entrepreneurial passion: Conceptual foundations and scale validation

Along with other affective and emotional dimensions, passion is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Yet past research on entrepreneurial passion (EP) has been hindered by the lack of a sound measurement instrument. Through a series of empirical studies conducted with samples from relevant populations, we develop and validate an instrument to capture EP and its inherent dimensions. We show that the task-specific dimensions of EP (intense positive feelings toward the domains of inventing, founding and developing, and the centrality of these domains to entrepreneurs' self-identity) are conceptually and empirically distinct from one another, and from other emotions and cognitions known to play a role in entrepreneurship. Our theory and results indicate that proper measurement of entrepreneurial passion incorporates the interaction between entrepreneurs' feelings and identity centrality for each domain. We discuss the implications of our model, instrument and findings for future research on the affective components of innovation and entrepreneurship. We also develop specific guidelines for using our validated instrument in future research.     

Macroeconomic policy and output comovement: The formal and informal sectors in India

Is the informal sector different from the formal sector? We present an aggregative analysis of the formal and informal sectors in India to investigate the extent to which the two can be viewed as broadly homogeneous. Using a macroeconometric framework, the paper analyzes over past three decades the behavior of the two sectors with respect to each other and several government-related policy variables. It is found that the formal and informal sectors display markedly different attributes in terms of their relationship to policy variables. Furthermore, the informal sector appears to be decoupled from the rest of the economy.     

New Directions: Cambridge–Maastricht Symposium 2001

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics -