The decision game: a serious game approach to understanding environmental risk management decisions

Abstract

Here we describe the implementation of an experimental research tool called the Decision Game that we used to collect data on household flood risk management decisions. Participants using this tool play an interactive game that involves making household decisions about place of residence and a variety of household expenditures, including spending on flood insurance and private flood risk mitigation. Participants also answer survey questions before and after playing the game; the pre-game survey collected demographic information, and the post-game survey collected information about participant experiences with flooding and flood mitigation. Online and face-to-face participants showed similar engagement with the experiment, and most participants appeared to have made deliberate and considered decisions about risk mitigation. Online study participants had similar responses to those who participated in person, although face-to-face participants seemed slightly more likely to mitigate against risk. Overall, participants in this research were younger, more educated and more likely to rent a home than the average Canadian. Serious games may be useful for augmenting existing data gathering strategies used in understanding environmental decision making, particularly for rare catastrophic events for which stated preference surveys may be less informative. Serious games allow for sharing a mixture of information with study participants, including maps, video clips, text and even immersive 3D experiences, and can be administered online to increase participation levels. Future research will consider longer duration online experiments and more immersive interaction frameworks.     

The Russian Crisis: A Debt Perspective

On 17 August 1998 the Russian authorities devalued the ruble, suspended repayments of ruble-denominated government paper and announced a moratorium on the Russian foreign debt. By doing so the government brought the domestic banking sector to the edge of bankruptcy and risked losing the little international faith still remaining in its abilities to restructure the economy. In this article we examine the deeper causes of the crisis. After having analysed its antecedents we gather our new insights into a basic stylised model of the crisis. The outcome of the model is then linked to the actual data and events.     

Ex Post Inefficiencies in a Property Rights Theory of the Firm

Private information can lead to inefficient bargaining betweenmanagers. I develop a property rights theory of the firm toanalyze the optimal ownership structure that minimizes thisbargaining inefficiency. I first show that a change in the ownershipstructure that reduces the managers' aggregate disagreementpayoff increases the probability that they realize efficienttrades, but also increases the cost of disagreement and canlead them to trade "too often." I then show that joint ownershipis optimal if the managers' expected gains from trade are largeand that either integration or nonintegration is optimal ifthe expected gains from trade are small.     

Evaluating investment projects in the presence of sectoral linkages1

In this paper we develop a framework to assess the economic impact of foreign investment projects. If investment projects interact with other industries in the host economy, either by buying inputs locally or by selling their own product to local downstream firms, they can create sectoral linkages. The expansion of upstream and downstream industries can feed back to the project's own industry leading to a further expansion of the local industry. We study the circumstances under which investment projects lead to the creation of sectoral linkages and characterize the factors that determine the project's welfare impact. We link analytical findings to case studies undertaken for the EBRD.     

Do interest rate controls work? Evidence from Kenya

This paper reviews the impact of interest rate controls in Kenya, introduced in September 2016. The intent of the controls was to reduce the cost of borrowing, expand access to credit, and increase the return on savings. However, we find that the law on interest rate controls has had the opposite effect of what was intended. Specifically, it has led to a collapse of credit to micro‐, small‐, and medium‐sized enterprises; shrinking of the loan book of the small banks; and reduced financial intermediation. Because of their adverse effects on bank lending, we estimate that the interest rate controls have reduced economic growth by ¼–¾ percentage points on an annual basis. We also show that interest rate caps reduced the signaling effects of monetary policy. These suggest that (1) the adverse effects could largely be avoided if the ceiling was high enough to facilitate lending to higher‐risk borrowers and (2) alternative policies could be preferable to address concerns about the high cost of credit.     

Relational delegation

We analyze a cheap talk game with partial commitment by the principal. We first treat the principal's commitment power as exogenous and then endogenize it in an infinitely repeated game. We characterize optimal decision making for any commitment power and show when it takes the form of threshold delegation—in which case the agent can make any decision below a threshold—and centralization—in which case the agent has no discretion. For small biases, threshold delegation is optimal for any smooth distribution. Outsourcing can only be optimal if the principal's commitment power is sufficiently small.     

Monetary and fiscal policy transmission in the Euro-area: evidence from a structural VAR analysis

This paper studies the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy in the Euro-area. To do so, structural VAR models are estimated. First, the EMU countries are considered as an aggregate entity and the estimation results are compared with those for the US and Japan. Attention is also paid to interaction of macroeconomic policies and the effects of shocks in financial markets. As a next step, SVARs are estimated for the individual EMU countries to analyze cross-country differences. It turns out that, compared to the EMU aggregate, individual EU countries react rather differently to monetary and fiscal policy shocks.     

INEQUALITY AND GROWTH: FROM MICRO THEORY TO MACRO EMPIRICS

We show that the way individual income data should be aggregated into an index of inequality in order to explain countries' growth performance is theory specific. A simulation set‐up shows that the use of a wrong measure might obscure the inequality–growth relationship and that the relative performance of different measures of inequality can be informative about the channel through which inequality influences economic growth.     

Labor market reforms, job instability, and the flexibility of the employment relationship

We endogenize separation in a search model of the labor market and allow for bargaining over the continuation of employment relationships following productivity shocks to take place under asymmetric information. In such a setting separation may occur even if continuation of the employment relationship is privately efficient for workers and firms. We show that reductions in the cost of separation, owing for example to a reduction in firing taxes, lead to an increase in job instability and, when separation costs are initially high, may be welfare decreasing for workers and firms. We furthermore show that, in response to an exogenous reduction in firing taxes, workers and firms may switch from rigid to flexible employment contracts, which further amplifies the increase in job instability caused by policy reform.