The daughter effect: do CEOs with daughters hire more women to their board?

Using a sample of S&P 100 firms, we find that CEOs with a daughter are more likely to hire new women to their board of directors than CEOs without a daughter. Our results provide additional evidence that parents’ attitudes and actions are affected by the gender of their children and that the effect is strong enough to influence important decisions at large corporations.     

Regionality revisited: An examination of the direction of spread of currency crises

What determines the direction of spread of currency crises? We examine data on waves of currency crises in 1992, 1994, 1997, and 1998 to evaluate several hypotheses on the determinants of contagion. We simultaneously consider trade competition, financial links, and institutional similarity to the “ground zero” country as potential drivers of contagion. To overcome data limitations and account for model uncertainty, we utilize Bayesian methodologies hitherto unused in the empirical literature on contagion. In particular, we use the Bayesian averaging of binary models that allows us to take into account the uncertainty regarding the appropriate set of regressors.We find that institutional similarity to the ground zero country plays an important role in determining the direction of contagion in all the emerging market currency crises in our dataset. We thus provide persuasive evidence in favour of the “wake-up call” hypothesis for financial contagion. Trade and financial links may also play a role in determining the direction of contagion, but their importance varies amongst the crisis periods.     

Learning and knowledge diffusion in a global economy

I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model to understand how multinationals affect host countries through knowledge diffusion. Workers in the model learn from their managers and knowledge diffusion takes place through worker mobility. Unlike in a model without learning, I present a novel mechanism through which an integrated equilibrium represents a Pareto improvement for the host country. I go on to explore other dynamic consequences of integration. The entry of multinationals makes the lifetime earning profiles of host country workers steeper. At the same time, if agents learn fast enough, integration creates unequal opportunities, thereby widening inequality. The ex-workers of foreign multinationals also found new firms which are, on average, larger than the largest firms under autarky.     

On the Welfare Significance of National Product for Economic Growth and Sustainable Development

This paper formulates an investment value transversality condition in a continuous-time growth model, which characterizes competitive paths along which current net national product measures the welfare achieved along the path. This transversality condition requires that the present value of net investment goes to zero asymptotically. An example provided shows that, in general, competitive paths do not necessarily satisfy this condition. It is also shown that, in a standard growth model including an exhaustible resource as an essential factor of production, competitive paths always satisfy this condition. Implications regarding national income accounting procedures and sustainable development policies are discussed.
JEL Classification Numbers: D90; O11; O41; Q32.     

Electoral goals and center-state transfers: A theoretical model and empirical evidence from India

We construct a model of redistributive politics where the central government is opportunistic and uses its discretion to make transfers to state governments on the basis of political considerations. These considerations are the alignment between the incumbent parties at the central and state levels and whether a state is a swing state or not. A testable prediction from the model is that a state that is both swing and aligned with the central government is especially likely to receive higher transfers. We test this prediction using Indian data for 14 states from 1974–75 to 1996–97. We find that a state which is both aligned and swing in the last state election is estimated to receive 16% higher transfers than a state which is unaligned and non-swing.     

Women's employment, intra-household bargaining, and distribution: a two-sector analysis

This paper investigates the intra-household impact of an expansionin employment opportunities for women in a dual labor market,when the informal sector functions as a gateway to the formalsector. We us a variant of the Harris-Todaro framework withtwo-period overlapping generations to model this economy. Laborallocation decisions and distribution of household consumptionare determined according to the generalized Nash cooperativebargaining solution, and agents have perfect foresight. It isshown that an increase in demand for women's labor can shiftintra-household distribution in favor of men and thereby reducewomen's welfare.     

‘Regular’ choice and the weak axiom of stochastic revealed preference

We explore the relation between two ‘rationality conditions’ for stochastic choice behavior: regularity and the weak axiom of stochastic revealed preference (WASRP). We show that WASRP implies regularity, but the converse is not true. We identify a restriction on the domain of the stochastic choice function, which suffices for regularity to imply WASRP. When the universal set of alternatives is finite, this restriction is also necessary for regularity to imply WASRP. Furthermore, we identify necessary and sufficient domain restrictions for regularity to imply WASRP, when the universal set of alternatives is finite and stochastic choice functions are all degenerate. Results in the traditional, deterministic, framework regarding the relation between Chernoff’s condition and the weak axiom of revealed preference follow as special cases. Thus, general conditions are established, under which regularity can substitute for WASRP as the axiomatic foundation for a theory of choice behavior.     

Community and class antagonism

We investigate how vertical unity within a community interacts with horizontal class divisions of an unequal income distribution. Community is conceptualized in terms of a public good to which all those in the community have equal access, but from which outsiders are excluded. We formulate the idea of redistributive tension, or class antagonism, in terms of the costs that poorer individuals would be willing to impose on the rich, to achieve a given gain in personal income. Our conclusion is that the nominal distribution of income could give a misleading picture of tensions in society, both within and across communities. Ideologies of community solidarity may well trump those of class solidarity because of the implicit sharing of community resources brought about by community-specific public goods. Greater economic mobility of particular types may actually exacerbate class tensions instead of attenuating them. We illustrate our theoretical results with a discussion of a number of historical episodes of shifting class tensions and alliances.     

Designing an optimal contest

The paper brings a mechanism design perspective to the study of contests. We consider the problem of selecting a contest success function when the contest designer may also value the prize. We show that any equilibrium outcome that can be achieved by a concave increasing contest success function can be replicated by a linear contest success function. An expected utility maximizing designer should employ a linear homogeneous contest success function. We explicitly derive the optimal contest for a risk-neutral designer and present comparative statics results. Tullock's contest is optimal only when the designer's valuation for the prize is low.