Does risk sharing increase with risk aversion and risk when commitment is limited?

I consider a risk-sharing game with limited commitment, and study how the discount factor above which perfect risk sharing is self-enforcing in the long run depends on agents׳ risk aversion and the riskiness of their endowment. When agents face no aggregate risk, a mean-preserving spread may destroy the sustainability of perfect risk sharing if each agent׳s endowment may take more than three values. With aggregate risk the same can happen with only two possible endowment realizations. With respect to risk aversion the intuitive comparative statics result holds without aggregate risk, but it holds only under strong assumptions in the presence of aggregate risk. In simple settings with two endowment values I also show that the threshold discount factor co-moves with popular measures of risk sharing.     

人文城市发展中的社交媒体管理

随着科学技术的快速发展、城市进程的加快,社交媒体被越来越广泛地应用到各个领域.年轻人更是将其作为了生活中不可或缺的一部分.然而,在人文城市建设的过程中,由社交媒体所引发的种种骚乱,其失控的形势也直逼1929年的全球经济大萧条,这使得许多国家的政府无所适从,不知如何应对.社会正在隐约地呼吁着“在传媒领域建立一种新的社会秩序”,这可能便是“有限干预的社交媒体”的模型.     

心理契约视角下的离职模型研究

如何面对员工的流失,尤其是人才的流失,成为众多企业不得不考虑的一个战略问题。要解决人才流失的难题,关键在于抓住人才流失的原因进行对症下药。目前,已有许多文献对员工的离职原因进行了分析,并提出许多离职模型,分析各个变量之间的关系。本文从现有的研究成果出发,结合心理契约的相关理论,尝试从心理契约的角度完善离职模型。     

福利满意度对员工工作态度的影响机理分析

福利满意度作为员工对企业福利制度和措施的一种感受和评价,对员工的工作态度和行为产生很重要的影响。文章分析了福利满意度对企业员工工作态度及行为的影响机理,并指出人力资源管理者在提高员工福利满意度,端正员工的工作态度,减少员工离职行为的过程中应当注意的问题。     

Surplus distribution and characteristics of social enterprises: Evidence from microfinance

The issue of surplus distribution has hardly been analyzed in the context of the social economy. This paper highlights the main drivers of distribution between various stakeholders of microfinance institutions (MFIs), which are an example of social enterprises. We focus on three major variables: size, governance structure and subsidies. Our results show that the size of the institution is the main indicator of the surplus that the organization keeps as a self-financial margin. Moreover, MFIs with a cooperative ownership structure allocate a larger part of their surplus to their employees, whereas non-profit organizations and shareholder-firm MFIs do not allocate their surplus in a significantly different way among their main stakeholders. Finally, we do not find any clear-cut effect of subsidies on the surplus allocation process.     

Public versus private provision of liquidity: Is there a trade-off?

To what extent is public debt private liquidity? Much policy advice given in the aftermath of the financial crisis rests on the assumption that increasing public debt relaxes borrowing constraints of private households. This is the case for ad-hoc debt limits, which are exogenous to public policy. Instead, if debt limits are fully endogenous, as e.g. in the case of the natural borrowing limit, public debt has no impact. We assume that borrowing limits arise because of limited contract enforceability and are therefore determined as equilibrium outcomes. Using an incomplete markets economy in which households are subject to uninsurable earnings shocks, we show that public debt provides some liquidity, but less so than it would if constraints were imposed ad-hoc. We show that generating borrowing constraints as an equilibrium outcome substantially alters the answers to other important questions, such as for the welfare effects of government debt or its impact on real economic activity.     

The Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering: A defense

It is shown that the Pazner-Schmeidler social ordering appears as a very natural solution to the problem of defining social preferences over distributions of divisible goods. The paper analyses various ways of deriving this social ordering from minimally egalitarian conditions and informational parsimony requirements.Received: 10 October 2003, Accepted: 4 April 2005, JEL Classification: D63, D71This paper was written while I was a research fellow at the ZiF (Bielefeld), for the project “Procedural Approaches to Conflict Resolution”, and the last version was prepared during my sabbatical year at Nuffield College, Oxford. I thank my hosts for their hospitality. D. Dimitrov and F. Maniquet have provided valuable comments on an earlier draft. I also thank the audience of a seminar at the U. of Montreal. Finally, the comments of three anonymous referees and the Associate Editor have been very helpful.     

A social exchange theory framework for understanding the job characteristics–job outcomes relationship: the mediating role of psychological contract fulfillment

This study integrated the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and concept of psychological contract fulfillment into a social exchange theory process framework to improve our understanding how and when job characteristics interact to influence job outcomes. Using survey data (n = 334), we found evidence to support our hypothesized relationships between job characteristics (job demands and job resources) and job outcomes (job satisfaction and organizational commitment); and the mediating role of psychological contract fulfillment (transactional and relational), such that when job resources (job control and support) were high, the negative effects of high job demands on psychological contract fulfillment were attenuated. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Dynamic agency with persistent observable shocks

This paper studies a continuous-time hidden-action model with persistent observable shocks. In this model, I develop a method to characterize the optimal contract with history-dependent effort exertion and shirking decisions. Temporal shirking is always optimal after some histories as long as a positive persistent shock is expected. As a result, my model gives rise to a mechanism through which the moral hazard problem amplifies macroeconomic fluctuations. I also show the pattern of the agent’s utility adjustments with respect to persistent shocks and its implications for compensation design.     

Privatization, Labor and Social Safety Nets

Privatization promotes economic efficiency and growth, thereby reinforcing macroeconomic adjustment. In the short run, however, it can lead to job losses and wage cuts for workers. This paper discusses these adverse impacts of privatization in terms of various methods of privatization and surveys the existing empirical evidence. It finds that public sales and auctions can have stronger negative effects on workers but maximize the government's revenue. Policymakers' options for mitigating the social impact of privatization are surveyed.     

The difference a manager can make: organizational justice and knowledge worker commitment

The quality of the employment relationship is argued to be central to knowledge workers' commitment, which in turn supports knowledge creation. Given the high levels of discretion enjoyed by knowledge workers, managers' decisions over work distribution, content and resources become more critical for commitment and knowledge creation. However, little research has explored how justice perceptions shape the quality of the employment relationship and the consequences for commitment. Using a sample of 429 R&D workers from across six science and technology-based firms this paper explores the three-way interaction of procedural and interactional justice with the psychological contract to predict knowledge worker commitment. We found that when employees simultaneously perceived high levels of procedural and interactional justice this moderated the relationship between psychological contract breach and knowledge worker commitment. Furthermore, where there was contract breach, positive perceptions of procedural justice moderated the relationship with commitment. However, in the context of contract fulfilment, low perceived levels of interactional justice predicted lower comparative levels of commitment, regardless of the level of procedural justice.

The results suggest that the perceived quality of the relationship between knowledge workers and their manager can make a positive difference in the context of breach of the psychological contract and this in turn can help maintain levels of commitment important for knowledge creation.     

IT运维外包中外派人员组织归属感的影响因素研究——基于心理契约理论的多案例研究

现在越来越多的客户将其部分或全部的IT运维工作交给外部的专业服务提供商。IT外派人员长期在客户的现场提供服务,这也导致了外派人员对母公司缺乏组织归属感。本文选择了四个涉及IT外派人员的IT运维外包项目进行案例研究,试图探寻影响外派人员对母公司组织归属感的影响因素。本文发现影响外派人员组织归属感的因素主要包括沟通、公平、员工关怀和稳定预期,但是在不同的心理契约情境下影响外派人员组织归属感的因素各不相同。     

论瑞典社会民主党构建和谐社会的探索

瑞典式社会主义和谐社会经历了诞生、发展到成熟的过程。1932年秋社民党通过竞选上台执政,开始功能社会主义福利国家的尝试；1944-1975年是和谐国家建设的全面展开和建成；1982-1990年“保卫福利、重振经济”和谐政策的调整；1990-2000年建设自由与平等基础上相互关联的社会共同体；以2001年1 1月社民党第34次全国代表大会为起点,重建民主的人道的更加和谐的社会主义福利国家。