Gender differences in macroeconomic expectations: evidence from Turkey

The aim of this study is to examine how men and women’s expectations differ about macroeconomic outlook. We examine whether there exist similarities or differences in men and women’s macroeconomic expectations. For this paper, 365 of Turkey’s leading business economists, strategists, portfolio managers and industry managers participated in a survey titled “Economic Expectations in Turkey for 2010.” The survey investigates gender differences in regards to four macroeconomic expectations; namely, inflation, unemployment, growth and exports. The survey participants are first classified according to their gender, and then their economic perceptions are analyzed. Initially, Kolmogorov–Smirnov statistics are implemented to test normality of data. Then, the Chi-square test of independence is used to compare macroeconomic expectations of men and women. The empirical findings show that macroeconomic expectations of males and females are not statistically different for inflation, unemployment, and exports. On the other hand, macroeconomic expectations of males and females are statistically different only for economic growth at a 10% level. The results indicate that gender is not one of the main determinants for macroeconomic expectations.     

Competitive and opportunistic behavior in a prisoner’s dilemma game: experimental evidence on the impact of culture and education

The experimental study presented in Cox et al. (1991) referred to henceforth as CLM, revealed that culture has a substantial impact on the cooperative or non-cooperative behavior of U.S.-born African, Anglo, Asian and Hispanic Americans in a Prisoner’s Dilemma setting. The present article complements CLM’s study in three ways. First, CLM’s experiment is replicated with a sample of Dutch undergraduates. This replication confirms the major finding of the CLM study that culture matters. Second, the role of uncertainty is included by introducing two different information regimes, indicating that uncertainty regarding the opponent’s future behavior facilitates cooperation. Third, CLM’s study is extended by analyzing the influence of education — particularly, knowledge of the competition or game theory of economics. It is found that knowledge of behavioral theories or “soft” economics does stimulate cooperative behavior, but that it has no impact on opportunism. The first point supports the claim in Holler et al. (1992) and Frank et al. (1993) that education plays a role in determining the cooperative or non-cooperative attitudes among managers and students, while the second underscores CLM’s observation that culture does matter.     

Tailoring but not targeting: a critical analysis of “the Meth Project” aimed at Hispanic youth

• This paper examines the Meth Project, a social marketing campaign that enlists violence and fear to persuade Anglo and Hispanic youth in the USA to avoid methamphetamines. Violent and graphic media spots, although perhaps initially effective for facilitating message acceptance, may be counterproductive for long‐term campaign objectives. We draw on Witte's Extended Parallel Process Model to conceptualize how fear, risk, and behavior drive health‐related behaviors. Merely translating the Anglo spots into Spanish is an insufficient strategy to reach Hispanic youth because it targets rather than tailors its message. Significant findings of content analyses show that public service announcements in Spanish, unexpectedly, underscore recovering users' concern for violating norms with schools, employers, and law enforcement (secondary groups), whereas the Anglo spots show users more upset for disappointing family, friends, and loved ones (primary groups). Culturally appropriate Latino spots should tailor their messages to the values of familism, collectivism, simpatía, personalismo, and respeto, which have implications for reaching Hispanic audiences in other social marketing contexts.

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Offshoring and reshoring: U.S. insights and research challenges

The phenomenon of reshoring to the U.S. has received wide attention ever since it became a political platform for U.S. politicians during the last presidential election. The economic downturn, a heightened emphasis on sustainability, and increasing customer expectations for flexibility and improved cost performance drove firms to re-consider the appropriate “shoring” decision. The intent of this research note is to add a U.S.-centric perspective to the “shoring” debate.     

Predicting failure risk using financial ratios: Quantile hazard model approach

This study examines the role of financial ratios in predicting companies’ default risk using the quantile hazard model (QHM) approach and compares its results to the discrete hazard model (DHM). We adopt the LASSO method to select essential predictors among the variables mentioned in the literature. We show the preeminence of our proposed QHM through the fact that it presents a different degree of financial ratios’ effect over various quantile levels. While DHM only confirms the aftermaths of “stock return volatilities” and “total liabilities” and the positive effects of “stock price”, “stock excess return”, and “profitability” on businesses, under high quantile levels QHM is able to supplement “cash and short-term investment to total assets”, “market capitalization”, and “current liabilities ratio” into the list of factors that influence a default. More interestingly, “cash and short-term investment to total assets” and “market capitalization” switch signs in high quantile levels, showing their different influence on companies with different risk levels. We also discover evidence for the distinction of default probability among different industrial sectors. Lastly, our proposed QHM empirically demonstrates improved out-of-sample forecasting performance.     

Sentiment and the U.S. business cycle

Psychological factors are commonly believed to play a role on cyclical economic fluctuations, but they are typically omitted from state-of-the-art macroeconomic models.This paper introduces “sentiment” in a medium-scale DSGE model of the U.S. economy and tests the empirical contribution of sentiment shocks to business cycle fluctuations.The assumption of rational expectations is relaxed. The paper exploits, instead, observed data on expectations in the estimation. The observed expectations are assumed to be formed from a near-rational learning model. Agents are endowed with a perceived law of motion that resembles the model solution under rational expectations, but they lack knowledge about the solution’s reduced-form coefficients. They attempt to learn those coefficients over time using available time series at each point in the sample and updating their beliefs through constant-gain learning. In each period, however, they may form expectations that fall above or below those implied by the learning model. These deviations capture excesses of optimism and pessimism, which can be quite persistent and which are defined as sentiment in the model. Different sentiment shocks are identified in the empirical analysis: waves of undue optimism and pessimism may refer to expected future consumption, future investment, or future inflationary pressures.The results show that exogenous variations in sentiment are responsible for a sizable (above forty percent) portion of historical U.S. business cycle fluctuations. Sentiment shocks related to investment decisions, which evoke Keynes’ animal spirits, play the largest role. When the model is estimated imposing the rational expectations hypothesis, instead, the role of structural investment-specific and neutral technology shocks significantly expands to capture the omitted contribution of sentiment.     

Claims of employment discrimination and worker voice

Using the U.S. National Study of the Changing Workforce survey, we show that claims of racial and gender discrimination emerge less frequently in workplaces with established worker voice mechanisms. This result accords with the hypothesis that participation enhances perceptions of workplace fairness. We show that while having a supervisor of the same race or gender is associated with reduced discrimination claims, the role of voice tends to be larger when the race or gender of the supervisor is different from that of the worker. This suggests that voice may be particularly important in heterogeneous workplaces.     

Lawyers,gender and grievance arbitration outcomes

Why should the grievant’s gender or the presence of legal representation affect arbitration outcomes? The “chivalry hypothesis” holds that male arbitrators will tend to favor female grievants; its theoretical mirror image, the “evil woman” hypothesis, suggests that female grievants suffer a comparative disadvantage vis-à-vis similarly situated males. However, neither hypothesis (both drawn from criminologists’ studies of judicial sentencing patterns) applies all that well to the grievance arbitration process where, unlike in the court system, the parties themselves select their decision-maker. This is not to say that the grievance arbitration process is free of gender discrimination, only that arbitrators are probably not the source of any pro- or anti-female bias which may be uncovered.     

False modesty: When disclosing good news looks bad

Is it always wise to disclose good news? Using a new statistical dominance condition, we show that if the receiver has any private receiver information then the weakest senders with good news gain the most from boasting about it. Hence the act of disclosing good news can paradoxically make the sender look bad. Nondisclosure by some or all senders is an equilibrium if standards for the news are sufficiently easy or if prior expectations without the news are sufficiently favorable. Full disclosure is the unique equilibrium if standards are sufficiently difficult or sufficiently fine, or if prior expectations are sufficiently unfavorable. Since the sender has a legitimate fear of looking overly anxious to reveal good news, mandating that the sender disclose the news can help the sender. The model’s predictions are consistent with when faculty avoid using titles such as “Dr.” or “Professor” in voicemail greetings and course syllabi.     

Women Managers’ Careers in China: Theorizing the Influence of Gender and Collectivism

This article is concerned with developing an understanding of the careers of women managers in China. Existing literature suggests that while women in China are comparatively well represented in management roles, they face distinctive pressures and barriers to their progress arising from entrenched patriarchal and collectivist aspects of the Chinese cultural tradition. However, little is known about how these aspects impact on women's orientations towards their careers and to what extent influential Western career theories are adequate in interpreting their experience. Drawing on interviews with 20 women managers in China, the article interprets women's orientations towards their careers in relation to their adherence to traditional gender roles and collectivist values. Using this framework, a fourfold taxonomy is developed which identifies “conformist,” “revolutionary,” “soloist,” and “dissident” orientations. The article suggests that Western career theories fail to capture the collective dimension, and thus do not account fully for the range of experience and orientations of Chinese women managers that are captured in the taxonomy. Implications, both practical and theoretical, are discussed. Recommendations are also made as to how management and career development policies might be developed in organizations in China in order to address the diverse needs and preferences of women managers. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Marginal effects of public employment on unconditional distribution of wage income in China

This paper examines the marginal effects of an employment expansion in China’s public sector on the unconditional distribution of “wage income” using the unconditional quantile estimation suggested by Firpo et al. (2009). Empirical data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey is split into three sub-samples to eliminate the effects of the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the subprime financial crisis in 2008 on our empirical results. To explore the marginal effects, the empirical unconditional distributions of wage income “before” and “after” an expansion of the public employment have been graphed and compared. It has been found that an expansion of China’s public employment reduces the dispersion of wage income and hence alleviates income inequality in China. Besides, an expansion of public employment makes the symmetrical unconditional distribution of wage income become leftward skewed. Given these findings, an expansion of the public employment caused by the strategy of “guojin mintui” could mitigate China’s income inequality.     

Monetary policy on twitter and asset prices: Evidence from computational text analysis

In this paper, we dissect the Twitter debate about the future course of monetary policy and trace the effects of selected topics of this discourse on U.S. asset prices. We focus on the “taper tantrum” episode in 2013, a period with large revisions in expectations about future Fed policy. Based on a novel data set of 90,000 Twitter messages (“tweets”) covering the debate of Fed tapering on Twitter, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a computational text analysis tool, to quantify the content of the discussion. Several estimated topic frequencies are then included in a VAR model to estimate the effects of topic shocks on asset prices. We find that the discussion about Fed policy on social media contains price-relevant information. Shocks to the discussion about the timing of the tapering, about the broader economic policy context and worrying investors are shown to lead to significant asset price changes. We also show that the effects are mostly due to changes in the term premium of yields consistent with the portfolio balance channel of unconventional monetary policy.     

中国出口技术含量地域结构变迁及变化动因

研究目标:廓清中国分企业所有制的出口技术含量地域结构及变化动因。研究方法:基于区分内外资全球投入产出模型的出口技术含量和反事实分析法。研究发现:中国内外资企业出口中来自(内资企业)国内技术含量的比重逐渐强化，表明中国出口实现了一定程度的本土技术升级。对计算机业分析发现，其出口国外技术含量地域结构具有稳定性，但趋于下降，而来自内资企业国内技术含量的贡献不断上升。质和量均对中国出口国内技术含量具有正向促进效应，但更多依赖最终生产工序技术含量的提升。研究创新:首次将中国内外资企业生产异质性纳入分析范畴，科学分析出口技术含量地域结构变迁及变化动因。研究价值:准确理解中国对外贸易技术含量水平与升级。     

“Agreeing to disagree” type results under ambiguity

This paper characterizes conditions under which it is impossible for non-Bayesian agents to “agree to disagree” on their individual decisions. The agents are Choquet expected utility maximizers. Whenever each agent’s information partition is composed of unambiguous events in the sense of Nehring (1999), then the agents cannot disagree on the common knowledge decisions, whether these decisions are conditional capacities or conditional Choquet expectations. Conversely, an agreement on conditional Choquet expectations, but not on conditional capacities, implies that each agent’s private information must consist of Nehring-unambiguous events. These results indicate that under ambiguity–contrary to the standard Bayesian framework–asymmetric information matters, and it can explain differences in common knowledge decisions due to the ambiguous nature of the agents’ private information.     

Analysis of the cross-region risk contagion effect in stock market based on volatility spillover networks: Evidence from China

This article uses the stock market regional indexes of 31 provinces (include Province-level municipalities and Minority Autonomous Regions) in mainland China as a sample, and constructs an inter-regional volatility spillover network of China’s stock market based on the GARCH-BEKK model. Through network centrality analysis, Diebold and Yilmaz's spillover index method and block model analysis, we comprehensively analyze the risk contagion effect among different regions in China’s stock market. The empirical results show that: (i) The risk contagion intensity (risk reception intensity) in various regions of China’s stock market has a typical “core-periphery” distribution characteristic due to regions’ different levels of economic development. (ii) There are obvious risk spillover effect in China’s stock market, among which the economically developed regions along the southeastern coast of China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang and Jiangsu, are the main risk transmitters, while the economically undeveloped regions in the Midwest of China, such as Xinjiang, Xizang, Gansu, Nei Menggu and Qinghai are the main risk receivers. (iii) Each region is divided into 4 blocks according to their respective roles in the risk spillover process in China’s stock market. Block 1 that is composed of the economically underdeveloped regions in the Midwest is the “main benefit block”, it acts as a “receiver”. Block 2 that is composed of regions with strong economic growth vitality in the Midwest is a “Bilateral spillover block”, it both plays the role of “receiver” and “transmitter”. Block 3 that is composed of developed regions along the southeast coast, it acts as a “transmitter”; Block 4 that is composed of the relatively fast-growing regions in the Southwest is the “brokers block”, it serves as a “bridge”. The results of this article can provide some reference for investors in financial institutions and decision makers in financial regulators.     

Liquidity traps and expectation dynamics: Fiscal stimulus or fiscal austerity?

We examine global dynamics under infinite-horizon learning in New Keynesian models where the interest-rate rule is subject to the zero lower bound. The intended steady state is locally but not globally stable. Unstable deflationary paths emerge after large pessimistic shocks to expectations. For large expectation shocks that push interest rates to the zero bound, a temporary fiscal stimulus, or in some cases a policy of fiscal austerity, will insulate the economy from deflation traps if the policy is appropriately tailored in magnitude and duration. A fiscal stimulus “switching rule,” which automatically kicks in without discretionary fine-tuning, can be equally effective.     

An evolutionary complex systems perspective on urban health

Deliberations about how to govern complex problems of urban health and wellbeing sustainably have often been implicitly biased by ideas such as being ‘human-scale’ or ‘people-centered.’ With increasing urban populations and increasing urban system interconnectivity, many cities have transformed into city regions or clusters, and the external effects of urban growth are carried mainly by the marginalized and the environment putting urban health increasingly at risk. Here we address the question of why human societies have not been better at collectively adapting to the challenges of urbanization and global environmental change? We build a theoretical framework of multi-level selection, complex systems evolution, and governance, following which we then present ‘human-scale’ and ‘people-centered’ ideas of urban development as expressions of two types of socio-political organization with different degrees of self-organization. We found several reasons for which the maladies of current urban development emerged and the seeming inability to resolve them. First, urban systems became increasingly interconnected and evolved into ultrasocial superorganisms, displaying preference to sustain themselves as a whole rather than their subordinates. Second, the difference in scaling effects between the biological and the social network contributed to the mismatch between rapid urban growth and slow adaptation. Furthermore, institutions of decreased variety reinforce themselves and become dominant, creating a positive feedback mechanism and promoting invasive and exploitative exponential growth, but they also reduce the creativity and resilience of urban systems. We also found that both the “human-scale” and the “people-centered” approaches acknowledge the exponential growth and decreasing variety in urban systems, and advocate for correcting the mismatches. To incorporate people's needs and values for long-term, truly sustainable urban health governance, we recommend combining the self-organizing, evolutionary feature of “human-scale” and the coordinative, political feature of “people-centeredness.”     

Schumpeter's Challenge to Economists: History,Theory, and Statistics as Key Competencies and Sociology as a Vision for the Future

Schumpeter wrote that a “scientific” economist is competent in three “techniques”: economic theory, economic history, and statistics. In addition, he mentions economic sociology. The current interpretation is that theory, history, and statistics refer to aspects of research that can emerge in any field of science. Their content and relations can be clarified with Mach's writings. Economic sociology is not a technique within economics, but a part of general sociology. The rationale of economic and general sociology becomes clear by considering Schumpeter's interpretations of Marx's ideas. Schumpeter's ultimate ambition may have been a grand theory following Marx's vision.     

Board gender diversity and environmental,social, and economic value creation: Does family ownership matter?

Prior literature on firm value creation for stakeholders has oversimplified and narrowed the concept of value down to “economic returns.” Although economic returns are fundamental to a firm's core stakeholders (i.e., shareholders), other legitimate stakeholders want “value” beyond economic returns. We define stakeholder value as the financial and nonfinancial returns a firm can offer to its legitimate stakeholders, and empirically investigate whether board gender diversity (BGD) improves our multidimensional measure of value. Using Thomson Reuters' ASSET4 data for U.K.‐listed firms available from Eikon for the period 2007–2017, we report a significant positive relationship between BGD and stakeholder value creation. In particular, BGD increases social and environmental value creation in addition to economic returns. Furthermore, our results suggest that even though gender‐diverse boards are associated with stakeholder value creation in family firms, this is only conspicuous for environmental value creation. The findings suggest that although female directors cater to the interests of broader stakeholder groups, family ownership causes them to mainly focus on environmental stakeholders. The study provides important implications for regulators, stakeholders, and academic scholars.