Performance Pay and Adverse Selection*

It is well known in personnel economics that firms may improve the quality of their workforce by offering performance pay. We analyze an equilibrium model where worker productivity is private information and show that the firms’ gain from worker self‐selection may not be matched by a corresponding social gain. In particular, the equilibrium incentive contracts are excessively high‐powered, thereby inducing the more productive workers to exert too much effort and increasing agency costs stemming from the misallocation of effort.     

Managerial risk-taking incentives, product market competition and welfare

Managers’ compensation may increase with the variance of the firm's profits. This paper investigates how this affects their choice of strategic variables, and how that affects managerial compensation. The social welfare aspects of this interaction are analyzed in a duopoly setting with uncertain linear demand and linear marginal cost. Compared to a situation in which the managers’ compensation does not depend on the variance of profits, social welfare may be either higher, lower, or remain unaffected, depending on the slope of the marginal cost curve and whether the competing firms produce goods that are demand substitutes or complements.     

Social Preferences,Sorting, and Competition*

In this paper, I investigate how an increase in competition for workers influences the impact of social preferences on labor‐market outcomes. By sorting themselves into firms with homogeneous work forces, workers can ensure that they suffer less from social comparisons. Competition promotes choice and thus facilitates sorting. However, competition also boosts rent differences in the labor market, because firms cannot curb internal inequity among its employees without losing workers to competitors. To reduce their exposure to social comparisons, workers might engage in inefficient sorting into unemployment. Consequently, social preferences can have strong effects (i.e., unemployment) in a competitive labor market, whereas they only have a slight impact on labor‐market outcomes in a monopsony.     

Empirical Asset Pricing: Eugene Fama,Lars Peter Hansen,and Robert Shiller

The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for 2013 was awarded to Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, and Robert Shiller for their contributions to the empirical study of asset pricing. Some observers have found it hard to understand the common elements of the laureates' research, preferring to highlight areas of disagreement among them. In this paper, I argue that empirical asset pricing is a coherent enterprise, which owes much to the laureates' influential contributions, and that important themes in the literature can best be understood by considering the laureates in pairs. Specifically, after summarizing modern asset‐pricing theory using the stochastic discount factor as an organizing framework, I discuss the following: the joint hypothesis problem in tests of market efficiency, which is as much an opportunity as a problem (Fama and Hansen); patterns of short‐ and long‐term predictability in asset returns (Fama and Shiller); and models of deviations from rational expectations (Hansen and Shiller). I conclude by reviewing the ways in which the laureates have already influenced the practice of finance, and how they might influence future innovations.     

Acquisition of Information and Share Prices: An Empirical Investigation of Cognitive Dissonance

Abstract. This paper deals with the determinants of agents' acquisition of information. Our econometric evidence shows that the general index of Italian share‐prices and the series of Italy's financial newspaper sales are cointegrated, and the former series Granger‐causes the latter, thereby giving support to the cognitive dissonance hypothesis: (non‐professional) agents tend to buy the newspaper when share prices are high and not to buy it when share prices are low. Instead, we do not find support for the hypothesis that the agents acquire information in order to trade in the stock market: we find no relationship between quantities exchanged in the market and newspaper sales, nor between stock market volatility and newspaper sales.     

Off‐Shoring,Specialization and R&D

This paper investigates whether off‐shoring promotes technological specialization by reallocating resources towards high‐tech industries and/or stimulating within industry R&D. Using data for the USA, Japan and Europe, our results show that material off‐shoring promotes high‐tech specialization through input reallocation between sectors, while service off‐shoring favors technologically advanced production by increasing within‐industry productivity, mainly via its positive impact on R&D. Conversely, we find that the increasing fragmentation of core production tasks, captured by narrow off‐shoring, has adverse effects on technological specialisation, which suggests that this type of off‐shoring is mainly pursued for cost‐reduction motives.