宗教信仰、政治身份与企业投资偏好

文章运用企业家宗教信仰的直接调查数据,考察了企业家的个人宗教信仰对企业投资活动的影响。研究发现,相对于研发型投资,有宗教信仰的企业家偏好于风险相对较小的关系型投资;不同类型的宗教信仰对企业投资偏好具有不同的影响,笃信东方宗教的企业家相对于笃信西方宗教的企业家更加偏好于关系型投资;企业家的宗教信仰对投资偏好的影响因企业家是否具有政治身份而有所不同,相对于有政治身份的企业家,没有政治身份的企业家的宗教信仰会更加显著地正向影响关系型投资,表明政治身份可能会弱化宗教信仰在关系型投资中的作用。     

Iterated Expectations and Common Priors

A necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a common prior for several players is given in terms of the players' present beliefs only. A common prior exists iff for each random variable it is common knowledge that all its iterated expectations converge to the same value; this value is its expectation with respect to the common prior. The proof is based on the presentation of type functions as Markov matrices.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C70, D82.     

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.     

Preferences,Country Bias,and International Trade

The paper analyzes international trade in a Ricardian world where consumer preferences exhibit country bias. In particular, consumers differentiate between identical physical goods by country of manufacture. In contrast to the classical Ricardian model, the pattern of international specialization in production depends on the preference structure. Possible equilibrium configurations include ones where both countries specialize incompletely and trade in both commodities, as well as situations where the pattern of specialization and trade is the reverse of that in the classical Ricardian world. Both interindustry and intraindustry trade can occur simultaneously, though there are no market imperfections or scale economies.     

Growth, Environment and Uncertain Future Preferences

The attitude of future generations towards environmental assets may well be different from ours, and it is necessary to take into account thispossibility explicitly in the current debate about environmental policy. The question we are addressing here is: should uncertainty about futurepreferences lead to a more conservative attitude towards environment?Previous literature shows that it is the case when society expects that onaverage future preferences will be more in favor of environment than ours,but this result relies heavily on the assumption of a separability betweenconsumption and environmental quality in the utility function. We show thatthings are less simple when preferences are non-separable: the attitude ofthe society now depends not only on the expectation of the change inpreferences but also on the characteristics of the economy (impatience,intertemporal flexibility, natural capacities of regeneration of theenvironment, relative preference for the environment), on its history(initial level of the environmental quality) and on the date at whichpreferences are expected to change (near or far future).     

Researching Preferences,Valuation and Hypothetical Bias

A number of recent papers in environmental economics have focused on the process of researching preferences – agents are uncertain about preferences but with effort may narrow their uncertainty. This issue has arisen in formulating bids in contingent valuation (CV) as well as the debate over the divergence between WTP and WTA. In the context of CV, it has been suggested that the hypothetical nature of the preference elicitation process biases responses. This paper provides both a theoretical model and experimental evidence to contribute to this debate. The model is a model of competitive bidding for a private good with two components that are particularly relevant to the debate. The first component is that bidders are unsure of their own value for the private good but may purchase information about their own value (researching preferences). The second component is that there is a probability that the auction is hypothetical – that the winning bidder will not get the private good and will not pay the winning bid. The experiment tests this theoretical model of bidding equilibrium and analyzes the effects of variations in the parameters (hypotheticalness, information costs and number of agents) on the endogenous variables (such as the proportion of bidders who become informed and the winning bid). Experimental results suggest that an increase in the hypotheticalness of an auction tends to decrease the likelihood that bidders pay for information on their valuation with an ambiguous effect on the winning bid.      

风险、社会保障与农村宗教信仰

遵循理性选择研究范式,本文研究了农村社会保障与农村信教行为之间的关系.实证分析结果表明,风险是宗教选择和宗教参与的一个重要决定因素;目前农村社会保障水平对信仰量变有显著影响,但对信仰质变尚不够构成显著影响;"新农合"的开展能够有效地降低农村宗教信仰的增长速度.这些结果可以对农村"宗教热"现象进行解释:世俗社会对于农村居民所面临风险的不作为或者弱作为,是宗教在农村颇具吸引力的一个重要原因.     

Visibility,Institutional Preferences and Agency Considerations

We show that market frictions and agency considerations are important concerns when institutional investors make portfolio allocation decisions. For a sample of widely followed firms, institutional holdings increase with increases in visibility as measured by the number of analysts following the firm. We also report a significant seasonal pattern in institutional holdings consistent with the gamesmanship hypothesis, which asserts that institutions rebalance their portfolios in response to agency considerations. Finally, we find that excess returns are highly seasonal with performance, deteriorating when the following by financial analysts increases. "Followed" firms actually exhibit inferior market performance over the 1981-1996 sample period.     

Sticky Norms,Endogenous Preferences,and Shareable Goods

The Internet has reduced the cost of borrowing and lending “shareable goods,” including tools, gear, toys, lodging, and vehicles. Online platforms can better match people with underutilized goods, but it may take time for people to develop sticky norms and endogenous preferences that are conducive to greater peer-to-peer sharing. This study estimates the current and potential value of sharing items across households. Data from the General Social Survey, the website NeighborGoods, and a new survey show that peer-to-peer borrowing is already worth at least $179 a year for 30% of Americans. Spending on shareable goods provides an upper bound on the potential gains from sharing. The consumer expenditure survey reveals that the average household spends $9,090 each year on shareable goods. Private vehicles account for 80% of these expenses, which suggests that the largest opportunities may be in greater car-sharing and ride-sharing.     

Social Preferences, Skill Segregation, and Wage Dynamics

We study the earning structure and the equilibrium assignment of workers to firms in a model in which workers have social preferences, and skills are perfectly substitutable in production. Firms offer long-term contracts, and we allow for frictions in the labour market in the form of mobility costs. The model delivers specific predictions about the nature of worker flows, about the characteristics of workplace skill segregation, and about wage dispersion both within and across firms. We show that long-term contracts in the presence of social preferences associate within-firm wage dispersion with novel "internal labour market" features such as gradual promotions, productivity-unrelated wage increases, and downward wage flexibility. These three dynamic features lead to productivity-unrelated wage volatility within firms.     

Heterogeneous Preferences, Education Expenditures and Income Distribution

This paper introduces heterogeneous preferences to a growth model which incorporates human capital, accumulated through either public or private education. The implications of heterogeneous preferences for income and its distribution are the focus of the paper. Public education expenditure is determined through a voting mechanism where the median preference rather than median income household is the decisive voter. The paper extends the work of Glomm and Ravikumar (1992) and shows first, that heterogeneous preferences increase income inequality in the private education model and second, public education can overcome the added heterogeneity and reduce income inequality. The results strengthen the arguments for public education as a redistributive mechanism.     

Preferences, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games

Research on ultimatum and dictator games has found that because of "fairness" first movers in such games offer more than noncooperative game theory predicts. We find that if the right to be the first mover is "earned" by scoring high on a general knowledge quiz, then first movers behave in a more self-regarding manner. We also conducted dictator double blind experiments, in which the experimenter could not identify the decision maker. The results yielded by far our largest observed incidence of self-regarding offers, suggesting that offers are due to strategic and expectation considerations. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C78, C91.     

Beliefs, Bailouts and Spread of Bank Panics

This article highlights the spread of bank panics across countries, as the public reassesses governments' propensity to bailouts. Policymakers decide whether to save collapsing banking systems by weighing social costs of crises against the costs associated with raising taxes to finance rescue packages. Policymakers know those social costs of bank liquidation whereas the public does not. In this setup, financial crises may result from the public's self‐fulfilling prophecies about equilibrium outcomes, as lenders' expectations impinge on the taxation cost of bailouts. It follows that a banking crisis in a country leads creditors to reexamine policymakers' willingness to bailouts in other countries, which eventually makes their banks more vulnerable to self‐confirming depositors' runs.     

Centralism, Federalism, and the Nature of Individual Preferences

Almost all of economic theorizing takes individual preferences as givens, and then proceeds to analyze individuals' choices within the constraints that they face. This paper takes into account the fact that preferences are to some extent endogenous, and that the state typically plays an important role in shaping individual preferences through its education and other policies. It analyzes the consequences of assuming both exogenous and endogenous preferences, and homogeneous and heterogeneous preferences for the choice between centralized and decentralized (federalist) government structures. Given the increasingly heterogeneous nature of individual preferences, more decentralized, federalist structures are deemed likely to be optimal. Ironically, at the same time an increasing tendency to proclaim and impose cross nationally a set of universal values can be discerned.     

Law and Preferences

Legal rules do more than provide incentives, they change people.When preferences and norms are endogenously determined via aprocess of imitation and learning, legal rules, by affectingthe market outcome, may affect the dynamics of preference formation.Analyzing the effect of different legal rules should thereforego beyond the analysis of the incentives they provide. It shouldalso include an analysis of their effect on the distributionof preferences and norms of behavior. We illustrate this claimby considering a simple market game in which individuals mayhave preferences that include fairness concerns. We show thatdifferent legal rules change not only the pattern of trade ina market game, but also individuals' fairness concerns. Thatis, different rules may eventually make individuals care more(or less) about a fair outcome. Specifically, our model suggeststhat enhanced remedies for breach of contract may reduce equilibriumpreferences for fairness.     

Risk Preferences,Production Risk and Firm Heterogeneity*

A new technique is proposed for deriving the risk preference function under production risk and expected utility of profit maximization. The derivation depends on neither a specific parametric form of the utility function nor any distribution of the error term representing production risk. The proposed risk preference function is flexible enough to test different types of risk behavior and symmetry of the output distribution. Furthermore, our production risk specification allows for inputs with positive and negative marginal risk. The econometric model accommodates production risk, risk preferences and firm heterogeneity simultaneously. Norwegian salmon farming data are used as an application.     

Preferences, reductionism and the microfoundations of Analytical Marxism

Analytical Marxism has recommended that Marxian theory shouldconform to ‘normal’ scientific methods and thatthis should involve the development of microfoundations. Thelatter has involved the adoption of rational choice theory andits corresponding assumptions regarding agents' behaviour. Thispaper seeks to question this position and highlight a numberof problems which Analytical Marxism faces, particularly inthe domain of economic theory. The different views of scienceespoused by Analytical Marxists display a tension between ‘positivist’and ‘realist’ perspectives, and the arguments forindividualist and anti-reductionist approaches to social andeconomic theory are also argued to be problematic. The approachof Analytical Marxism, it is suggested, can involve the uncriticaladoption of many of the assumptions of standard economic theoryand, as such, it is subject to a number of substantive criticisms,some of which have been elaborated from within mainstream economictheory.     

Preferences for Educational Status,Human Capital Accumulation,and Growth

Using an overlapping generations model in which human capital accumulation has positive external effects on the production of the human capital of future generations, this paper analyzes implications of agents’ having preferences for educational status, represented by human capital holdings relative to the social average. Examining the value and sign of the optimal distortionary tax in the optimal taxation scheme, we analyze the efficiency of the level of human capital accumulation in a decentralized economy. The desire for educational status can compensate for insufficient accumulation of human capital stemming from human capital externalities directed toward future generations.     

Public Goods,Social Norms,and Naïve Beliefs

An individual's contribution to a public good may be seen by others as a signal of attributes such as generosity or wealth. An individual may, therefore, choose their contribution so as to send an appropriate signal to others. In this paper, we question how the inferences made by others will influence the amount contributed to the public good. Evidence suggests that individuals are naïve and biased toward taking things at “face value.” We contrast, therefore, contributions made to a public good if others are expected to make rational inferences versus contributions if others are expected to make naïve inferences.     

Beliefs and arbitrage pricing

This paper investigates the necessary restriction on investor beliefs implied by a no-arbitrage price system. In addition, Stone's theorem is invoked to study the existence of equivalent probability measures, and to relate our approach to the existing literature.