The limits of self-governance when cooperators get punished: Experimental evidence from urban and rural Russia

We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we conducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge urban–rural gap. In contrast to previous experiments we find no cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. An important reason is that there is punishment of contributors in all four subject pools. Thus, punishment can also undermine the scope for self-governance in the sense of high levels of voluntary cooperation that are sustained by sanctioning free riders only.     

Private Debt and Timely Loss Recognition

Abstract

In this study, we investigate whether private debt contracting provides incentives for borrowers to recognize economic losses earlier in accounting earnings. Focusing on the window around firms' issuances of private loans, we document that timely loss recognition significantly increases following an issuance. This effect is significantly stronger for debt contracts that include performance covenants acting as trip-wires when firm performance deteriorates. We also find that timely loss recognition is particularly used when writing debt contracts is hampered by uncertainty about a firm's future development. These findings are consistent with timely loss recognition being used to increase contract efficiency by facilitating state-contingent control allocation based on a borrower's performance over the loan term.     

How to speed up the quantization tree algorithm with an application to swing options

In this paper, we suggest several improvements to the numerical implementation of the quantization method for stochastic control problems in order to obtain fast and accurate premium estimations. This technique is applied to derivative pricing in energy markets. Several ways of modeling energy derivatives are described and numerical examples including parallel execution on multi-processor devices are presented to illustrate the accuracy of these methods and their execution times.     

Periodically collapsing Evans bubbles and stock-price volatility

This paper analyzes stock-price volatility in the presence of periodically collapsing Evans bubbles. We derive a volatility formula that establishes a link between the bubble component and stock-price volatility. We demonstrate how to fit the volatility equation to stock-market data.     

Phenomena-centered Text Analysis (PTA): a new approach to foster the qualitative paradigm in text analysis

Quality & Quantity - Content or text analysis is one of the most common evaluation methods employed in qualitative research. Despite its wide application, however, a clear structure of how such...     

Was für und was gegen die Neuverhandlung des NAFTA spricht

With the election of a new president in the US, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is back on the international trade policy agenda. This article sets out US motivations to push for a renegotiation and examines the pros and cons of renegotiating the agreement. While there are good reasons to update NAFTA, a new agreement or even a US withdrawal from the treaty will not meet the expectations raised in President Trump’s election campaign.