Twitter Presence and Experience Improve Corporate Social Responsibility Outcomes

Journal of Business Ethics - We investigate the role of social-media-triggered public pressure on corporate social responsibility (CSR) that includes expectations of transparency and accountability...     

Product Market Competition,Monetary Policy Regimes and Inflation Dynamics: Evidence from a Panel of OECD Countries

We empirically analyze the impact of product market competition on the responsiveness of inflation to macroeconomic imbalances. If competition is high the response of inflation to lagged inflation, unemployment and import prices is reduced, while inflation is more responsive to changes in productivity growth in countries in which competition is above the OECD average. Given the (‘good luck’) macroeconomic trajectories of the 1990s–2000s, the structural reforms that made goods markets more competitive improved the ability of OECD economies to smooth (dis)inflationary shocks, while changes in the monetary policy framework had a modest role in taming inflation during the Great Moderation.     

Investigation of institutional changes in the UK housing market using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models

This paper investigates the effects of institutional changes within the UK housing market in recent decades using structural break tests and time-varying parameter models. This approach is motivated by models of institutional change drawn from the political science literature which focus on the existence of both fast-moving and slow-moving institutional changes and the interactions between them as drivers of the dynamics of asset prices. As a methodological contribution, we use several time-varying parameter models for the first time in investigations of institutional change. Our findings support the existence of both structural breaks and continuous variance in parameters. This contributes to our understanding of the housing market in two respects. Firstly, the dates of structural breaks appear to better match unexpected market shocks rather than remarkable political events, and this supports prior institutional theory. Secondly, assessment of the effect of slow-moving institutional changes shows that people’s biased expectations rather than the economic fundamentals have increasingly played an important role in driving housing prices in the short run although fundamentals continue to drive house prices to converge to their long-run equilibrium.     

The Price Discovery Puzzle in Offshore Yuan Trading: Different Contributions for Different Contracts

The People's Bank of China (PBC) lifted yuan trading restrictions in July of 2010 that led to offshore yuan spot trading in Hong Kong. Based on causality analyses, we find that price discovery is absent between the onshore and offshore spot markets. However, we document the presence of price discovery between onshore spot and offshore nondeliverable forward (NDF) rates. These seemingly inconsistent results present a puzzle wherein one offshore market appears to be more informationally integrated with the onshore market than another. We conclude that price discovery differences in the offshore markets stem from the offshore spot and forward contracts tracking different aspects of yuan rates (e.g., the offshore nondeliverable rate tracks onshore spot rates whereas the offshore spot rate tracks onshore interest rates). Moreover, the introduction of offshore spot trading in Hong Kong has led to an increase in cross‐market price discovery between onshore spot and offshore NDF rates. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 34:103–123, 2014     

STRATEGIC ASSET ALLOCATION FOR LONG‐TERM INVESTORS: PARAMETER UNCERTAINTY AND PRIOR INFORMATION

We study the effect of parameter uncertainty on the long‐run risk for three asset classes: stocks, bills and bonds. Using a Bayesian vector autoregression with an uninformative prior we find that parameter uncertainty raises the annualized long‐run volatilities of all three asset classes proportionally with the same factor relative to volatilities that are conditional on maximum likelihood parameter estimates. As a result, the horizon effect in optimal asset allocations is much weaker compared to models in which only equity returns are subject to parameter uncertainty. Results are sensitive to alternative informative priors, but generally the term structure of risk for stocks and bonds is relatively flat for investment horizons up to 15 years. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Simple Analytics of Evaluating NFL Trades

Atlantic Economic Journal -     

Innovation speed under uncertainty and competition

Innovation speed is widely considered to be a key factor for a firm's ability to maintain competitive advantage. Primarily, empirical evidence has found contradictory interdependencies regarding the role of innovation speed. The prevailing proposition of “the faster the better” has been challenged by results of empirical studies heavily depending on the methodological setup used. In contrast, we propose a model of the complete innovation process to study innovation speed under uncertainty and competition. We find that higher market uncertainty speeds up innovation and encourages firms to innovate incrementally. Strong competition tends to reduce innovation speed and encourages rather radical innovation.     

REPORTING GUIDELINES FOR META-ANALYSIS IN ECONOMICS

Meta-analysis has become the conventional approach to synthesizing the results of empirical economics research. To further improve the transparency and replicability of the reported results and to raise the quality of meta-analyses, the Meta-Analysis of Economics Research Network has updated the reporting guidelines that were published by this Journal in 2013. Future meta-analyses in economics will be expected to follow these updated guidelines or give valid reasons why a meta-analysis should deviate from them.