Portfolio concentration and performance of institutional investors worldwide

Using data on security holdings for 10,771 institutional investors from 72 countries, we test whether concentrated investment strategies result in excess risk-adjusted returns. We examine several measures of portfolio concentration with respect to countries and industries and find that portfolio concentration is directly related to risk-adjusted returns for institutional investors worldwide. Results suggest, in contrast to traditional asset pricing theory and in support of information advantage theory, that concentrated investment strategies in international markets can be optimal.     

Global Warming and a Potential Tipping Point in the Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation: The Role of Risk Aversion

The risk of catastrophes is one of the greatest threats of climate change. Yet, conventional assumptions shared by many integrated assessment models such as DICE lead to the counterintuitive result that higher concern about climate change risks does not lead to stronger near-term abatement efforts. This paper examines whether this result still holds in a refined DICE model that employs the Epstein–Zin utility specification and that is fully coupled with a dynamic tipping point model describing the evolution of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC). Risk is captured by the possibility of a future collapse of the circulation and it is nourished by fat-tailed uncertainty about climate sensitivity. This uncertainty is assumed to resolve in the middle of the second half of this century and the near-term abatement efforts, which are undertaken before that point of time, can be adjusted afterwards. These modelling choices allow posing the question of whether aversion to this specific tipping point risk has a significant effect on near-term policy efforts. The simulations, however, provide evidence that it has little effect. For the more likely climate sensitivity values, a collapse of the circulation would occur in the more distant future. In this case, acting after learning can prevent the catastrophe, implying the remarkable insensitivity of the near-term policy to risk aversion. For the rather unlikely and high climate sensitivity values, the expected damage costs are not great enough to justify taking very costly measures to safeguard the THC. Our simulations also provide some indication that risk aversion might have some effect on near-term policy, if inertia limiting the speed of decarbonisation is accounted for. As it is highly uncertain how restrictive this kind of inertia will be, future research might investigate the effects of risk aversion if additional uncertainty about inertia is considered.     

Start ‘Em Early: Pastoral Power and the Confessional Culture of Leadership Development in the US University

We apply a critical perspective on leadership development discourses and practices to the case of student leadership development programs in the US universities and colleges. We leverage the first author’s personal experiences as a facilitator in such programs to focus on the manner in which they adapt and deploy a variety of commodified pop and positive psychology techniques—including prominently among them icebreakers and psychological assessment tests—that encourage participants to share personal and emotional insights about themselves as the necessary prerequisite for becoming leaders. We draw on Foucault’s notion of pastoral power to argue that these quasi-therapeutic practices help to produce and to normalize what we describe as a confessional culture of leadership development that prepares would-be student leaders to submit themselves to similarly or even more psychologically demanding regimes of governmentality in the workplace after they graduate. We conclude with a call for future research on the central role of such leadership development practices—and the institutions, industries, and actors that promote them—in folding together the ways that individuals seek to claim agency and to develop themselves as leaders with the ways that organizations function to constrain that agency and to govern them as willing but compliant subjects.

     

Effects of media headlines on consumer preferences for food safety,quality and environmental attributes

In recent years, Asia has emerged as an important supplier of food to Western countries. In this study, we focus on shrimp, a major aquaculture commodity, to evaluate consumer willingness‐to‐pay (WTP) for enhanced food safety, use of antibiotics and eco‐friendly practices used in producing shrimp in the presence of country‐of‐origin labelling. Specifically, this research assesses the effects of news headlines regarding product safety, as information shocks on U.S. consumer demand. Consumers were found to have a mean willingness‐to‐pay of $7.81 per pound of shrimp with an enhanced safety characteristic from the United States, $0.94 for the same type of shrimp from China and $2.43 for similar shrimp from Thailand. Consumers had a WTP for the absence of antibiotics in the production of U.S. shrimp of $7.31 and were only willing to pay for an eco‐friendly attribute on domestically produced shrimp. Media headlines were found to have a statistically significant effect on consumer preferences and WTP for product characteristics. Food policy and international agribusiness implications of our findings are discussed.     

A virtual and anonymous, deliberative and analytic participation process for planning and evaluation: The Concept Mapping Policy Delphi

Integrating knowledge and values across a range of stakeholders and experts is a common goal of, and challenge in, forecasting and planning processes across numerous decision-making domains. In this paper we present a virtual and anonymous, deliberative and analytical participatory group process which we applied in a planning study. The process was a combination of concept mapping and a policy Delphi. The Concept Mapping Policy Delphi offers an iterative process that is meant to foster critical, dissensus-based thinking by a group about an evaluation problem. In particular, it offers a platform on which to structure the group brainstorming of ideas, integrates knowledge and values, and creates a shared conceptual framework for addressing evaluation problems. We discuss the merits and limitations of this process and compare it with other public engagement mechanisms for decision-making. We argue that the use of a Concept Mapping Policy Delphi is relevant in forecasting and decision-making processes that aim to integrate information which is from various disparate points of view in order to clarify arguments and values, democratize and mediate public participation, and/or provide strategic advice about scenarios or planning options, while mitigating the problematic aspects of face-to-face group processes.     

Different determinants at different times: B2B adoption of a radical innovation

This research aims to empirically determine which factors best explain business to business adoption of a radical, high-tech innovation early in the diffusion process. Early lifecycle data collection provides insights about the differences in determinants of adoption at different times in the product diffusion process. The results indicate that differences do exist between the determinants of early adoption, intent to adopt later, and unawareness of the innovation. The influencers of earliest adopters appear to be innovation-focused: the perceived benefits of the innovation as well as the strength of the producer network positively relate to early adoption; early adopters also tend to perceive the technology in the innovation as less different than previous technology than do those who intend to adopt later. The influence of a champion within the adopting firm, the ability of the firm to sense and respond to new technology, and the depth of technology knowledge within the adopting firm are significant influencers across multiple stages of diffusion, showing that firm-internal traits are particularly important influencers of adoption. Laggard firms are missing the critical firm traits that lead to information gathering and understanding of innovations. In addition to contributing to adoption research theory and methodology, this research has implications for innovation-marketing and innovation-adopting firms.     

Heterogeneity biases,distributional effects,and aggregate consumption: An empirical analysis using stratified microdata

Using stratified microdata from the Canadian FAMEX (78–86) surveys, this paper investigates whether observed heterogeneity in marginal propensities to consume across strata actually hinders the aggregation process. Despite significant heterogeneity in marginal responses, the divergences between aggregate predicted consumption and the predictions from a model that uses average strata responses are found to be small, whenever the strata demands are approximatively linear at the mean and the commodity group considered is not a luxury good. On the other hand, some cross-sectional estimates obtained by pooling the strata are shown to be contaminated by unwanted cross-moments. Further, the analysis reconciles the fact that while there exists significant heterogeneity in consumer demands, the related distributional effects in the aggregate equation have not been found to be important.