The family and the state: a public choice perspective

The Review of Austrian Economics - The family is an institution within which exchange takes place. The state depends on the productivity of families for its current and future revenues. Yet, work...     

Who gets the carrot and who gets the stick? Evidence of gender disparities in executive remuneration

This paper offers a new explanation of the gender pay gap in leadership positions by examining the relationship between managerial bonuses and company performance. Drawing on findings of gender studies, agency theory, and the leadership literature, we argue that the gender pay gap is a context‐specific phenomenon that results partly from the fact that company performance has a moderating impact on pay inequalities. Employing a matched sample of 192 female and male executive directors of U.K.‐listed firms, we corroborate the existence of the gender pay disparities in corporate boardrooms. In line with our theoretical predictions, we find that bonuses awarded to men are not only larger than those allocated to women, but also that managerial compensation of male executive directors is much more performance‐sensitive than that of female executives. The contribution of attributional and expectancy‐related dynamics to these patterns is highlighted in line with previous work on gender stereotypes and implicit leadership theories such as the romance of leadership. Gender differences in risk taking and confidence are also considered as potential explanations for the observed pay disparities. The implications of organizations' indifference to women's performance are examined in relation to issues surrounding the recognition and retention of female talent. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Connections and performance in bankers’ turnover

In this paper we study the impact of the connections of the top executives (Presidents, CEOs and General Managers) of Italian banks on their turnover and on bank performance. We measure managers’ connections by the kilometer distance between the province of the bank's headquarter and the manager's province of birth. We show that top managers tend to be local in the sense that the distribution of this distance is heavily skewed towards zero. On the basis of this evidence we investigate whether connections affect the duration of the appointment at the bank, and whether connections entrench managers at the expense of the bank's performance. We find that connections generally decrease the probability of bank manager’s turnover, and that the positive effect of performance on tenure is strongly attenuated once connections are taken into account. Furthermore we find that for any bank type performance does not increase with connections. On the contrary, we show that having connected managers hurts performance in Mutual, Cooperative and Rural banks. Overall these findings suggest that connections are collusion devices to share and maintain rents at the expenses of bank performance.     

Queues, not just mediocrity: Inefficiency in decentralized markets with vertical differentiation

We analyze a dynamic, decentralized market with endogenous entry, where in each period the active sellers supply one unit of an indivisible service at varying degrees of quality. The customers that have entered the market are randomly matched with the active sellers and prices are set by (complete information) pair-wise bargaining. In its unique steady state, the market leads to an excess diversity of quality and customers may have to suffer costly delays. Notably, efficiency is not regained as per period delay costs disappear. We also show that setting minimal quality standards, such as licensing rules by a professional college, will improve welfare (and even Consumer Surplus), relative to the free market, whenever the inefficiency is caused by a large enough excess supply.     

Rubinstein bargaining with two-sided outside options

Summary. In this note we show that if in the standard Rubinstein model both players are allowed to leave the negotiation after a rejection, in which case they obtain a payoff of zero, then there exist a continuum of subgame-perfect equilibrium outcomes, including some which involve significant delay. We also fully characterize the case in which, upon quitting, the players can take an outside option of positive value. Received: February 27, 1996; revised version: March 28, 1997     

Uniqueness of stationary equilibria in bargaining one-dimensional policies under (super) majority rules

We consider negotiations selecting one-dimensional policies. Individuals have instantaneous preferences represented by continuous, concave and single-peaked utility functions, and they are impatient. Decisions arise from a bargaining game with random proposers and (super) majority approval, ranging from the simple majority up to unanimity. We provide sufficient conditions that guarantee the existence of a unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium, and we provide its explicit characterization. The uniqueness of the equilibrium permits an analysis of the set of Pareto optimal voting rules. For symmetric distributions of peaks and uniform recognition probabilities unanimity is the unanimously preferred majority rule.     

Economic Diplomacy

We study bilateral conflicts that affect the welfare of third parties, the stakeholders. The conflict takes the form of a war of attrition and intervention is modeled as the possibility that the stakeholder “aids” the agreement with transfers to the contenders. We characterize the optimal policy when the stakeholder limits its intervention to a unilateral commitment to compensate the contenders if the conflict is resolved, and show that if contenders must be treated equally after agreement, then the optimal policy cannot eliminate the delay in resolving the conflict, and intervention is only advisable when the stakes are high enough. Economic diplomacy is modeled as a three‐player game where the stakeholder is actively involved in the negotiation where transfers are discussed simultaneously with a settlement for the conflict. We prove that, provided that none of the parties involved is too impatient, diplomacy benefits the third party in all conflicts.