Liquidity Constraints,the Composition of Government Expenditure,and Economic Growth

Abstract

This paper explains how and why the stock market, which is regarded as the embodiment of capitalism, has been allowed to develop and gain a prominent place among China's financial markets. That development has been consistent with the changing vested interests of the central government in its attempts to collect quasi-fiscal revenue from the financial sector, reflecting the stock market's growing importance as a tax-collection venue.     

The consumer's relational commitment: main dimensions and antecedents

As in business-to-business relationships, consumers often establish and maintain long-term relationships with firms. This article uses a multidisciplinary approach with the aims of describing the process that a consumer follows until committing to a firm and identifying the main dimensions and antecedents of the consumer's commitment. As antecedents of commitment, the proposed model considers dependence and trust through the reduction in uncertainty and in the perception of opportunism. The empirical study for the consumer–garage relationship suggests that the consumer's trust reduces the fear and perception of the firm's opportunism and engenders affective and temporal commitment.     

Sexual orientation and household decision making.: Same-sex couples' balance of power and labor supply choices.

This study estimates the effect of intra-household-bargaining on gay and lesbian couples' labor supplies, in order to determine how homosexual and heterosexual decision making compare, in a collective-household framework. Data from the 2000 US Census show that couples of all types exhibit a significant response to bargaining power shifts, as measured by age and non-labor-income differences between partners. Among gay, lesbian, and heterosexual cohabiting couples, a relatively young or rich partner has more bargaining power and supplies less labor, the opposite being true for his/her mate. Among married couples, the older spouse is instead more powerful, or the richer. No such patterns are found among same-sex roommates.     

Wage setting in the Colombian manufacturing industry

We show that wage setting in the Colombian manufacturing industry is not fundamentally driven by labour productivity in contrast to the standard theoretical prediction. On the contrary, internal institutional arrangements – payroll taxation, the minimum wage or the price wedge between manufacturing and consumption prices – together with a higher exposure to international trade – connected to the increasing globalization of the Colombian economy – appear as the crucial drivers. These findings lead us to question the political strategy followed to attain cost competitiveness in a context of growing exposure to international trade. Implementation of a true wage bargaining system is suggested as a critical policy target to prevent the disruptive economic consequences of the current wage‐setting mechanism and help rebalance the trade deficit.     

Experimental evidence on personality traits and preferences

Using an experiment, we test the relation between personality traits and revealed risk and ambiguity preferences, and we consider the effects of personality traits prevalence in a group on the decision making of each group member. In the experiment, subjects reveal their risk and ambiguity preferences through lottery choices. They then participate in an unstructured group chat. Afterwards, they are given the chance to revise their initial lottery choices. Results show that personality traits affect ambiguity but not risk preferences before the chat. Specifically, agreeableness is negatively related to ambiguity aversion. We also show that the probability of changing decisions after the chat is affected by the individual's personality traits but not by the traits of the other group members. The latter only affects the direction and the degree of the change.     

Multi-item models for evaluating managerial and organizational resources in service firms

Services are the primary source of wealth in almost every nation around the world. Domestic competitiveness increasingly depends on the health of its service firms. Then understanding the source of competitive advantage for the case of service industry is a challenge that cannot be deferred. Resource-Based View literature gives sound evidences that intangible assets like managerial and organizational resources are the primary source of competitive advantage, especially in the service industry. However, the development of managerial tools for measuring and managing these resources remains as an open gap. In the last few years, some academic work has been devoted to develop intangible assets measurement devices. Nevertheless, these scales are either oriented towards manufacturing industry or do not take specifically into account the distinctive features of service delivery. This study replies the multi-item model proposed by Camisón (Manag Res 3(1):27–48, 2004) over a sample of 152 medium and large services companies. We have taken different tests to demonstrate validity and reliability of the scales. Results show that these scales may also be suitable for being used in all the types of service companies. However, some partial modifications should be done in order to give more relevance to soft managerial competences and to organizational human capital. This study was carried out as part of research project (reference GV2007-075) which has been subsidized by the “Valencian Government Programme Scientific Research and Technological Development Projects”.     

An empirical analysis of assortative mating in India and the U.S.

This paper uses a conditional logit model to analyze empirically how individuals sort themselves through marriage into households in India and the U.S. The results support positive assortative mating of spouses with respect to age and schooling. We find no evidence in favor of Becker's theory of labor market specialization in couples. Moreover, while similarity in age is the strongest predictor of marital choice in India, education of a prospective spouse plays a more important role in the U.S. Finally, we find that while dowry increases the likelihood of women marrying men with characteristics dissimilar to their own, availability of a mate has a positive effect on the degree of stratification in India.     

La confianza,la satisfacción,las normas relacionales,el oportunismo y la dependencia como antecedentes del compromiso organizacional del trabajador

The objective of this study is to research the most important antecedents of the affective, normative and continuance of employee’s commitment in his/her relation with the firm. The proposal includes both relational or interpersonal antecedents (trust, satisfaction and relational norms) and economic antecedents (dependence and firm opportunism). The testing of the proposed hypotheses with a sample of Mexican employees shows that both affective and normative commitment influence continuance commitment; satisfaction, relational norms and perception of opportunism are the main antecedents of affective commitment; and trust and dependence are the main antecedents of normative commitment. Besides, trust and relational norms contribute to enhance labor satisfaction as well as the antecedents of affective commitment are also, indirectly, antecedents of normative commitment. These results show interesting implications for both the academic and the professional world.     

Post-Earnings Announcement Drift in Spain and Behavioural Finance Models

Our study examines whether behavioural theories can explain post-earnings announcement drift (i.e. earnings momentum) in the Spanish market. In particular, we test models proposed by Barberis et al. (Journal of Financial Economics, 49, pp. 307–343, 1998), Daniel et al. ( Journal of Finance, 53(6), pp. 1839–1885, 1998) and Hong and Stein (Journal of Finance, 54(6), pp. 2143–2184, 1999). Each of these behavioural models draws on two premises – cognitive biases and limits to arbitrage – that we assume will vary with a given country's cultural and institutional features. Therefore, we must exercise caution when extrapolating the favourable results observed in the US market to markets outside of the USA. Our results provide little evidence in support of the hypothesis used to test whether these models can indeed explain the earnings momentum anomaly in the Spanish market. We believe some characteristics of the Spanish market, such as its lower score on the Individualism Index, lower levels of investor protection and code-law-based legal system, may explain why our results differ from those obtained in the USA.