Dishonesty and charitable behavior

We examine in the laboratory how having the opportunity to donate to a charity in the future affects the likelihood of engaging in dishonest behavior in the present. We also examine how charitable donations are affected by past ethical choices. First, subjects self-report their performance on a task, which provides them with an opportunity for undetected cheating. In the second stage they can donate some of the money earned in the first stage to a charity. Only subjects in the treatment group know about the opportunity to donate in the second stage. We find that more subjects cheat if they know they can donate some of the money to charity. We also find that subjects in treatment end up donating less to charity and that both honest and dishonest subjects donate less in treatment. We propose a new hypothesis that explains these results: past violations of social norms numb one’s conscience, leading to more antisocial behavior.     

Online customer experience in e-retailing: implications for web entrepreneurship

Providing consumers with unique experiences and immersing them in original contexts are the goals of web entrepreneurs. Researchers and web entrepreneurs have expressed a particular interest in the online customer experience, agreeing on its importance in creating satisfaction, revisiting intention, e-trust and e-loyalty. This paper explores customer experience in the online retail context. The online customer experience is central in forming customers’ perceptions of expectations of online retailers because this experience is highly personal. However, empirical research on the online customer experience remains scarce. The objectives of this unique study are twofold. The first is to compare the effect of online customer experience on the responses of Romanian and Tunisian customers. The comparative analysis is based on two dimensions of the online customer experience assessment tool. These dimensions are cognitive experiential state (flow) and affective experiential state. The second objective is to examine the contribution of each of these two dimensions in explaining overall perceived value, e-satisfaction, e-trust and repurchase intention in the online context, as well as their effects on web entrepreneurial initiatives. The findings reveal the impact of cultural influences on the constructs embedded in the research framework. The implications for practice relate to the increasing importance of online customer experience in tailoring online marketing campaigns. The implications for web entrepreneurship are clearly emphasised by the pathways from online customer experience to entrepreneurial initiatives. These pathways capture the value of customer-generated content in designing innovative business models.

     

Econometric Methods for Modelling Systems With a Mixture of i(1) and i(0) Variables

This paper considers structural models with both I(1) and I(0) variables. The structural shocks associated with either set of variables could be permanent or transitory. We classify the shocks as (P1,P0) and (T1,T0), where P/T distinguishes permanent/transitory, while 1/0 means they are attached to structural equations with either I(1) or I(0) variables as their ‘dependent’ variable. We show that P0 shocks can affect cointegration analysis and provide a formula to compute the permanent component if they are present. Finally, we reformulate a well‐known empirical structural vector autoregression showing the impact of P0 shocks when there are just long‐run parametric and sign restrictions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Oil crisis,energy-saving technological change and the stock market crash of 1973–74

The market value of U.S. corporations was nearly halved during the oil crisis of 1973–74. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that the sharp rise in energy costs during this period resulted in the obsolescence of firms' existing capital and reduced their market value. To quantify this obsolescence channel of the energy crisis, we simulate a calibrated dynamic general equilibrium model, where firms adopt energy-saving technologies along with the rise in energy prices, and the value of their installed capital falls due to investment irreversibility. We find that this channel can account for a third of the decline in Tobin's q observed in the data. Separately, we consider the role of investment subsidies extended by the government during this period to expedite the adoption of energy-saving technologies. This extension of the model can account for more than half of the decline in q. We also find empirical support for the capital obsolescence channel in cross-sectional regressions, where we show that the sectoral variation in the decline of energy use following the crisis is significant in explaining the sectoral variation in the drop of market values.     

Financial amplification of foreign exchange risk premia

Theories of financial frictions in international capital markets suggest that financial intermediaries' balance sheet constraints amplify fundamental shocks. We present empirical evidence for such theories by decomposing the U.S. dollar risk premium into components associated with macroeconomic fundamentals, and a component associated with financial intermediary balance sheets. Relative to the benchmark model with only macroeconomic state variables, balance sheets amplify the U.S. dollar risk premium. We discuss applications to financial stability monitoring.     

Informal settlements’ needs and environmental conservation in Mexico City: An unsolved challenge for land-use policy

The aim of this article is to analyze the effectiveness of land-use policy in Mexico City in controlling the expansion of informal human settlements in peri-urban zones of high ecological value. It is argued that Mexico City's land-use policy has been reactive and internally inconsistent, failing to take informal settlements into account, has not offered the poor access to housing with adequate services and greater security in terms of land tenure, and lacks the necessary financial resources and institutional capabilities for providing solutions to these problems. Through a case study of informal settlement management policy in the Tlalpan Delegation,¹ applied in what has been termed SC or “Conservation Land,”² we conclude that local government exhibits an inability to confront the new challenge of urban sustainability, that it resorts to conventional solutions which give rise to contradictory situations where political decision-making prevails over ecological considerations, so land-use policy is permissive and does not halt informal urban expansion in areas of high environmental value.     

The magic of the new: How job changes affect job satisfaction

We investigate a crucial event for job satisfaction: changing one's workplace. For representative German panel data, we show that the reason why the previous employment ended is strongly linked to satisfaction with the new job. Workers initiating a change of employer experience extraordinarily high job satisfaction, though in the short term only. To investigate causality, we exploit the event of plant closure as an exogenous trigger of job switching. In this case, we find no significantly positive effect of job changes on job satisfaction. Our findings complement research on workers’ well‐being and concern labor market policies and human resource management.