Intra-industry information transfers: evidence from changes in implied volatility around earnings announcements

Review of Accounting Studies - We examine whether there is intra-industry information transfer with respect to the second moment of returns around earnings announcements. Using implied volatility...     

Agent-based model generating stylized facts of fixed income markets

Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination - We develop an agent-based model (ABM) of a financial market with multiple assets belonging either to the fixed income or equity asset classes. The...     

The determinants of multilateral bargaining: a comprehensive analysis of Baron and Ferejohn majoritarian bargaining experiments

Experimental Economics - We analyze the data sets of all majoritarian Baron and Ferejohn (Am Political Sci Rev 83(4):1181–1206, 1989) experiments through 2018. By exploiting the variation of...     

IMAGINING A DECOLONIZED CITY IN AND FROM AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND

Imagining decolonized cities creates space to explore how urban places could strip away colonial dominance and restore the ability of Indigenous people to live, know and be. In this essay, we describe one attempt to create such space. While working in Porirua in Aotearoa New Zealand, we ran an urban design competition, hosted workshops with young people and held a symposium. Through all three phases we drew on utopian thinking to imagine beyond the current constraints of urban form in Aotearoa New Zealand to consider how cities might reflect the diverse realities of Māori. While this approach is an attempt at generating hopeful geographies, it also sat in tension with (post)colonial realities, such as racist attempts by white people to claim Indigeneity, and the ongoing need for land to be returned to Indigenous people. We argue that envisioning how cities might be decolonized is useful and needs to be rooted in the particular politics of place, but this imagining needs to be paired with action to confront persistent colonialism.     

Do house prices affect campaign contributions?

Individual campaign contributions are the largest source of financing for U.S. presidential and congressional candidates, though the body of research examining why people give remains small. To help understand these decisions, we estimate the causal impact of house prices on donations across campaigns and parties using an instrumental variables strategy. Our results indicate that an increase in house prices increases ZIP code-level donations to Democratic presidential and congressional candidates, with minuscule or no effect for Republican candidates. The effects in areas with a greater proportion of renters are larger than areas with more homeowners. Since this population is likely to experience higher rents as a result of house price increases, this suggests that pleas for policy may inspire giving. Further, areas with the highest fraction of college educated residents also see the largest effects, when compared to less-educated areas, suggesting a wealth effect exists as well.     

Rethinking corporate social responsibility under contemporary capitalism: Five ways to reinvent CSR

Skepticism toward CSR is increasing. Management research on CSR tends to focus on positive outcomes from the practice of CSR, such as enhanced financial performance and best practice business cases. Less attention is devoted to why CSR is under siege. This paper argues that CSR is intimately connected with the way that capitalism is practiced, and that poor CSR outcomes are often the result of five “shortcomings” of contemporary capitalism: runaway self-interest, quarterly focus, elite orientation, volume orientation, and one-pattern capitalism. To evidence this, I employ a two-stage approach: a “diagnostic” stage that investigates current challenges facing capitalism and how they affect CSR, and a “clinical” stage that identifies potential solutions based on a qualitative data set collected in Asian business contexts. The proposed solutions suggest ways that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can conceptualize, design, and implement CSR programs that better fulfill CSR’s promise to business and society. Based on these results, I conclude with ideas on how CSR research can be strengthened by exploring the under-researched linkages among CSR, modern capitalism, and global institutional contexts.     

The price-to-rent ratio: A macroprudential application

We examine the potential for the price-to-rent ratio to be used as a macroprudential tool. In addition to using standardized appraisal methods, appraisers could estimate the current market rent for a property. The resulting price-to-rent ratio would provide a useful signal for speculative pressures. We show this by estimating price-to-rent ratios using the American Housing Survey. The distribution of price-to-rent ratios shifted up dramatically during the housing boom with the 75th and 95th percentile reaching a historic peak in 2006 at 22 and 44, respectively. We propose a lending policy that incorporates the price-to-rent ratio to generate countercyclical loan-to-value ratios.     

High reliability Human Resource Management (HRM): A system for high risk workplaces

High Performance Work Systems (HPWS) research is based on the search for the most suitable bundle of complementary practices appropriate for the organisation and its operating environment. We examine the contents of a HPWS in organisations seeking impeccable safety and reliability as their foremost ‘performance’ outcome. We propose a ‘High Reliability HRM’ framework, and examine the degree of implementation in a three case study of Australian state emergency services organisations. The findings highlight HRM practices inconsistent with the framework, and illustrated by rich interview accounts, we detail associated negative implications for employee behaviour and attitudes. We contribute to HPWS research by empirically examining how reliability-seeking organisations conceptualise and implement HRM systems. This study emphasises how inconsistency in HRM practice bundles can pose a threat to reliable service provision, a critical finding for emergency services and reliability-seeking organisations more broadly.     

Material and nonmaterial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from a low-income country

How have COVID-19-related restrictions affected consumption levels and life satisfaction in low-income countries? We conducted phone surveys with 577 households in Liberia to compare consumption patterns across three points in time: November 2019 (pre-COVID-19), May 2020 (short term), and September 2020 (medium term). This article analyzes the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the related restrictions on food and nonfood consumption, which we categorize as “material” welfare and life satisfaction, which we categorize as “nonmaterial” welfare. We find differences between food and nonfood consumption patterns under pandemic conditions. In particular, consumption by households dependent on food and labor markets was negatively affected by the pandemic. In terms of life satisfaction, we find that most respondents perceived their lives to have worsened due to the pandemic.