巴黎高等商学院（HEC）收购支付方式的信号效应

众所周知，一家公司在被收购时，现金支付比股票支付更易受到证券市场的追捧。但若仅是购买一个业务单元，事实就会反过来：你最好采用股权支付而不是现金。为什么？简单说来，选择股权还是现金来收购资产本身会揭示出一些信息，而市场会利用这些信息来进行估值。     

SOCIAL SECURITY AND RETIREMENT DECISION: A POSITIVE AND NORMATIVE APPROACH*

Abstract Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez‐faire or in a first‐best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first‐best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not observable, the optimal social insurance policy may imply a distortion on the retirement decision. The main point we make is that while there is no doubt that retirement systems induce an excessive bias towards early retirement in many countries, a complete elimination of this bias (i.e. a switch to an actuarially fair system) is not the right answer for two reasons. First, some distortions are second‐best optimal. This is the normative argument. Second, and on the positive side, the elimination of the bias might be problematic from a political perspective. Depending on the political process, either it may not be feasible or alternatively it may tend to undermine the political support for the pension system itself.     

Cost-effective species conservation in exurban communities: A spatial analysis

Exurban areas have increasingly become zones of conflict as conservation and development compete for the same finite land resources. Conversion of natural areas to land dominated by human use results in loss, degradation, and fragmentation of wildlife habitat which often lead to species endangerment or even extinction. Recently, reserve site selection models have begun to integrate spatial attributes in order to design more compact and connected reserve networks that are thought to improve long-term species persistence. While these models are a good step forward to designing conservation reserve networks, they might not be adequate for use in exurban areas that consist of heterogeneous mosaics of land uses where habitat fragmentation already exists and not all parcels are available for preservation. This paper presents a species conservation framework that expands upon traditional reserve site selection models in three ways. First, because of the focus on exurban areas, the framework used here allows for land conversion within core habitat patches. Second, the framework provides a more robust assessment of connectivity among patches by accounting for land-use heterogeneity in the dispersal matrix. And third, the framework explicitly incorporates species population dynamics. We apply our conservation framework to the case of pond-breeding salamanders in an exurban community in Rhode Island, USA. Comparisons are made between the outcomes for uniform conservation policies and more flexible policies that accommodate ecological and economic heterogeneity. As expected, policies that offer more flexibility in the decision-making process are less costly in terms of foregone development. Conservation planners should consider core habitat patches, dispersal matrix, and spatial scale in their decision making. By not assessing the potential impact of dispersal barriers, reserve site selection models will result in conservation plans that may not protect species over the long term, particularly for species residing in highly fragmented landscapes such as those found in many exurban communities.     

Central bank measures in support of the financial sector in the EU and the United States

The extensive public sector measures in support of the fi nancial sector have been key to managing the fi nancial crisis that erupted in mid-2007 and intensifi ed after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. This article looks into the measures taken by central banks to contain the impact of the crisis. This article reviews and compares the measures adopted by the Eurosystem, the Bank of England (BoE) and the Federal Reserve System (Fed). A complementary article, to appear in a subsequent issue, will deal with governments’ responses to the crisis.     

Job Allocation Rules and Sorting Efficiency: Experimental Outcomes in a Peter Principle Environment

An important issue in personnel economics is the design of efficient job allocation rules. Firms often use promotions both to sort workers across jobs and to provide them with incentives. However, the Peter Principle states that employees' output tends to fall after a promotion. Lazear (2004) suggests that self‐selection may improve job allocation efficiency while preserving incentive effects. We reproduce this Peter Principle in the laboratory and compare the efficiency of a promotion standard with subjects self‐selecting their task. We find no evidence of effort distortion, as predicted by theory. Furthermore, we find that when the Peter Principle is not severe, promotion rules often dominate self‐selection efficiency of task assignment. Results are consistent with imperfect appraisal of transitory ability and a lack of strategic behavior.     

Pleasure in decision‐making situations: politics and gambling

This work investigates whether pleasure influences political and gambling decisions. Participants received two questionnaires. On Questionnaire 1, they rated the pleasure/displeasure of a series of items: social and political issues in Experiment 1, winning bets in Experiment 2, and losing bets in Experiment 3. On Questionnaire 2, they indicated the items that they would actually choose in real life. Their choices were then compared with their hedonic ratings on Questionnaire 1. Results showed that participants tended to choose those items they had most highly rated for pleasure on Questionnaire 1. In all cases, the selected outcomes were higher than chance, and thus tended to maximize pleasure, but were significantly lower than the maximum possible, indicating the presence of non‐hedonic criteria. The tendency to maximize pleasure was independent of age, gender, political opinions, and gambling propensity in real life. The results of all three experiments support the hypothesis that decisions are made predominantly, though not exclusively, in the hedonic dimension of conscious experience. A fourth experiment was set to answer a methodological question: a delay of 77 ± 3 days was placed between Questionnaires 1 and 2. The results were similar to those of Experiments 1–3, thus answering the concern.     

Campaign spending limits,incumbent spending,and election outcomes

Abstract. We study the impact of campaign spending limits for candidates in Canadian federal elections. We first demonstrate that spending limits are binding mostly for incumbent candidates. We then use this information to produce endogeneity‐corrected estimates for the impact of incumbent spending on electoral vote shares. Furthermore, we examine the impact of spending limits on broader measures of electoral outcomes, finding that larger limits lead to less close elections, fewer candidates, and lower voter turnout.     

Social innovation, an analytical grid for understanding the social economy: the example of the Québec housing sector

Over the past few decades, there has been renewed interest in the social economy, especially in relation to the employment crisis and the reshaping of State’s interventions. The social economy plays an important role in solving new social problems with pioneering solutions, especially in the field of public services. It is important to better understand its innovative function. This article discusses the notion of social innovation and explains how it can be used as an analytical framework for understanding the social economy. The case of Québec’s social economy housing serves to illustrate this proposition.