Toward global checks and balances

The rapid growth and importance of intergovernmental coordination in the regulation of markets, transportation and communication, the environment, and national security poses numerous challenges for democratic accountability within participating states. Direct public participation in the intergovernmental regulatory bodies is generally modest or absent. Information regarding their deliberations is limited. And the multiple oversight mechanisms and supervisory processes that exist at the domestic level of developed democracies that can scrutinize intergovernmental regulatory decisions tend to be lacking. This lack of accountability raises legitimacy concerns, the most prominent of which is the fear executive branch officials will delegate controversial policy decisions to intergovernmental bodies in order to escape democratic deliberation. In this paper we survey the ways that different review venues (other international institutions and national courts) are attempting to cope with these accountability related issues: we argue that national courts may prove to be the most effective venue for promoting democratic accountability. This is not because they are more reliably representative of their domestic constituency or possess a more cosmopolitan perspective than the bodies whose decisions they are reviewing. Rather their relative advantage lies in: (1) the increasing acceptance on the part of domestic courts that inter-judicial coordination is a prerequisite for their continued ability to fulfill their judicial review function; and (2) the visibility that the decisions of these courts possess. Acting together these two forces have the potential to foster greater transparency and public deliberation than most rival venues.     

Private information in currency markets

Using daily abnormal currency returns for the universe of countries with flexible exchange rates, we show local currency depreciations ahead of unscheduled, public sovereign debt downgrade announcements. Consistent with the private information hypothesis, the effect is stronger in lower institutional quality countries and holds after we control for concurrent public information and for publicly available rumors about the forthcoming downgrades. Our results persist when abnormal currency returns are adjusted for global carry and dollar risk factors, world equity and bond returns, as well as local stock market returns. Finally, the currency depreciations are permanent, providing evidence for a link between fundamentals and currency markets.     

Household Life Insurance Demand

Abstract

What types of households own life insurance? Who owns term life and who owns whole life insurance? These are questions of great interest to insurers that operate in a highly competitive market. To answer these questions, we jointly examine household demand of two types of insurance, term and whole life, using data from the Survey of Consumer Finances, a probability sample of the U.S. population. We model both the frequency and the severity of demand for insurance, building on the work of Lin and Grace by using explanatory variables that they developed. For the frequency portion, the household decisions about whether to own term and whole life insurance are modeled simultaneously with a bivariate probit regression model. Given ownership of life insurance by a household, the amounts of insurance are analyzed using generalized linear models with a normal copula. The copula permits the bivariate modeling of insurance amounts for households who own both term and whole life insurance, about 20% of our sample. These models allow analysts to predict who owns life insurance and how much they own, an important input to the marketing process.

Moreover, our findings suggest that household demand for term and whole life insurance is jointly determined. After controlling for explanatory variables, there exists a negative relationship for a household’s decision to own both whole and term life insurance (the frequency part) and a positive relationship for the amount of insurance purchased (the severity part). This indicates that the greater the probability of holding one type, the smaller the probability of holding the other type of life insurance. However, higher demand for both types of insurance exists when a household decides to own both. This mixed effect extends prior work that established a negative relationship, suggesting that term life insurance and whole life insurance are substitutes for one another. In contrast, our findings reveal that the ownership decision involves substitution, but, for households owning both types of insurance, amounts are positively related. Therefore, term and whole life insurance are substitutes in the frequency yet complements in the severity.     

入美企业如何避开国家安全限制

2008年11月14日,美国财政部发布《2007年外国投资与国家安全法》（FINSA）的实施细则,此项法律旨在改革美国外国投资委员会（CFIUS）关于国外机构收购、兼并和接管美国企业国家安全审查体制。2008年12月,美国财政部发布了有关经过CFIUS审核认为存在国 家安全问题的交易类别指引,正式条例和相关指引传递的明确信息是,在个案基础上,CFIUS将保持其对外国投资交易进行国家安全审查的广泛自由裁量权。那么,美国这些法规的出台将会给我国企业以外资并购的方式进入美国市场带来怎样的影响？     

Innovation, rule breaking and the ethics of entrepreneurship

This article examines a feature of the ethics of entrepreneurship that is infrequently directly discussed, viz., rule breaking. Entrepreneurs are widely said to engage in rule breaking. Many examples of this appear in popular and academic literature. But how may this be integrated into an account of the ethics of entrepreneurship? One response would be that when entrepreneurs break legal and moral rules then what they do is wrong and ought to be condemned. There is a great deal to be said for this rule model of entrepreneurial ethics. However, this view is also mistaken. Instead, this article defends a virtue-based account of the ethics of entrepreneurship in which certain instances of rule breaking, even if morally wrong, are nevertheless ethically acceptable and part of the creative destruction that entrepreneurs bring not only to the economy but also to morality.     

Product-harm crisis management: Time heals all wounds?

This paper focuses on product-harm crises and examines consumer responses associated with product defect in three time periods (i.e., 3 days, 3 months and 1 year after a crisis). An experiment was conducted based on three widely accepted- influences on product-harm crisis management (i.e., crisis extent, social responsibility and organizational responses). The fourth influencing factor, time, was introduced in the present study. The four-factor model for measuring the effectiveness of product-harm crisis management was tested with particular attention to the impact of time. Crises were described in scenarios for a fictitious mobile phone. The results demonstrate that the effects of a crisis are minimal a few months after the crisis has occurred. Consumers tend to “forget” about the crisis and its effects, especially in cases when the company is socially responsible, and when the company issues a voluntary recall of its product.     

Environmental performance and plant closure

This study uses a sample of plant closings as the testing stage to examine the financial consequences of variant environmental performance records and stakeholder pressure levels. It compares 117 manufacturing facilities closing down between 1998 and 2000 to 351 facilities surviving through this period, along four measures of environmental performance. It shows that in the ten years prior to closure, closing facilities reduce their toxics emissions relatively more and incur somewhat stronger community and regulatory pressures than surviving ones. The results persist through alternative versions of the model and suggest that the environmental performance of closing facilities is at least as good as that of surviving ones. The mix of environmental practices of closing facilities differs from that of surviving ones with the former engaging in significantly less recycling of waste than the latter. Closing facilities focus more on end-of-pipe measures while surviving ones engage in more pro-active strategies, consistent with evidence in the literature of a positive relation between pro-active environmental practices and performance. Stakeholder pressures, in some cases (e.g., in pollution intensive industries), may be associated with unrecoverable costs to facilities, including closure, depending on the environmental management choices of the facilities.     

Financial structure and the heterogeneous impact of monetary policy across industries

The two general channels by which monetary policy impacts output are the neo-classical cost of capital channel and the credit channel. This paper decomposes the output response to a change in the stance of monetary policy to each of these channels. We use a unique industry level data set that measures the financial characteristics of firms operating at the industry level through time. We bring these financial characteristics formally into the regression analysis, thus allowing for a more precise identification of the two channels. The evidence indicates that both channels are active in the Canadian economy.     

Misperceiving the value of information in predicting the performance of others

Economic models typically allow for “free disposal” or “reversibility” of information, which implies non-negative value. Building on previous research on the “curse of knowledge” we explore situations where this might not be so. In three experiments, we document situations in which participants place positive value on information in attempting to predict the performance of uninformed others, even when acquiring that information diminishes their earnings. In the first experiment, a majority of participants choose to hire informed—rather than uninformed—agents, leading to lower earnings. In the second experiment, a significant number of participants pay for information—the solution to a puzzle—that hurts their ability to predict how many others will solve the puzzle. In the third experiment, we find that the effect is reduced with experience and feedback on the actual performance to be predicted. We discuss implications of our results for the role of information and informed decision making in economic situations. Electronic Supplementary Material Supplementary material is available in the online version of this article at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10683-006-9128-y. JEL Classification C91, D83