On the impact of shock persistence on the dynamics of a recursive economy

The present note relies exclusively on numerical computation of a parametric version of a (stochastic) version of the one-sector neoclassical growth model to derive the qualitative properties of the optimal consumption/investment policy functions and of the resultant steady state, and to study the manner in which these properties are affected by an increase in the degree of shock persistence. In particular, we measure the effects of (differing degrees of) shock persistence on the means and variances of the resulting (stationary) distributions on output, consumption, and capital stock. Furthermore, we explore the effects of increasing degrees of shock persistence on the dynamic time path of the economy.     

Multinational decision-making: Reconciling international norms

How should highly-placed multinational managers, typically schooled in home country moral traditions, reconcile conflicts between those traditions and ones of the host country? When host country standards for pollution, discrimination, and salary schedules appear substandard from the perspective of the home country, should the manager take the high road and implement home country standards? Or does the high road imply a failure to respect cultural diversity and national integrity? In this paper, I construct and defend an ethical algorithm for multinational managers to use in reconciling such international normative conflicts.     

Junior must pay: pricing the implicit put in privatizing Social Security

Summary. Proposals that a portion of the Social Security Trust Fund assets be invested in equities entail the possibility that a severe decline in equity prices will render the Funds assets insufficient to provide the currently mandated level of benefits. In this event, existing taxpayers may be compelled to act as insurers of last resort. The cost to taxpayers of such an implicit commitment equals the value of a put option with payoff equal to the benefits shortfall. We calibrate an OLG model that generates realistic equity premia and value the put. With 20 percent of the Funds assets invested in equities, the highest level currently under serious discussion, we value a put that guarantees the currently mandated level of benefits at one percent of GDP, or a temporary increase in Social Security taxation of, at most, 20 percent. We value a put that guarantees 90 percent of benefits at .03 percent of GDP. In contrast to the earlier literature, our results account for the significant changes in the distribution of security returns resulting from Trust Fund purchases.We thank Henning Bohn for his insightful comments. We also thank Kenneth Arrow, Jean Boivin, John Campbell, Kenn Judd, Narayana Kocherlakota, Mordecai Kurz, Rick Mishkin, Nobu Kiyotaki, Ed Prescott, Steve Ross, Andrei Shleifer, Kent Smetters, Luis Viceira, David Webb, Steve Zeldes and the seminar participants at Columbia, Harvard, LSE, Minnesota, MIT, NYU, Oslo, Stanford, Stockholm School of Economics, UCLA, USC, Wharton, Wisconsin and Yale for helpful discussions.     

Junior is rich: bequests as consumption

We explore the consequences for asset pricing of admitting a bequest motive into an otherwise standard overlapping generations economy where agents trade equity, a risk free asset and consol bonds. With low risk aversion, the calibrated model produces realistic values for the mean equity premium and the risk free rate, the variance of the equity premium, and the ratio of bequests to wealth. However, the variance of the risk free rate is unrealistically high. Security prices tend to be substantially higher in an economy with bequests as compared to an otherwise identical one where bequests are absent. We are able to keep the prices sufficiently low to generate reasonable returns and premia by stipulating that a portion of the bequests skips a generation and is received by the young.

“You never actually own a Patek Philippe. You merely take care of it for the next generation.” Patek Philippe & Co.

We thank John Cox, Jean Pierre Danthine, Felix Kubler, Edward Prescott and seminar participants at The Bank of Italy, Columbia, Lausanne, Mannheim, MIT, Lugano, SIFR, the University of New South Wales, USC, Yale and the University of Zurich for insightful xcomments. The usual caveat applies.     

Team discourse explains media richness and anonymity effects in audit fraud cue brainstorming

This article contributes by extending media richness (MRT) and media synchronicity theories (MST) to explore how media richness and anonymity influence team interactions and success in audit fraud brainstorming. Sixty-three, three-person teams, with 189 student participants from two Universities, identified fraud risk cues in a SAS 99 audit planning case. Participants were assigned to one of three conditions: electronic anonymity (EA; n = 18 teams), electronic identified (EI; n = 28 teams), or identified face-to-face (FtF; n = 17 teams). Compared with teams in the low media richness conditions, i.e., the EA and EI, discussions in FtF teams produced more and better dialog, which resulted in better identification of fraud risk cues. Additionally, compared with the discussions in the EA teams, FtF team discussions evidenced less narcissism and were more focused and inhibited. Mediation analyses of team interactions indicated that the quantity of dialog (team production) completely explains, fully mediates, the effects of media richness and anonymity on risk assessments. Contributions include extending MRT and MST, and using automated content analysis, to explicate the role of media richness, anonymity, and team interactions in explaining audit team fraud identification success. The concluding section identifies the sample, design, and method limitations, and, discusses the potential for group support technologies to enhance or detract from audit team processes, depending on task, context, and technology.     

Critical levels and the (reverse) repugnant conclusion

It is well-known that there is a trade-off among the properties of population principles that are used to make social evaluations when the number of people in the society under consideration may vary. The commonly used principles either lead to the repugnant conclusion (which is the case for classical utilitarianism), or they violate the Pareto-plus principle and related properties (average utilitarianism is an example of such a principle). This paper examines the nature of this trade-off and shows that the incompatibility between avoiding the repugnant conclusion and the Pareto-plus principle is fundamental and not restricted to the commonly used population principles.     

Ethical Stewardship – Implications for Leadership and Trust

Great leaders are ethical stewards who generate high levels of commitment from followers. In this paper, we propose that perceptions about the trustworthiness of leader behaviors enable those leaders to be perceived as ethical stewards. We define ethical stewardship as the honoring of duties owed to employees, stakeholders, and society in the pursuit of long-term wealth creation. Our model of relationship between leadership behaviors, perceptions of trustworthiness, and the nature of ethical stewardship reinforces the importance of ethical governance in dealing with employees and in creating organizational systems that are congruent with espoused organizational values. Cam Caldwell is Assistant Professor of Management in the School of Business at Weber State University. His research is primarily in the areas of organizational governance, ethical leadership and trust. He received his Ph.D from Washington State University where he was Thomas S. Foley Graduate Fellow. He has worked as a City manager, Human Resource Director, and Management Consultants for 30 years. Linda A. Hayes is Assistant Professor and Director of Program Assessment in the School of Business Administration of the University of Houston – Victoria. She received a B.S.M.E. from Clarkson University, an M.B.A from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D from University of California at Berkeley. Dr. Hayes has 15 years of industry experience. Her research interests include decision-making, stakeholder behavior, business strategy. Dr. Hayes was a 1996 NASA Faculty Fellow. Recently, she has published in the Journal of Management Development, Journal of International Marketing, Business Horizons and International Journal of Mobile Communications. Ranjan Karri is an Associate Professor of Management at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He received his Ph.D from Washington State University. His research interests are in the areas of entrepreneurship, ethics and strategy. Patricia Martinez is a cum laude graduate of the University of Houston – Victoria School of Business and works for the Learning Education Achieve Dreams program at that University to help young people in the Victoria, Texas Community set and achieve personal and educational goals.     

Strategic Human Resource Management as Ethical Stewardship

The research about strategic human resource management (SHRM) has suggested that human resource professionals (HRPs) have the opportunity to play a greater role in contributing to organizational success if they are effective in developing systems and policies aligned with the organization??s values, goals, and mission. We suggest that HRPs need to raise the standard of their performance and that the competitive demands of the modern economic environment create implicit ethical duties that HRPs owe to their organizations. We define ethical stewardship as a model of governance that honors obligations due to the many stakeholders and that maximizes long-term organizational wealth creation. We propose that if HRPs adopt an ethical stewardship framework and the qualities of transformative leaders, they will be more aware of their ethical duties to their organizations and more effective in helping their organizations to create increased wealth, achieve desired organizational outcomes, and establish work environments that are more satisfying to employees.     

Willingness to pay for publicly-financed health care: how should we use the numbers?

This paper addresses the question of how willingness to pay (WTP) values in health care evaluation can be used by policy makers. The way in which WTP values are used depends on from whom values are elicited and whether the good concerned is privately-financed or publicly-financed through taxation. Thus, four possible uses of WTP values are identified. The focus is on the two uses which arise in the publiclyfinanced situation. ‘Conventional’ use of WTP values, where the decision as to whether or not to provide a service depends upon whether or not WTP values are greater than total cost, applies only in the privately-financed, and not publiclyfinanced situations. The situations with publicly-financed goods are more complex. The use of WTP values for publicly-financed goods is justified and illustrated.