The Effect of Competitive Bidding on Engagement Planning and Pricing*

This paper investigates how clients' choices regarding whether or not to engage in competitive bidding affect a bidding firm's decisions about planned engagement effort and pricing. Specifically, we investigate whether competitive bidding is associated with higher planned engagement effort and lower fees relative to noncompetitive bidding, and whether competitive bidding is associated with increased sensitivity of effort and fees to cost drivers and the components of service production. There is little available evidence regarding the effects of competitive versus noncompetitive bidding in the current market, and none that focuses on both quality and pricing effects associated with competitive bidding across a broad array of clients. We address these issues using data from a sample of one firm's evaluations of prospective clients, made during 1997‐98. During that period, about half of the firm's bids were competitive and half were noncompetitive, providing a unique opportunity to study how the bidding environment affects engagement planning and pricing. Our findings reveal that competitive bidding is associated with higher planned engagement effort and lower fees. In addition, we find that in competitive bidding situations there are stronger associations between cost drivers and planned engagement effort, and between the components of service production and fees.     

Assessing the Macroeconomic Effects of LTROs during the Great Recession

In response to the 2008–2009 crisis, faced with distressed financial intermediaries, the European Central Bank (ECB) embarked in longer term refinancing operations (LTROs) with full allotment. Using an estimated DSGE model with a frictional banking sector, we find that such liquidity injections have played a key role in averting a major credit crunch. A counterfactual analysis suggests that, absent these nonconventional measures, output, consumption, investment, and the GDP deflator would have been 2.5%, 0.5%, 9.7%, and 0.5% lower on average over 2009, respectively.     

Financial Transaction Taxes,Market Composition,and Liquidity

We use the introduction of a financial transaction tax (FTT) in France in 2012 to test competing theories on its impact. We find no support for the idea that an FTT improves market quality by affecting the composition of trading volume. Instead, our results are in line with the hypothesis that a lower trading volume reduces liquidity and in turn market quality. Consistent with theories of asset pricing under transaction costs, we document a shift in security holdings from short‐term to long‐term investors. Finally, we find that moderate aggregate effects on market quality can mask large adjustments made by individual agents.     

Changes in the Credit Repayment Performance of Low Income Consumers: An Exploratory Study

This paper examined the credit behavior during the second year of a two-year study of bank credit card use by a group of low income consumers who had had a consumer education course. It reports findings about factors affecting changes in repayment practices over the two-year period. Different variables were found to affect repayment behavior at different points in time with elements from traditional credit scoring schemes becoming important in the second year of study.     

Ecological Intuition versus Economic “Reason”

This paper discusses the discount rate to be used in projects aimed at preserving the environment. The model has two different goods: one is the usual consumption good whose production may increase exponentially, and the other is an environmental good whose quality remains limited. The stylized world we describe is fully determined by four parameters, reflecting basic preferences, “ecological” and intergenerational concerns, and feasibility constraints. We define an ecological discount rate and examine its connections with the usual interest rate and the optimized growth rate. We discuss, in this simple world, different forms of the precautionary principle.     

Markups and the Welfare Cost of Business Cycles: A Reappraisal

Gali, Gertler, and Lopez‐Salido (2007) recently show quantitatively that fluctuations in the efficiency of resource allocation do not generate sizable welfare costs. In their economy, which is distorted by monopolistic competition in the steady state, we show that they underestimate the welfare cost of these fluctuations by ignoring the negative effect of aggregate volatility on average consumption and leisure. As monopolistic suppliers, both firms and workers aim to preserve their expected markups; the interaction between aggregate fluctuations and price‐setting behavior results in average consumption and employment levels that are lower than their counterparts in the flexible‐price economy. This level effect increases the efficiency cost of business cycles. It is all the more sizable with the degree of inefficiency in the steady state, lower labor–supply elasticities, and when prices instead of wages are rigid.     

Aggregate Investment Externalities and Macroprudential Regulation

Evidence suggests that banks tend to lend a lot during booms and very little during recessions. We propose a simple explanation for this phenomenon. We show that instead of dampening productivity shocks, the banking sector tends to exacerbate them, leading to excessive fluctuations of bank credit, output, and asset prices. Our explanation relies on three ingredients that are characteristic of modern banks’ activities: moral hazard, high exposure to aggregate shocks, and the ease with which capital can be reallocated to its most productive use. At the competitive equilibrium, banks offer privately optimal contracts to their investors, but these contracts are not socially optimal: banks reallocate capital excessively upon aggregate shocks. This is because banks do not internalize the impact of their decisions on asset prices. We examine the efficacy of possible policy responses to these properties of credit markets, and derive a rationale for macroprudential regulation in the spirit of a Net Stable Funding Ratio.     

Free Cash Flow,Issuance Costs,and Stock Prices

We develop a dynamic model of a firm facing agency costs of free cash flow and external financing costs, and derive an explicit solution for the firm's optimal balance sheet dynamics. Financial frictions affect issuance and dividend policies, the value of cash holdings, and the dynamics of stock prices. The model predicts that the marginal value of cash varies negatively with the stock price, and positively with the volatility of the stock price. This yields novel insights on the asymmetric volatility phenomenon, on risk management policies, and on how business cycles and agency costs affect the volatility of stock returns.     

Simulation of the Impact of the Recognition of Stock Options on the Earnings: The case of Canadian Companies*

One of the most controversial accounting issues pertains to stock compensation. In Canada, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) approved section 3870, Stock‐based Compensation and Other Stock‐Based Payments, on November 13, 2001, to take effect in January 2002. Section 3870 forces companies to “take a look at the real economic cost of most of the stock‐based compensation mechanisms” (AcSB Bulletin, October 2001, 1). The adoption of section 3870 was aimed at harmonizing Canadian accounting practice with U.S. standards. The new standard, which was initially based on two American accounting standards ‐ APB Opinion No. 25 and SFAS No. 123 ‐ gave companies the choice of using either the fair value method or the pro forma disclosure of net income and adjusted earnings per share to account for stock‐based compensation. The Accounting Standards Board (AcSB) nevertheless recommended that Canadian companies use the fair value method, which consists in estimating and recognizing the value of the stock options at the grant date.