Stereotypes, Asian Americans, and Wages: An Empirical Strategy Applied to Computer Use at Work

This article examines the effect on wages of the Asian-American stereotype as mathematically and technically adept, and the role this stereotype may play in explaining racial wage differences. We propose an empirical strategy to examine the influence of stereotypes on labor market outcomes, with a specific application to the wage premium associated with computer use at work. Using Current Population Survey data, ordinary least squares estimates do not provide compelling evidence that a positive stereotype affects wages for Asian Americans.     

Do People Accurately Anticipate Sanctions?

We provide lab data from four different games that allow us to study whether people have accurate expectations regarding monetary sanctions (punishment/reward) and nonmonetary sanctions (disapproval/approval). Although the strength of the sanction is always predicted with some error (particularly in the case of monetary sanctions), we observe that (i) most subjects anticipate correctly the sign of the average sanction, (ii) expectations covary with sanctions, (iii) the average expectation is very often not significantly different than the average actual sanction, and (iv) the errors exhibit no systematic bias, except in those situations where rewards are frequent. In this line, we find some evidence that punishment is better anticipated than rewards.     

Too few dividends? Groups' tunneling through chair and board compensation

Group affiliation increases boards' compensation in countries as different as Korea, India, Hong Kong and Italy. In this paper, I examine a 6-year sample of controller-dominated, concentrated-ownership firms in Chile in search of a rationale for these results.I show that, for group-affiliated companies, controllers' presence on the board of directors is associated with a strong negative relation between chair and board compensation and controllers' cash-flow rights. Furthermore, I show that controllers of group-affiliated companies prefer to increase chair and board compensation rather than dividends as their cash-flow rights decrease.     

Analysis of Social Performance in the Spanish Financial Industry Through Public Data. A Proposal

Banking firms are becoming increasingly aware that their clients’ management of environmental and social risks may in term threaten their own business as lenders and investors. In addition, stakeholders are requiring banks to improve their social performance. As a result, some banks are developing corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies and management systems to reduce potential risks and improve their performance. In the Spanish financial system, half of the banking firms are savings banks, most of which have always used some Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) criteria in their management. Private Banks have only recently started to integrate social aspects in their performance. However, no formal analysis has been carried out on the impact of CSR strategies. Various initiatives have been launched nationally and internationally to include the social dimension in management systems. The purpose of this research is to analyse the social performance of the main Spanish financial companies through public data such as social or sustainability reports and media sources. In order to do this, we need to determine which CSR criteria most greatly affect banking firms and to choose the most accurate quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure social performance.     

Chinese intellectual property rights? Know before you go

China's membership in the World Trade Organization further encourages foreign direct investment. Organizations establishing a multinational enterprise in China, and intending to utilize their intellectual property rights as a method of conducting their business enterprise, must be familiar with the current laws and developments regarding their protection and enforcement. This article focuses on Chinese intellectual property laws with examples of both infringements and enforcements. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Employment comovements at the sectoral level over the business cycle

This paper implements the technique suggested by Den Haan (J Monet Econ 46:3–30, 2000) to investigate contemporaneous as well as lead and lag correlations among economic data for a range of forecast horizons. The lead/lag approach provides a richer picture of the economic dynamics generating the data and allows one to investigate which variables lead or lag others, and whether the lead or lag pattern is short term or long term in nature. This technique is applied to monthly sectoral level employment data for the USA and shows that among the ten industrial sectors followed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, six tend to lead the other four. These six have high correlations indicating that the structural shocks generating the data movements are mostly in common. Among the four lagging industries, some lag by longer intervals than others and some have low correlations with the leading industries. These low correlations may indicate that these industries are partially influenced by structural shocks beyond those generating the six leading industries, but they also may indicate that lagging sectors feature a different transmission mechanism of shocks.     

Output gap in Brazil: a real-time data analysis

Recent literature for developed economies has shown that output gap estimates go through important revisions over time, impairing their reliability in real time. We organize a real-time data set for Brazil’s GDP and assess the revisions of the output gap estimated by four different methods. Similar to the findings of studies for developed economies, the output gap revisions in Brazil are substantial in all methods, with frequent changes in the output gap sign. In general, both the GDP data revision and the effect of adding new observations to the sample are relevant sources of output gap revisions. However, differently from those studies, we cannot assert that the latter source is preponderant.