LIFE STYLE-WORK GROUP STRUCTURE-TASK CONGRUENCE AND JOB SATISFACTION AND PERFORMANCE: A THREE-DIMENSIONAL CONTINGENCY MODEL

A Three -Dimensional contingency‘theory’of organizational behaviour was used to predict job satisfaction and performance in a sample of registered representatives of a national securities firm. Contingency variables composed of individual life style orientation, perceived work group structure and perceived job complexity did not predict a significant amount of variance in the dependent measures. Cautions concerning the assumed universal superiority of contingency predictors over simpler formulations are discussed.     

Aspetti matematici nella ricerca di condizioni di unicita' per il tasso interno di rendimento

Si fornisce un'ampia rassegna di condizioni sufficienti per l'unicità del Tasso Interno di Rendimento di un dato progetto, riconducendo la maggior parte di queste ad un'unica procedura, della quale si fornisce la formulazione più generale.     

New evidence about regional income divergence in China

There are many empirical studies trying to test if there is income convergence across the provinces of China. In this paper, we bring new information to the current literature by applying non-linear panel unit root test of Exponential Smooth Auto-Regressive Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ESTAR-ADF) unit root test developed by Cerrato et al. (2008) to the time series data for the period 1952–2003. The number of converging provinces decreases in the post-reform period when using panel ESTAR-ADF test. Furthermore, our results find evidence of increasing regional disparity that has been prevailing in China since the open door economic reforms of the late 1970s, which confirms the view of Pedroni and Yao (2006) that interprovincial inequalities have been widening since 1978.In addition, we also examine the determinants of conditional convergence in China. The results indicate that low inflation, transport and telecommunication infrastructure, and trade openness could stimulate economic growth in China. Human capital also play a significant role in growth, and it exhibits non-linearity between human capital and growth in the sense that at low levels of human capital the effect on growth is negative and became positive at middle levels.     

Robustness and Pricing with Uncertain Growth

We study how decision-makers' concerns about robustness affectprices and quantities in a stochastic growth model. In the modeleconomy, growth rates in technology are altered by infrequentlarge shocks and continuous small shocks. An investor observesmovements in the technology level but cannot perfectly distinguishtheir sources. Instead the investor solves a signal extractionproblem. We depart from most of the macroeconomics and financeliterature by presuming that the investor treats the specificationof technology evolution as an approximation. To promote a decisionrule that is robust to model misspecification, an investor actsas if a malevolent player threatens to perturb the actual data-generatingprocess relative to his approximating model. We study how aconcern about robustness alters asset prices. We show that thedynamic evolution of the risk-return trade-off is dominatedby movements in the growth-state probabilities and that theevolution of the dividend-price ratio is driven primarily bythe capital-technology ratio.     

99 Luftballons: Monetary policy and the house price boom across U.S. states

We use a dynamic factor model estimated on quarterly state-level data from 1986 to 2005 via Bayesian methods to disentangle the relative importance of the common component in OFHEO house price movements from local (state- or region-specific) shocks. We find that historically movements in house prices were mainly driven by the local component. The recent period (2001-2005) has been different: the increase in house prices is a national phenomenon. We use a VAR to investigate the extent to which expansionary monetary policy is responsible for this phenomenon. We find the impact of policy shocks on house prices to be small in comparison with the magnitude of recent fluctuations.     

Reputational cheap talk

We analyze information reporting by a privately informed expert concerned about being perceived to have accurate information. When the expert's reputation is updated on the basis of the report as well as the realized state, the expert typically does not wish to truthfully reveal the signal observed. The incentives to deviate from truth telling are characterized and shown to depend on the information structure. In equilibrium, experts can credibly communicate only part of their information. Our results also hold when experts have private information about their own accuracy and care about their reputation relative to others.     

What kind of preference maximization does the weak axiom of revealed preference characterize?

A (multivalued) choice is justified if no two chosen alternatives are preferred to each other, and if all chosen alternatives are preferred to all rejected alternatives. This concept permits a connection between the behavioral property expressed by WARP and a weak form of preference maximization. I am grateful to Michele Lombardi, Michael Mandler, Paola Manzini and an anonymous referee for useful discussions and comments.     

Technology shocks, structural breaks and the effects on the business cycle

It is shown that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60s. Moreover, the importance of technology shocks over the business cycle has sharply decreased after the break.     

Smoke in the (Tariff) Water

As the economic crisis deepened and widened, fears of a return to the protectionist spiral of the 1930s become more common. However, an important difference between the 1930s and today is the existence of the World Trade Organization and the legal limits it imposes on the protectionist responses members can pursue. The first objective of this paper is to assess the extent to which applied tariffs can be legally raised without violating bound tariff obligations and compare it with what is economically feasible. The second objective is the examination of whether individual countries have taken advantage of these legal tariff hikes as protectionist responses during economic crises, after the creation of the WTO. Results suggest that the policy space left when looking at what is economically possible is indeed quite large. However, in the recent past little of the available policy space has been used by countries suffering from an economic crisis.