Is Knowledge Cursed When Forecasting the Forecasts of Others?

Financial decision makers (lenders, insurers, advisees) often need to estimate how well others make decisions. Is knowledge a blessing or a curse when forecasting others' forecast accuracy? The authors show that this depends on its type. Within a single experimental setting, they identify and test 4 distinct information types that have different effects on forecast accuracy. First, the authors revisit the well-known “curse of knowledge” and show that it may have resulted from entirely arbitrary, uninformative anchors. Second, we show that in contrast, genuinely informative cues purged of anchoring potential enhance estimation accuracy. Third, richer, more detailed financial information has no effect even for participants better able to interpret it. Fourth, domain experts do not overimpute others' forecast ability. The authors conclude that in financial settings knowledge may be a blessing or a curse, or have no effect depending on its type.     

Who’s calling? The effect of phone calls and personal interaction on tax compliance

International Tax and Public Finance - Most tax agencies use letters as the method of communicating with taxpayers. Still, other technologies exist that could be more effective. This paper reports...     

A panel cointegration approach to estimating substitution elasticities in consumption

This paper investigates the relationship between government spending and private consumption. The general framework is a cointegration approach of Ogaki (1992) used to estimate the intratemporal elasticity of substitution between government and private consumption in a panel of 15 European countries. Recently developed non-stationary panel methodologies that assume cross-section dependence are applied. Results indicate an Edgeworth substitutability between private and public spending.     

Annual miles drive used car prices

This paper investigates whether the net benefits from owning a vehicle, proxied by annual miles driven, explain the price declines observed over a vehicle's life. We first model the household decision on how much to drive each of its vehicles. Then we empirically establish that variation in household annual miles across brands explains observed price declines. Furthermore, the effect of vehicle age on annual miles decisions (and consequently on market value) depends on household characteristics and the composition of the vehicle stock owned. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DOES FISCAL DECENTRALIZATION AFFECT INFRASTRUCTURE QUALITY? AN EXAMINATION OF U.S. STATES

A transportation network is vital to an economy. However, the U.S. highway infrastructure suffers from insufficient maintenance creating inefficiencies such as increased travel times and increase in accidents. The means to fund the infrastructure and their maintenance is a point of debate. In this paper, we examine the role of political institutions and decision‐making on the quality of highway infrastructure by focusing on the role of fiscal decentralization. Using generalized linear model estimation on state data from 1992 to 2012, we find evidence that fiscal decentralization improves infrastructure quality. These results are robust to the choice of control variables and method of estimation. (JEL D73, H42, H72)     

Patterns of white-collar unionization in the steel industry

In the steel industry the influence of the employers and the steel workers' unions has probably played a more significant role in defining the direction and growth of white-collar unionism than the attitudes of the white-collar workers themselves.     

Multiproduct Firms' Pricing Behaviour in the Italian Grocery Trade

This paper investigates the determinants of price dispersion between different goods in grocery retailing, as the result of pricing decisions of multiproduct retailers. Demand parameters are generated using the LES system. These are then used to test theoretical predictions about the nature of supermarkets' pricing and consumers' shopping behaviour using disaggregated data from the Italian grocery trade. The empirical results concerning the supply function provide evidence for the existence, in all types of retail organisation, of a monopolistic form of price discrimination. The results are consistent with discrimination due to the exploitation of customers' switching costs.     

Bank ownership and performance. Does politics matter?

This paper uses a new dataset to reassess the relationship between bank ownership and bank performance, providing separate estimations for developing and industrial countries. It finds that state-owned banks located in developing countries tend to have lower profitability and higher costs than their private counterparts, and that the opposite is true for foreign-owned banks. The paper finds no strong correlation between ownership and performance for banks located in industrial countries. Next, in order to test whether the differential in performance between public and private banks is driven by political considerations, the paper checks whether this differential widens during election years; it finds strong support for this hypothesis.