Competition,transmission and bank pricing policies: Evidence from Belgian loan and deposit markets

This paper addresses the pass-through from market interest rates to retail bank interest rates. The paper advocates a heterogeneous approach and applies it to the Belgian banking market. A substantial proportion of the heterogeneity in bank pricing policies can be explained by the bank lending channel and the relative market power hypothesis. The results also suggest that the long-term pass-through is typically less than one-for-one, rejecting the completeness hypothesis. While there is no convincing evidence for asymmetry in retail rates, large deviations from equilibrium mark-ups are faster reduced than small deviations. Overall, conditions for corporate loans are more competitive compared to consumer loans. Demand and savings deposits have, by far, the most rigid prices.     

On the Consequences of Behavioral Adaptations in the Cost–Benefit Analysis of Road Safety Measures

It is sometimes argued that road safety measures or automobile safety standards fail to save lives because safer highways or safer cars induce more dangerous driving. A similar but less extreme view is that ignoring the behavioral adaptation of drivers would bias the cost–benefit analysis of a traffic safety measure. This article derives cost–benefit rules for automobile safety regulation when drivers may adapt their risk‐taking behavior in response to changes in the quality of the road network. The focus is on the financial externalities induced by accidents because of the insurance system as well as on the consequences of drivers' risk aversion. We establish that road safety measures are Pareto improving if their monetary cost is lower than the difference between their (adjusted for risk aversion) direct welfare gain with unchanged behavior and the induced variation in insured losses due to drivers' behavioral adaptation. The article also shows how this rule can be extended to take other accident external costs into account.     

Unit roots and infrequent large shocks: new international evidence on output

The nature and magnitude of the economic shocks that have affected the per capita GDP of 16 OECD countries are analyzed over a long period using the outlier method. Strong proof of infrequent large permanent and transitory shocks were found, essentially resulting from the two major wars in the twentieth century, the recession in the 1920s, the Great Depression, among others. We also examine the nature of the output trend by combining different tests of non-stationarity on different GDP series corrected by the outliers detected. It is shown that the per capita GDP series cannot reject the unit root hypothesis in 13 of the 16 countries examined. No conclusion could be drawn for the other countries because the test results were contradictory.     

Sustainability adrift: An evaluation of the credibility of sustainability information disclosed by public organizations

This article aims to evaluate the credibility of information disclosed by public organizations in terms of sustainable development. It focuses on an under-studied aspect in the sustainability reporting literature—namely, the factors that may affect the credibility of disclosure practices. The study is based on a qualitative analysis of the sustainable development content of annual management reports disclosed by 113 ministries and public bodies in the province of Quebec, Canada. The findings shed more light on the main factors that affect the credibility of the information disclosed therein, particularly in terms of lack of transparency and flawed monitoring mechanisms.     

FURTHER EVIDENCE ON MEAN REVERSION IN THE AUSTRALIAN EXCHANGE RATE

In this paper we re‐examine the purchasing power parity (PPP) in Australia for the period February 1970 to April 2005 using an alternative method relative to the previous studies. We underlined large shocks due to depreciations that affected the Australian exchange rate, using outlier methodology. Once we adjusted the data of these outliers that had large, but either temporary or permanent effects on the series, our results show that there is no tendency for PPP in Australia to hold in the long run during this period.     

PREFERENCES UNDER IGNORANCE

A decision maker (DM) makes choices from different sets of alternatives. The DM is initially ignorant of the payoff associated with each alternative and learns these payoffs only after a large number of choices have been made. We show that, in the presence of an outside option, once payoffs are learned, the optimal choice rule from sets of alternatives can be rationalized by a DM with strict preferences over all alternatives. Under this model, the DM has preferences for preferences while being ignorant of what preferences are “right.”     

SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITIES IN GAMES: AN APPLICATION TO THE OVERBIDDING PUZZLE*

This article illustrates how the joint elicitation of subjective probabilities and preferences may help us understand behavior in games. We conduct an experiment to test whether biased probabilistic beliefs may explain overbidding in first‐price auctions. The experimental outcomes indicate that subjects underestimate their probability of winning the auction, and indeed overbid. When provided with feedback on the precision of their predictions, subjects learn to make better predictions, and to curb significantly overbidding. The structural estimation of different behavioral models suggests that biased probabilistic beliefs are a driving force behind overbidding, and that risk aversion plays a lesser role than previously believed.     

Fee-for-service payments and consultation length in general practice: a work–leisure trade-off model for French GPs

This article presents an adaptation of the labour supply model applied to the independent medical sector. First, we model simultaneous General Practitioner (GP) decisions on both the leisure time and the consultation length for two payment schemes: fixed fees and unregulated fees. The objective of this econometric study is to validate the theoretical prediction that doctors under unregulated fees may make choices about the length of patient consultations independent of their personal leisure decision. Indeed, according to our empirical results, the bidirectional link between leisure choice and consultation length – verified with fixed fees – does not hold any longer under unregulated fees. Our findings can be seen as a necessary but not a sufficient condition to legitimize unregulated fees in general practice.