The Under-Exploitation of Natural Resources: A Model with Overlapping Generations*

It is well known that competitive markets may fail to generate an optimal rate of extraction of a natural resource-stock. The barrier to optimality may be uncertainty about tenure, commonality of property rights in the resource, or uncertainty about the extent of the resource. In all these cases, suboptimality takes the form of over-extraction. We draw attention to an additional source of suboptimality. In an economy with overlapping generations, the resource-stock plays the double role of repository of savings and source of productive inputs. The decline in the supply of the resource-stock may eventually force its price so high that it ceases to perform its second function. Extraction comes to an end even though the resource has a positive marginal productivity in producing consumption goods. This is inefficient, hence suboptimal. This time, however, suboptimality takes the form of under-extraction.     

Value Cores for Finite Agents*

The standard definition of the competitive equilibrium, at given prices, presents the difficulty that finite agents (i.e. agents with finite budget and production sets), and a fortiori coalitions of such agents, need not be price takers and will upset the equilibrium. Since 1963 an extensive literature has sprung up, which has dealt with the problem, essentially by considering infinite numbers of infinitesimal agents. The present article outlines two alternative approaches to deal with this problem, both of which, realistically, admit (a finite number of) finite agents and redefine the core in terms of the value structure of the economy, viz. prices in the presence of controls, and cost and revenue functions in their absence. It is shown that the notion of value core, here introduced, coincides with that of competitive equilibrium, which is formulated as a characteristic-function game.     

Causal Relationships in Australian Wage Inflation and Minimum Award Rates*

When variables are correlated in time-series studies, it is often difficult to determine which is cause and effect, and in what sense. This paper applies multivariate time-series tests of causality to Australian wage, price, minimum wage award, labour demand and strike (working days lost) variables for 1953-76. The results provide tentative support for a model in which strikes are exogenous:the size of Arbitration Commission awards is determined by strikes (suggesting that a trade union capture theory of Arbitration Commission regulation may apply):money wages are determined by minimum wage awards; and the demand for labour variable (measured in this paper by the ratio of actual to potential output) is determined (in a negative relationship) by money wages.     

Masculinity,Testosterone, and Financial Misreporting

We examine the relation between a measure of male CEOs’ facial masculinity and financial misreporting. Facial masculinity is associated with a complex of masculine behaviors (including aggression, egocentrism, riskseeking, and maintenance of social status) in males. One possible mechanism for this relation is that the hormone testosterone influences both behavior and the development of the face shape. We document a positive association between CEO facial masculinity and various misreporting proxies in a broad sample of S&P1500 firms during 1996–2010. We complement this evidence by documenting that a CEO's facial masculinity predicts his firm's likelihood of being subject to an SEC enforcement action. We also show that an executive's facial masculinity is associated with the likelihood of the SEC naming him as a perpetrator. We find that facial masculinity is not a measure of overconfidence. Finally, we demonstrate that facial masculinity also predicts the incidence of insider trading and option backdating.     

Multinational Banks and the Global Financial Crisis: Weathering the Perfect Storm?

We use data on the 48 largest multinational banking groups to compare the lending of their 199 foreign subsidiaries during the Great Recession with lending by a benchmark of 202 domestic banks. Contrary to earlier and more contained crises, parent banks were not a significant source of strength to their subsidiaries during 2008–09. When controlling for other bank characteristics, multinational bank subsidiaries had to slow down credit growth almost three times as fast as domestic banks. This was in particular the case for subsidiaries of banking groups that relied more on wholesale funding.     

How Control System Design Influences Performance Misreporting

This paper investigates reporting honesty when managers have monetary incentives to overstate their performance. We argue that managers who report about their performance will take into account how their report affects their peers (i.e., other managers at the same hierarchical level). This effect depends on the design of the organization's control system, in particular, on the reward structure and the information policy regarding individual performance reports. The reward structure determines if peers’ monetary payoff is increased or decreased when managers claim a higher level of performance. The information policy determines if managers will be able to link individual peers to their reports and affects the nonmonetary costs of breaking social norms. We present the results of a laboratory experiment. As predicted, we find that participants are more likely to overstate their performance if this increases the monetary payoff of others than if their reported performance decreases others’ monetary gains. In addition, overstatements are lower under an open information policy, where each individual's reported performance is made public, compared to a closed information policy, where participants only learn the average performance of the other participants. Our findings have several important implications for management accounting research and practice.