Designing randomized response surveys to support honest answers to stigmatizing questions

Review of Economic Design - Randomized response survey methods use noise to mask respondents’ answers to stigmatizing questions in an attempt to elicit honest responses. Respondents weigh the...     

Adding Value to Applied Policy Models： The Case of the WTO and OECD Support Classification Systems

Both the OECD and the WTO have accumulated systematic data on the magnitude of support going to farmers as a result of farm policies. The datasets are collected for different purposes, but both give a detailed picture of the evolution of these policies. This paper extends recent work on the compatibility or otherwise of the two attempts at policy monitoring by considering the categorization of individual policy instruments in Norway, Switzerland, the US, and the EU. The results show how the OECD dataset, particularly with respect to the link between direct payments and production requirements, complements that of the WTO. Many payments classified in the WTO Green Box require production, raising the possibility that they may distort production and trade. Though the issue of correct notifications to the WTO is the province of lawyers, the implications for modeling and policy analysis are of interest to economists, and the broader question of improving the consistency of the two datasets is of importance in the quest for transparency in the interpretation of changes in farm policies.     

Mutual Fund Liquidity Costs

One dollar in purchases or redemptions generates an average cost of $0.006 for US equity mutual funds during the period 1997‐2009, approximately 70% lower than prior estimates derived from older data. However, large cross‐sectional differences exist between funds. Many funds have costs near zero, but funds that hold relatively illiquid equities, have relatively concentrated portfolios, and manage relatively large amounts of assets have average liquidity costs significantly greater than the full sample average. Furthermore, despite a large difference in underlying asset liquidity, US bond funds and US equity funds have similar average liquidity costs.     

When Hosts Become Guests: Return Visits and Diasporic Identities in a Commonwealth Eastern Caribbean Community

The broad intent of this paper is to further contribute to the existing literature that addresses VFR tourism. It suggests that the return visit may ultimately be positioned as a form or type of travel within the larger category of VFR tourism, but a form or type that has built within it a more clear understanding of historic and social contexts and processes. The other broad intent of the paper is to highlight the importance of the relationship between the returning visitor, originating from diasporic communities abroad, and the host community as a stage for the negotiation of identities. The return visit is shown to reflect such underlying processes yet continue to incorporate aspects of individual motivation, which when taken together demonstrate the fluidity of diasporic spaces and transnational identity structures. Using data obtained from ethnographic fieldwork among social networks within the Commonwealth Eastern Caribbean community in Toronto, Canada, it is suggested that return visits are used to retain social histories and contextualise social and cultural backgrounds after migration. The implications for VFR tourism and the relationship between diasporas, transnationalism and tourism are discussed, as is a conceptual model of the return visit.     

Has the “CEO effect” increased in recent decades? A new explanation for the great rise in America's attention to corporate leaders

We introduce a new explanation for one of the most pronounced phenomena on the American business landscape in recent decades: a dramatic increase in attributions of CEO significance. Specifically, we test the possibility that America's CEOs became seen as increasingly significant because they were, in fact, increasingly significant. Employing variance partitioning methodologies on data spanning 60 years and more than 18,000 firm‐years, we find that the proportion of variance in performance explained by individual CEOs, or “the CEO effect,” increased substantially over the decades of study. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of this finding. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Institutional Investors' Preferences for REIT Stocks

This article investigates the determinants of real estate investment trusts (REIT) portfolio investment and institutional REIT ownership using multivariate Tobit regressions. We contend that many institutional investors take larger positions in more liquid assets like REIT stocks, as compared with private real estate equities, because of liquidity considerations. Consistent with this contention, we find that liquidity constraints are significantly related to REIT portfolio investment by institutional investors. We also find that institutional investors have different preferences for REIT stocks than do other investors; they generally prefer larger, more liquid REIT stocks.     

Market growth through mergers and acquisitions: The role of the relationship marketing manager in sustaining performance

This research suggests that firms considering a merger and acquisition strategy need to pay attention to the relationship marketing managers of the target firm and the implicit agreements that have kept them with the target firm. The results of this study convey that the joint activity of maintaining the implicit contracts and retaining the relationship marketing managers have a stabilizing and positive impact on the productivity of subordinate marketing employees. These employees are a key success factor that enables the target firm to function effectively after the acquisition.