How to hire helpers? Evidence from a field experiment

How to hire voluntary helpers? We shed new light on this question by reporting a field experiment in which we invited 2859 students to help at the ‘ESA Europe 2012’ conference. Invitation emails varied non-monetary and monetary incentives to convince subjects to offer help. Students could apply to help at the conference and, if so, also specify the working time they wanted to provide. Just asking subjects to volunteer or offering them a certificate turned out to be significantly more motivating than mentioning that the regular conference fee would be waived for helpers. By means of an online-survey experiment, we find that intrinsic motivation to help is likely to have been crowded out by mentioning the waived fee. Increasing monetary incentives by varying hourly wages of 1, 5, and 10 Euros shows positive effects on the number of applications and on the working time offered. However, when comparing these results with treatments without any monetary compensation, the number of applications could not be increased by offering money and may even be reduced.     

Moonlighting politicians

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the time they devote to political life. If high-ability citizens can keep earning money outside of parliament, they will be more likely to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected. These predictions are confronted with a dataset about members of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2006. The empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is in fact a non-negligible fraction of citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament. These citizens are those who gain relatively more from being elected in terms of outside income. At the same time, they are less committed to the parliamentary activity in terms of voting attendance.     

Accounting for Employee Stock Options: What Can We Learn from the Market's Perceptions?

The scope of this is paper is to provide new empirical evidence on the value relevance of employee stock options (ESOs) in Europe. We show, empirically, that the market participants when pricing a firm's equity place approximately the same valuation weights on the ESO‐deferred compensation expense (the so called “ESO asset”) and the compensation option liability (the so called “ESO liability”). Our empirical findings support the theoretical work of Ohlson and Penman who suggest that the deferred compensation expense be treated as a contra‐liability. The second contribution of our work rests on the nature of the ESO expense. We show that the distinction between persistent and non‐persistent ESO expenses is of critical importance for the market participants. Accordingly, an improved accounting disclosure should assist the investors in assessing the long‐term goals of the ESO plans at the firm level.     

SEASONALITY,FORECAST EXTENSIONS AND BUSINESS CYCLE UNCERTAINTY

Abstract Seasonality is one of the most important features of economic time series. The possibility to abstract from seasonality for the assessment of economic conditions is a widely debated issue. In this paper we propose a strategy for assessing the role of seasonal adjustment (SA) on business cycle measurement. In particular, we provide a method for quantifying the contribution to the unreliability of the estimated cycles extracted by popular filters, such as Baxter and King and Hodrick–Prescott (HP). The main conclusion is that the contribution is larger around the turning points of the series and at the extremes of the sample period; moreover, it much more sizeable for highpass filters, like the HP filter, which retain to a great extent the high‐frequency fluctuations in a time series, the latter being the ones that are more affected by SA. If a bandpass component is considered, the effect has reduced size. Finally, we discuss the role of forecast extensions and the prediction of the cycle. For the time series of industrial production considered in the illustration, it is not possible to provide a reliable estimate of the cycle at the end of the sample.     

Returns to buying earnings and book value: accounting for growth and risk

Historical cost accounting deals with uncertainty by deferring the recognition of earnings until the uncertainty has largely been resolved. Such accounting affects both earnings and book value and produces expected earnings growth deemed to be at risk. This paper shows that the earnings-to-price and book-to-price ratios that are the product of this accounting forecast both earnings growth and the risk to that growth. The paper also shows that the market pricing of earnings and book values in these ratios aligns with the risk imbedded in the accounting: the returns to buying stocks on the basis of their earnings yield and book-to-price are explained as a rational pricing of the risk of expected earnings growth not being realized. Accordingly, the paper provides a rationalization of the well-documented book-to-price effect in stock returns: book-to-price indicates the risk in buying earnings growth. However, growth identified by a high book-to-price as yielding a higher return in this paper is quite different from “growth” typically attributed to a low book-to-price as yielding a lower return. Accordingly, the notion of “growth” versus “value” requires modification.     

Indirect versus Direct Constraints in Markets with Vertical Integration

For an assessment of market power on the wholesale (or merchant) market in the presence of vertically integrated firms, we analyze the interaction of direct constraints, arising from competition on the wholesale market, and of indirect constraints, arising from substitution on the retail market. A vertically integrated firm that still participates in the merchant market exerts both direct and indirect constraints. We analyze the factors that determine the importance of indirect constraints. We find that, in contrast to a common presumption, indirect constraints are sometimes more powerful than direct constraints. We furthermore analyze the incentives of integrated firms to still participate in the merchant market, provided that this is technologically feasible.     

The effects of unification: markets,policy, and cyclical convergence in Italy, 1861–1913

This paper uses time-series evidence on construction movements to examine the convergence of regional business cycles in the decades that followed Italy’s unification. The aggregate series point to cyclical convergence, but a sector-level analysis traces this result to the decline in differentiated “regional-policy” shocks. The regional market cycles diverged, as regions specialized in different sectors of production; market-cycle convergence is observed only within the “industrial triangle,” the regions of which also developed different specializations. This suggests that the balance between growing interdependence and growing differentiation is not general, as the current literature presumes, but specialization-specific.     

Price discrimination and price dispersion in a duopoly

This paper analyses the problem of price discrimination in a market where consumers have heterogeneous preferences both over a horizontal parameter (brand) and a vertical one (quality). Discriminatory contracts are characterized for different market structures. It is shown that price dispersion, i.e. the observed range of prices for each class of customers, increases almost everywhere as competition is introduced in the market.     

Competition in Communication Networks: Pricing and Regulation

By any measure, the communication sector is important. It isno surprise, then, that the communication sector has attractedthe attention of both policy-makers and economists. In thispaper, we argue that four characteristics of the networks thatdeliver communication services make this area of particularinterest. We analyse the implications of networks' cost structures;the strong complementarity between their components; the demand-sideexternalities that arise from consumption of their services;and the social obligations attached to them. Despite the attentionthat the communication sector has received, many aspects ofcompetition between networks are still poorly understood. Weidentify some of the key issues that will continue to troubleregulators and interest academics.     

Consumer heterogeneity and the development of environmentallyfriendly technologies

The paper examines the effect of heterogeneous consumer demand on the generation and diffusion of environmentally benign technology paradigms. The history of the shift from horse-based to car-based transport provides the basis for an empirically grounded multi-agent model of sequential technology competitions. Firms compete on price, product quality, and the environmental sustainability of their products, and improve their market position through product innovation. The trajectory of product innovation is shaped by the distribution of heterogeneous consumer preferences with regards to quality, price, and the environmental impact of consumption. The distribution of consumer preferences determines whether cleaner designs are developed within a technology paradigm, whether new, more environmentally benign paradigms are developed, and whether these new paradigms replace older, environmentally harmful technology paradigms.