Resource egalitarianism with a dash of efficiency

We study the problem of defining inequality-averse social orderings over allocations of commodities when individuals have different preferences. We formulate a notion of egalitarianism based on the axiom that any dominance between consumption bundles should be reduced. This Dominance Aversion requirement is compatible with Consensus, a version of the Pareto principle saying that an allocation y is better than x whenever everybody finds that everyone?s bundle at y is better than at x. We characterize a family of multidimensional leximin orderings satisfying Dominance Aversion and Consensus.     

Credit spread interdependencies of European states and banks during the financial crisis

We investigate the interdependence of the default risk of several Eurozone countries (France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) and their domestic banks during the period between June 2007 and May 2010, using daily credit default swaps (CDS). Bank bailout programs changed the composition of both banks’ and sovereign balance sheets and, moreover, affected the linkage between the default risk of governments and their local banks. Our main findings suggest that in the period before bank bailouts the contagion disperses from bank credit spreads into the sovereign CDS market. After bailouts, a financial sector shock affects sovereign CDS spreads more strongly in the short run. However, the impact becomes insignificant in the long term. Furthermore, government CDS spreads become an important determinant of banks’ CDS series. The interdependence of government and bank credit risk is heterogeneous across countries, but homogeneous within the same country.     

Stakeholder Management, Reciprocity and Stakeholder Responsibility

Stakeholder theory advocates that firms bear responsibility for the implications of their actions. However, while a firm affects or can affect stakeholders, stakeholders can also affect the corporation. Previous stakeholder theorising has neglected the reciprocal nature of responsibility. The question can be asked whether??in a spirit of reciprocity, loyalty and fairness??stakeholders should treat the corporation in a fair and responsible way. This study based on different definitions of stakeholders argues that various stakeholder attributes differ for different categories of stakeholders. This analysis presumes that the attribute of stakeholder reciprocity can probably be restricted to real stakeholders, labelled stakeowners: genuine stakeholders with a legitimate stake, the loyal partners who strive for mutual benefits. Stakeowners own and deserve a stake in the firm. Stakeholder reciprocity could be an innovative criterion in the corporate governance debate as to who should be accorded representation on the board. Corporate social responsibility should imply corporate stakeholder responsibility.     

Variance Estimation of Imputed Estimators of Change for Repeated Rotating Surveys

A common problem in survey sampling is to compare two cross‐sectional estimates for the same study variable taken from two different waves or occasions. These cross‐sectional estimates often include imputed values to compensate for item non‐response. The estimation of the sampling variance of the estimator of change is useful to judge whether the observed change is statistically significant. Estimating the variance of a change is not straightforward because of the rotation in repeated surveys and imputation. We propose using a multivariate linear regression approach and show how it can be used to accommodate the effect of rotation and imputation. The regression approach gives a design‐consistent estimation of the variance of change when the sampling fraction is small. We illustrate the proposed approach using random hot‐deck imputation, although the proposed estimator can be implemented with other imputation techniques.     

Segregation in Friendship Networks

We analyze a network‐formation model where agents belong to different communities. Both individual benefits and costs depend on direct as well as indirect connections. Benefits of an indirect connection decrease with distance in the network, while the cost of a link depends on the type of agents involved. Two agents from the same community always face a low linking cost, while the cost of forming a relationship between two agents from different communities diminishes with the rate of exposure of each of them to the other community. We find that socialization among the same type of agent can be weak even if the cost of maintaining links within one's own type is very low. Our model also suggests that policies aimed at reducing segregation are socially desirable only if they reduce the within‐community cost differential by a sufficiently large amount.     

Individual preference rankings compatible with prices, income distributions and total resources

The compatibility of a given ranking with a dataset consisting of prices, income distributions and total resources is shown to be equivalent to the existence of a solution to a set of linear equalities and inequalities. Their structure makes their solution easier to compute than the solutions of Afriat’s inequalities that characterize the rationalizability of a finite set of individual consumption data. Exploiting this structure, we also give new proofs of the rationalizability of finite data sets where total resources are close to being collinear and the contractibility and pathconnectedness of the set that consists of rationalizable finite datasets.