Deposit insurance and regulation in a Diamond-Dybvig banking model with a risky technology

Summary Three deposit insurance schemes are studied in a version of the Diamond-Dybvig banking model with a risky technology. The schemes include a full deposit guarantee and two alternatives which people have suggested as ways to limit the moral hazard problem of deposit insurance: deductible and coinsurance. Regulation to suppress the moral hazard problem under each scheme takes the form of solvency and incentive compatibility constraints. When the regulation is relaxed slightly, as it might be under regulatory error, the insurer's payout is lower under the alternatives than under the full guarantee. However, the coinsurance and deductible schemes are less effective at preventing bank runs than the full guarantee. Moreover, in some environments, even the full guarantee itself does not provide enough reassurance to rule out bank runs.I am indebted to Neil Wallace, John Kareken, Ed Green, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Andy McLennan, Mike Stutzer, Jan Werner and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments.     

Disability, absence and the health reform era

The total cost of employee absence for many employers is high, and the correlation between employee health and disability is clear. This article reviews several challenges employers face in managing employee health and absence in a well-integrated manner. Although such an undertaking is not easy, the additional cost national health care reform may bring makes the interrelationship between employer profitability and employee absence, health and disability more crucial than ever for employers to recognize and manage.     

Design vs. Content: A Study of Adolescent Girls' Website Design Preferences

This study considered the utility of gender schema theory in examining girls' website design preferences. It built on a previous study which identified eight website evaluation criteria related to biological sex: collaboration, social connectivity, flexibility, motility, contextuality, personal identification, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia concentration. Eleven fourteen-, fifteen-, and sixteen-year-old girls participated in the study. The participants completed the short form of the Children's Sex-Role Inventory (CSRI). Following 50-minute Web searching sessions, they were divided into a feminine-high group and a masculine-high group based on their CSRI scores. Each group then participated in interviews concerning their website evaluation and design preferences. Data analysis identified relationships between gender schema and five of the proposed criteria: social connectivity, flexibility, motility, inclusion, and graphic/multimedia concentration. More generally, members of the feminine-high group favored evaluation criteria relating to graphic and multimedia design, whereas members of the masculine-high group favored evaluation criteria relating to subject content. These results indicate that gender schema theory can indeed serve as a framework for making website design more appealing to female adolescent users. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Trade Liberalization in Egypt

A computable general equilibrium model of Egypt is developed to analyze proposed reforms in its trade policies, including a partnership agreement with the European Union. The model has multiple trading regions and allows for administrative trade barriers and tariffs. The paper reports computations of the revenue impacts of trade liberalization and the required changes in distortionary commodity taxes to maintain a fixed real government budget. Egypt's greatest potential gains come from removing its administrative trade barriers while adopting globally free trade. The partnership agreement with the EU could lower or raise Egypt's welfare, depending on prior trade reform.     

The Markets for Real Estate Assets and Space: A Conceptual Framework

In this study, we present a simple analytic framework that divides the real estate market into two markets: the market for real estate space and the market for real estate assets. After describing the size and character of flows and stocks in the U.S. real estate market, we use our framework to demonstrate the important connections between the space and asset markets. We illustrate how these real estate markets are affected by the nation's macroeconomy and financial markets, tracing out the impacts resulting from various exogenous shocks on rents, asset prices, construction and the stock of real estate.     

Comparing Compliance Behaviour of Students and Farmers. An Extra-laboratory Experiment in the Context of Agri-environmental Nudges in Germany

Increasing popularity of economic experiments for policy impact analysis has led to an on-going debate about the suitability of students to substitute professionals as experimental subjects. To date, subject pool effects in agricultural and resource economics experiments have not been sufficiently studied. In order to identify differences and similarities between students and non-students, we carry out an experiment in the form of a multi-period business management game that is adapted to an agri-environmental context. We compare the compliance behaviour of German agricultural students and German farmers with regard to water protection rules and analyse their responses to two different green nudge interventions. The experimental results reveal that the direction of the response to the policy treatments is similar. Even unexpected behaviour could be reproduced by the student sample. Nevertheless, the magnitude of the treatment effects differed between the two samples. This implies that experimenters in the field of agricultural and resource economics could use the subject pool of students to analyse the direction of nudge policies. If predictions should be made about the magnitude effects, we suggest using a professional subject pool.     

Using real options theory to explain patterns in the valuation of research and development expenditures

Real options theory posits that the value of the firm is a combination of the value generated by the assets in place and the value of the option to invest in the future. It is based on the idea that many decisions are difficult to reverse, and valuing the outcome of these decisions is more complicated than estimating the present value of future cash flows. R&D activities often generate real options due to the nature of these activities, and examining the valuation of R&D expenditures through the lens of real options theory can help explain differing results documented in both the R&D and value relevance of earnings and book value literatures. Numerous studies have documented that the stock market positively values R&D expenditures; however, recent work has raised questions about whether this positive relation occurs across firms reporting both profits and losses. Consistent with real options theory, I find that the negative coefficient on the R&D expenditures of profitable firms documented by prior studies only exists for low growth firms. In addition, for all R&D firms experiencing high sales growth, the market places a lower value on assets in place and a higher value on R&D expenditures.