The effect of ASU 2014–08 on the use of discontinued operations to manage earnings

Review of Accounting Studies - Accounting regulations require firms to separately disclose the profits and losses from discontinued operations. These discontinued operations are typically excluded...     

Stock repurchases: How firms choose between a self tender offer and an open-market program

In practice, open-market stock repurchase programs outnumber self tender offers by approximately 10–1. This evidence is puzzling given that tender offers are more efficient in disbursing free cash and in signaling undervaluation – the two main motivations suggested in the literature for repurchasing shares. We provide a theoretical model to explore this puzzle. In the model, tender offers disburse free cash quickly but induce information asymmetry and hence require a price premium. Open-market programs disburse free cash slowly, and hence do not require a price premium, but because they are slow, result in partial free cash waste. The model predicts that the likelihood that a tender offer will be chosen over an open-market program increases with the agency costs of free cash and decreases with uncertainty (risk), information asymmetry, ownership concentration, and liquidity. These predictions are generally consistent with the empirical evidence.     

On the evolutionary edge of altruism: a game-theoretic proof of Hamilton’s rule for a simple case of siblings

We offer a game-theoretic proof of Hamiltons rule for the spread of altruism. For a simple case of siblings, we show that the rule can be derived as the outcome of a one-shot prisoners dilemma game between siblings.JEL Classification: A13, C70, D64Correspondence to: Oded Stark, ZEF, University of Bonn, Walter-Flex-Strasse 3, 53113 Bonn, GermanyWe are indebted to an anonymous referee and to Uwe Cantner for helpful comments and suggestions. Partial financial support from the National Institute on Aging (grant RO1-AG13037) and from the Humboldt Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.     

The dynamics of price elasticity of demand in the presence of reference price effects

The authors derive an expression for the price elasticity of demand in the presence of reference price effects that includes a component resulting from the presence of gains and losses in consumer evaluations. The effect of reference price is most noticeable immediately after a price change, before consumers have had time to adjust their reference price. As a result, immediate-term price elasticity is higher than long-term elasticity, which describes the response of demand long after a price change, when reference price effects are negligible. Furthermore, because of the differential effect of gains and losses, immediate-term price elasticity for price increases and price decreases is not equal. The authors provide a quantitative definition for the terms immediate term and long term, using the average interpurchase time and the discrete “memory” parameter. Practical consequences of the distinction between immediate- and long-term elasticities for the estimation and use of elasticity values are discussed. Gadi Fibich (fibich@math.tau.ac.il) is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Tel Aviv University. This research grew out of his interest in applications of mathematical modeling to economics and management science. He is currently working on auction theory. Arieh Gavious (ariehg@bgumail.bgu.ac.il) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Ben Gurion University, Israel. His interest is in application of game theory to economics and management science problems. His current interest is in auction theory. Oded Lowengart (odedl@bgumail.bgu.ac.il) is a senior lecturer in the Department of Business Administration at Ben Gurion University, Israel. His research interests are in the areas of modeling pricing effects on consumer behavior at both aggregate and disaggregate levels, product positioning, and market share forecasting and diagnostics.     

Rural-to-urban migration, human capital, and agglomeration

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban dwellers in equilibrium. Various measures aimed at curtailing rural-to-urban migration by unskilled workers can lead to a Pareto improvement for both the urban and rural dwellers. In addition, the government can raise social welfare by reducing the migration of skilled workers to the city. Moreover, without a restriction on rural-to-urban migration, a government's efforts to increase educational expenditure and thereby the number of skilled workers may not increase wage rates in the rural or urban areas.     

On structural change,the social stress of a farming population,and the political economy of farm support

A rationale for providing support to the farm sector in the course of economic development and structural change is a growing gap between the incomes of non‐agricultural workers and the incomes of farmers. Drawing on a model that enables us to analyze the level of social stress experienced by farmers as employment shifts from the farm sector to other sectors, we find that even without an increasing gap between the incomes of non‐agricultural workers and the incomes of farmers, support to farmers might be needed/can be justified. This result arises because under well‐specified conditions, when the size of the farm population decreases, those who remain in farming experience increasing aggregate social stress. The increase is nonlinear: it is modest when the outflow from the farm sector is relatively small or when it is large, and it becomes more significant when the outflow is moderate. This finding can inform policymakers who seek to alleviate the social stress of the farming population as to the timing and intensity of that intervention.     

Optimal strike prices of stock options for effort-averse executives

This paper evaluates the common practice of setting the strike prices of executive option plans at-the-money. Hall and Murphy [Hall, Brian, Murphy, Kevin J., 2000. Optimal exercise prices for executive stock options. American Economic Review 90 (2), 209–214] claim this practice to be optimal since it maximizes the sensitivity of compensation to firm performance. However, they do not incorporate effort and the possibility that managers are effort-averse into their model. We revisit this question while explicitly introducing these factors and allowing the reward package to include fixed wages, options, and stock grants. We simulate the manager’s effort choice and compensation as well as the value of shareholders’ equity under alternative compensation schemes, and identify schemes that are optimal. Our simulations indicate that, when abstracting from tax considerations, it is optimal to award managers with options that will most likely be highly valuable (i.e., substantially in-the-money) on their expiration date. Prior to 2006, the tax code and financial reporting standards provided incentives to award options that are closer to the money when issued than the options that were optimal in the absence of these considerations. Recent tax and reporting changes voided these incentives and thus we predict that these changes will induce firms to issue options with lower strike prices than those that were issued prior to 2006.     

A note on the shadow wage in LCDs with migration and formal and informal urban sectors

Given induced rural-to-urban migration, the social cost of (unskilled) labour for urban public sector projects is shown to be lower than the formal-sector, exogenously-determined wage. This result is valid not only when the urban alternative to formal employment is unemployment but also (and more realistically) when the relevant alternatives are formal employment, informal employment and unemployment.