Funding the story of hybrid ventures: Crowdfunder lending preferences and linguistic hybridity

Prosocial crowdfunding platforms are venues for individual lenders to allocate resources to ventures that specifically pursue economic and social value. In a setting where hybridity is expected, do crowdfunders respond positively to category-spanning ventures, or do they prefer to fund ventures that are more clearly situated within a single category? Drawing on theory rooted in category membership and spanning, our hypotheses test whether prosocial crowdfunding lenders will more quickly allocate resources to hybrid microenterprises that communicate their hybridity, or to those that communicate a single one of their dual aims. Our study demonstrates that even in such a setting, crowdfunders lend more quickly to microenterprises that position themselves within a single linguistic category in which the social is emphasized over the economic. This suggests that how hybrid organizations position themselves in their linguistic narratives has a significant impact on resource allocation by external prosocial audiences.     

Good neighbours matter: economic geography and the diffusion of human rights

Using multi-country panel data, this paper investigates the geopolitical and economic aspects of human rights performance. Human rights performance depends on the relative levels of economic development and spatial proximity to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ neighbours. The paper tests for basic effects of income, and applies spatial weighting models, to analyse the neighbours’ impact on human rights levels, treating this impact as partly endogenous. It takes into account size and distance when comparing each country’s human rights performance with what would be predicted from a weighted average of its neighbours’ performance. There are (1) geographical clusters and (2) size and proximity effects for human rights performance.     

Perceived and actual option values of college enrollment

An important feature of postsecondary schooling is the experimentation that accompanies sequential decision making. Specifically, by entering college, a student gains the option to decide at a future time whether it is optimal to remain in college or to drop out, after resolving uncertainty that existed at entrance about factors that affect the return to college. This paper uses data from the Berea Panel Study to quantify the value of this option. The unique nature of the data allows us to make a distinction between “actual” option values and “perceived” option values and to examine the accuracy of students' perceptions.     

Impact of patient portal behavioral engagement on subsistence consumers' wellbeing

Subsistence consumers, representing almost half the global population, live on low incomes, possess low levels of literacy, and generally experience poor health. Technology is a tool used to facilitate stronger connections between consumers and support services, including for subsistence consumers. Given the unique characterization of subsistence marketplaces, research needs to examine potential associations between subsistence consumers' individual resource integration and wellbeing via their behavioral engagement with technologies. Research is also warranted that investigates the factors that can moderate this association. A 45-day customized patient portal app was delivered via 26 healthcare service providers, resulting in the surveying of 336 subsistence consumers who used the portal. The results indicate positive associations between subsistence consumers' individual resource integration, patient portal behavioral engagement, and wellbeing. They also indicate that these associations are strengthened by service provider's resource support and subjective norms, and weakened by medical mistrust. Theoretical and managerial implications from this study's findings are discussed.     

Heterogeneous Beliefs and Learning about the Expected Return in a Market for a Short-Lived Asset

This paper examines the properties of asset prices in an economy in which the true expected return on an asset is unknown and investors have heterogeneous assessments of the expected return. The principal innovation of the analysis is that the formation and evolution of investors' beliefs are modeled in a Bayesian framework. Among other things, this allows one to operationalize the notion of investor confidence. The dispersion of beliefs is, in contrast to the findings of many existing studies, not vacuous for asset prices and, in fact, can have virtually any qualitative effect on asset prices depending on the parameterization. The model has implications for the volatility of asset prices and shows that learning can give rise to some unconventional relationships, such as an inverse relationship between asset prices and risk.     

Factor price equalization: a cointegration approach

Factor Price Equalization: A Cointegration Approach. — Previous studies of factor price equalization have generated mixed results. It is argued that the limited success often results from the fact that labor cost time series are nonstationary, and hence traditional OLS models are misspecified. In this paper, the cointegration approach is utilized to test for the existence of a long-run relationship between factor prices. It is shown that indices of labor cost per unit of manufacturing output for six major industrialized nations are indeed cointegrated. These results support the hypothesis that factor prices possess a long-run equilibrium relationship.     

Wage inequality and firm performance: Professional basketball's natural experiment

The purpose of this inquiry is to utilize a natural experiment from professional basketball to examine how wage inequality impacts the productivity of the firm. The literature suggests that wage inequality may promote firm productivity if higher wages are necessary to limit the damage potential of certain workers. In contrast, other writers have trumpeted the productivity gains from worker cooperation and thus, argued that wage disparity lowers firm output. During the 1990s, the National Basketball Association experienced dramatic increases in the level of wage inequality. The empirical evidence reported here supports a third possibility. Specifically, wage inequality and firm productivity are not related.     

Personality and ad-evoked feelings: The case for extraversion and neuroticism

Feeling responses to advertisements have been identified as important advertising effects. Considerable intersubject variance has been noted across those ad-evoked feelings. Conceptual models have proposed individual differences, including personality, as antecedents of adevoked feelings. In the psychology literature,extraversion andneuroticism have been shown to predict positive and negative affect, respectively. The current research proposes and tests relationships between extraversion and neuroticism and specific, transient feeling responses to ads. Additionally, the single traitaffect intensity, an alternative construal of individual differences in affective predispositions, is measured and compared with extraversion and neuroticism. Extraversion and neuroticism appear to be preferable, theoretically grounded predictors of adevoked feelings and consequent consumer attitudes. These findings should advance advertising managers’ understandings of differences across consumers in fundamental patterns of feeling responses to advertising. He received his Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1994. His research has been published inPsychological Reports andAdvances in Consumer Research.     

Information acquisition,coordination, and fundamentals in a financial crisis

This paper reconciles the two explanations of a financial crisis, the self-fulfilling prophecy and the fundamental causes, in an empirically-relevant framework, by explicitly modeling the costly voluntary acquisition of information about fundamentals in a variant of Diamond and Dybvig [Diamond, D., Dybvig, P., 1983. Bank runs, deposit insurance, and liquidity. Journal of Political Economy 91, 401–419]. The model exhibits strategic complementarity in information acquisition. In the “partial run” equilibrium investors engage in costly evaluation of projects, so that banks with lower-return projects fail. There also exist the classic “full-run” and “no-run” equilibria in which there is no project evaluation. Investors’ coordination on a specific equilibrium is triggered by a self-fulfilling prophecy. So, financial crises are seen as both fundamentals-based and self-fulfilling prophecies-based phenomena.