From Destination- to Origin-Based Consumption Taxation: A Dynamic CGE Analysis

A switch from the current destination-based value-added taxation to an origin-based consumption tax will not be neutral in a world economy with international capital mobility and overlapping generations. This paper evaluates the macroeconomic and welfare effects of such a multilateral reform in a two-region, intertemporal general equilibrium model. The analysis isolates and quantifies income effects due to changes in generations' tax burdens, factor price repercussions and initial asset price adjustments, as well as efficiency effects that arise from endogenous labor supply and short run savings responses in a numerical simulation exercise.     

An analysis of the impact of swine CAFOs on the value of nearby houses

The impact of 39 swine confined or concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in Black Hawk County, Iowa on 5,822 house sales is explored by introducing a new variable that more accurately captures the effects of prevailing winds, exploring potential adverse effects within concentric circles around each CAFO, managing selection bias, and incorporating spatial correlation into the error term of the empirical model. Large adverse impacts suffered by houses that are within 3 miles and directly downwind from a CAFO are found. Beyond 3 miles, CAFOs have a generally decreasing adverse impact on house prices as distance to the CAFO increases.     

Measuring the Trade Restrictiveness of Domestic Support using the EU Common Agricultural Policy as an Example

We develop an index that measures the overall trade effects of domestic support payments. Our index is based on the Mercantilist Trade Restrictiveness Index (MTRI) and is capable of analysing the development of the trade restrictiveness of domestic support payments over time and across countries. It facilitates the evaluation of agricultural policy reforms introducing changes in the composition of domestic support payments. We conduct this analysis with a computable general equilibrium model that is extended to depict detailed agricultural policies using the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (EU) as an example. For the representation of agricultural policies, we updated the underlying database by incorporating detailed EU domestic support payments taken from the OECD Producer Support Estimate (PSE) tables and reconcile PSE data with the WTO classification scheme. Our index confirms a decrease in trade distortion stemming from the implementation of decoupled support in the EU. In addition, the trade-equivalent protection rate shows that the trade restrictiveness of domestic support payments depends on the assumptions made with regard to the degree of decoupling of those payments.     

Risking Other People's Money: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Incentives and Personality Traits

Decision-makers often face incentives to increase risk-taking on behalf of others (e.g., they are offered bonus contracts and contracts based on relative performance). We conduct an experimental study of risk-taking on behalf of others using a large heterogeneous sample, and we find that people respond to such incentives without much apparent concern for stakeholders. Responses are heterogeneous and mitigated by personality traits. The findings suggest that a lack of concern for others’ risk exposure hardly requires “financial psychopaths” in order to flourish, but it is diminished by social concerns.     

Mergers with Differentiated Products: Where Do We Stand?

Review of Industrial Organization - On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the 2010 U.S. Horizontal Merger Guidelines, this article provides an overview of the state of economic analysis of...     

Individual performance in a coopetitive R&D alliance: motivation,opportunity and ability

This study examines individual knowledge sharing in a coopetitive R&D alliance. R&D is increasingly carried out in an R&D alliance setting, where individuals share highly specialized tacit knowledge crossing firm boundaries. A particular challenging setting is the coopetitive R&D alliance, where partner firms partially compete and individuals may leak competitive knowledge. This setting has been studied on the level of the partner firm. We want to deepen insights by examining the individual level. Drawing on the motivation‐opportunity‐ability framework, we study the influence of individuals’ job experience (ability) on their performance in the alliance. We also examine effects of two‐ and three‐way interactions between job experience, a central position in the social alliance network (opportunity) and intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. We find a positive association of job experience with individual performance, a positive interaction between job experience and extrinsic motivation and a positive three‐way interaction between job experience, central network position and intrinsic motivation, and discuss the impact of these findings.     

FISCAL CONSOLIDATION PROGRAMS AND INCOME INEQUALITY

We document a strong empirical relationship between higher income inequality and stronger recessive impacts of fiscal consolidation episodes across time and space. To explain this finding, we develop a life‐cycle economy with uninsurable income risk. We calibrate our model to match key characteristics of several European economies, including inequality and fiscal structures, and study the effects of fiscal consolidation programs. In our model, higher income risk induces precautionary savings behavior, which decreases the proportion of credit‐constrained agents in the economy. These agents have less elastic labor supply responses to fiscal consolidations, which explain the correlation with inequality in the data.     

Why do firms rarely adopt IFRS voluntarily? Academics find significant benefits and the costs appear to be low

Kim and Shi (Rev Account Stud, doi:10.1007/s11142-012-9190-y, this issue) document that voluntary IFRS adoption is associated with significant benefits and argue that the effect is causal??a conclusion that is similar to many published papers on IFRS adoption. Yet voluntary IFRS adopters constitute only a small percentage of the global population of firms, which implies that either practitioners behave irrationally or the benefits are incorrectly estimated by academics. In this discussion I argue that the error is on the part of academics, not practitioners, and that it is mainly due to the lack of exogenous variation in accounting standards. This conclusion is based on inconsistencies between the estimated benefits and costs of IFRS adoption, as well as the accounting standards choices of presumed rational managers. I also propose a contracting explanation for the capital market benefits around IFRS adoption in which managers behave rationally, but IFRS per se is not the cause.