EDGAR on the internet: The welfare effects of wider information distribution in an experimental market for risky assets

Policies such as the SEC’s Fair Disclosure Rule, and technologies such as SEC EDGAR, aim to disseminate corporate disclosures to a wider audience of investors in risky assets. In this study, we adopt an experimental approach to measure whether this wider disclosure is beneficial to these investors. Price-clearing equilibrium models based on utility maximization and non-revealing and fully-revealing prices predict that in a pure exchange economy, an arbitrary trader would prefer that no investors are informed rather than all are informed; non-revealing theory further predicts that an arbitrary trader would prefer a situation in which all traders are informed rather than half the traders are informed. These predictions can be summarized as “None > All > Half”. A laboratory study was conducted to test these predictions. Where previous studies have largely focused on information dissemination and its effects on equilibrium price and insider profits, we focus instead on traders’ expected utility, as measured by their preferences for markets in which none, half, or all traders are informed. Our experimental result contradicts the prediction and indicates “Half > None > All”, i.e. subjects favor a situation where a random half is informed. The implication is that in addition to testing predictions of price equilibrium, experiments should also be used to verify analytical welfare predictions of expected utility under different policy choices. JEL Classification D82, D53, G14, L86 This work was largely completed while this author was at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.     

A note on the evolution of inequality in Poland, 1992-99

Analyses of household budget surveys, national accounts dataon functional income distribution, and data on the dispersionof wages, indicate that income inequality in Poland, after fallingover the 1993–96 period, rose significantly from 1997onwards. Farmers and the unemployed were the main losers. Theoverall position of wage-earners improved, although wage inequalityincreased sharply in the second half of the 1990s. Employersand the self-employed fared quite well. This coincided withfiscal policy changes which substantially slowed down progressionin income taxes. Over the 1993–96 period growth was highand balanced. Subsequently, growth slowed down, giving riseto serious fiscal and external deficits.     

On the existence of rational expectations equilibrium

We prove a theorem on the existence of rational expectations general economic equilibrium when agents condition on prices as well as on private information, and maximize the expectation of a state-dependent utility function. The key to the result is a new idealization of what it means for a set of empirical distributions to support agents' expectations. This idealization depends on the notion that agents compare their expectations with continuous versions of the random empirical distributions that are generated by the workings of the economy. The existence theorem covers all strictly concave utility functions, arbitrary distributions of the state variable, and situations in which the dimension of the state variable is large relative to the number of commodities.     

现代各种不同的维修管理

介绍当代各种不同的维修管理方法，以及在现代生产系统中造成维修管理复杂性的因素及其特征。对维修管理的方法及其框架这两个概念加以定义。详细说明维修活动的过程是由企业活动水平来划分，并提出一个结构，保证正确支持当前的管理人员，根据应用于维修的信息技术，现代维修工程的作用，以及根据维修方面公关能力的需求，对所需要的功能进行分类。     

Mood and Ethical Decision Making: Positive Affect and Corporate Philanthropy

Journal of Business Ethics - This study examines the influence of mood (‘affect’) on corporate philanthropic giving. Drawing on group emotions theory and affect-infused decision theory,...     

CEO Stock‐Based Incentive Compensation and Firm Performance: A Quantile Regression Approach

This study employs the quantile regression model to examine the non‐monotonic impact of CEO stock‐based compensation on firm performance, using the data for U.S. non‐financial firms from 1993 to 2005. The results indicate that while the impact of CEO stock‐based pay on firm performance is positive for firms in the higher earnings quantile levels, the impact is negative for firms in the lower levels. In addition, the “V‐shaped” relationship between CEO stock‐based pay and firm performance satisfactorily explains the longstanding disagreement among earlier studies with regard to whether CEO stock‐based pay can enhance firm performance. Furthermore, the quantile‐varying pattern of the impact of stock‐based compensation on firm performance is robust after controlling for the industrial and yearly effects. It is also robust to the use of the pay‐for‐performance sensitivity as an alternative explanatory variable or the market‐based measure of performance as the dependent variable, or the consideration of the suspected endogenous problem between firm performance and stock‐based compensation.     

Do movie contents influence box-office revenues?

This article studies the determinants of box-office revenues in the motion picture industry. We first adopt an approach that takes into account quality signals (e.g. talent concentration, movie budget and Oscar awards, among others) to analyse the empirical relationship between category-specific parenthood ratings (R-ratings) and box-office revenues. Then, by matching movie contents with economic performance records, our original approach reveals that offensive contents like profanity or nudity may be a hindrance to achieve economic returns, while violent contents seems to enhance box-office revenues. Further research is needed to clarify the interaction in this regard between production budget and movie contents.     

Unobservable persistent productivity and long term contracts

We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the persistent productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker's productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects over time. We provide a characterization of the optimal dynamic compensation scheme that attracts only high productivity workers: consumption—regardless of time period—is ranked according to likelihood ratios of output histories, and the inverse of the marginal utility of consumption satisfies the martingale property derived in [Rogerson, William P., 1985. Repeated moral hazard. Econometrica 53 (1) 69–76]. However, in the case of i.i.d. output and square root utility we show that, contrary to the features of the optimal contract for a repeated moral hazard problem, the level and the variance of consumption are negatively correlated, due to the influence of early luck into future compensation. Moreover, in this example long-term inequality is lower under persistent private information.     

Estimating consumer willingness to pay for food quality with experimental auctions: the case of yellow versus fortified maize meal in Kenya

Biofortification of maize with provitamin A carotenoids is a new approach to the alleviation of vitamin A deficiencies in Africa. Unfortunately these varieties are yellow or orange, while consumers generally prefer white. Consumer willingness to pay for yellow and fortified maize was compared in experimental auctions in three regions in Kenya. The premium that consumers are willing pay for fortified maize (24%) was higher than the discount they require to buy yellow maize (11%), and in one zone consumers prefer yellow. Yellow color is, therefore, not an impossible obstacle for biofortified maize, although it would clearly be easier to introduce this maize first in regions where yellow maize is currently grown.