When two tribes go to work: Board political diversity and firm performance

A substantial literature has studied how increased diversity in terms of gender, age, education, and race amongst members of firms' boards affects decisions and performance. This paper studies whether ideological diversity in the boardroom affects firm performance. We find that whilst a board with a broader range of political opinions and beliefs is correlated with better performance ceteris paribus, that the causal impact of such an increase in diversity is negative and substantial. This negative effect is still present when diversity is measured excluding top management, and when diversity is defined in terms of the difference between firms' management and non-executive directors. In conclusion we consider the implication of these findings given the recent growth in both political polarization and ideological segregation.     

Nonlinear Capital Flow Tax: Capital Flow Management and Financial Crisis Prevention in China

How to promote capital account liberalization while preventing financial crises is a challenging task for policymakers. This study proposes a nonlinear (progressive) capital flow tax as a solution. We first demonstrate that the collateral requirement of international borrowing can give rise to multiple equilibria and self‐fulfilling financial crises. We then show that the crisis equilibrium characterized by large exchange rate depreciation, capital flight and welfare loss can be eliminated by imposing a nonlinear (progressive) tax scheme on capital outflows with the marginal tax rate increasing with the size of individual capital outflows. The implementation of such a tax scheme in China is also discussed.     

Media market concentration and pluralism

We study the relationship between market concentration and market variety, and thereby focus on two dimensions of variety, namely on internal variety and on external variety. In our setup, firms can expand their internal variety continuously around their focus point on a Salop‐circle. External variety then refers to the market supply of variety offered by all firms on the circle. We believe that this setting is particularly applicable to media. It turns out that in more concentrated markets, there is an incentive to provide more internal variety in order to compete for consumers. Then, the relationship between market concentration and external variety turns out to be ambiguous. There also exists no clear free market bias with respect to socially optimal internal and external variety.     

Leverage and strategic preemption: Lessons from entry plans and incumbent investments

This paper empirically investigates the effect of leverage on strategic preemption. Using new data on entry plans and incumbent investments from the American casino industry, I find that high leverage prevents incumbents from responding to entry threats. Facing the same set of entry plans, low-leverage incumbents expand physical capacity (by 30%), whereas high-leverage incumbents do not. This difference in investment matters because capacity installations preempt eventual entry. Stock market reactions to withdrawn plans imply that effective preemption increases incumbent firm value by 5%. My findings suggest that leverage matters for industry composition, not just firm-level investment.     

Air passenger duties as strategic tourism taxation

There has been a recent debate on the rationale and economic impacts of air passenger duties (APDs) linked to puzzling empirical results on this topic. We argue that an approach from strategic tourism taxation can improve our understanding of these results. APD set by origin countries of tourists can be viewed as an instrument for extracting economic rents that would otherwise be retained by tourism destinations. A theoretical model of strategic taxation between an origin and two destinations is developed to illustrate this idea. We find that countries' strategies may end up with winners and losers, or with all parties facing welfare losses. The game outcome depends on countries' market shares of profits and the substitutability between tourism services provided by different destinations. The findings suggest that the economic impacts of APDs recently evaluated in the literature might be biased because of the omission of other countries' potential tax reactions.     

Independent boards and innovation

Much research has suggested that independent boards of directors are more effective in reducing agency costs and improving firm governance. How they influence innovation is less clear. Relying on regulatory changes, we show that firms that transition to independent boards focus on more crowded and familiar areas of technology. They patent and claim more and receive more total future citations to their patents. However, the citation increase comes mainly from incremental patents in the middle of the citation distribution; the numbers of uncited and highly cited patents—arguably associated with riskier innovation strategies—do not change significantly.     

Are mutual fund fees excessive?

There is a long running debate over whether competition in the mutual fund industry limits the ability of investment advisors to charge fees that are disproportionate to the services they provide. We posit that disproportionately high fees are prevalent in funds with multiple share classes and those with weak governance structures. Using a comprehensive sample of index mutual funds for the from 1998 to 2007, we find that internal governance mechanisms matter primarily for funds with relatively small share classes where investors often face increased search costs and/or restricted access to competitive mutual funds. Additionally, we find that funds managed by publicly held sponsors are associated with disproportionately higher fee spreads (about 28 basis points). The results are robust to the inclusion of board characteristics, share class structure, and investment objectives. Overall, our findings suggest that competition and agency considerations are important determinants in the pricing of mutual funds.     

Fiber vs. vectoring: Limiting technology choices in broadband expansion

The upgrade of legacy infrastructure is a challenging undertaking in general. The underlying issues are especially prominent for telecommunications networks outside of urban areas. Using German micro-level data, we identify the structural determinants for fiber optics deployment and its extent. We also measure the role of technology competition from the existing infrastructures, VDSL-Vectoring and TV-Cable. In this setting and exploiting a natural experiment, a technologically restrictive policy as proposed by the European Commission is found to be ineffective in promoting fiber deployment. Policy interventions in the form of subsidies targeted at specific local infrastructure projects, however, raise the likelihood of fiber deployment by a substantial margin. A targeted, proactive policy approach is therefore needed to overcome structural and geographical disadvantages.     

Multipliers of expected vs. unexpected fiscal shocks: The case of Korea

We compare the multipliers of expected and unexpected fiscal shocks. In doing so, we consider that the future path of fiscal policy is anticipated to some degree, and incorporate this characteristic into a news approach. We build a standard small open economy New-Keynesian DSGE model with a fully specified fiscal policy structure, and examine the Korean economy as an example of a small open emerging economy. We find that the present-value multiplier of the government consumption news shock in Korea is smaller than that of a corresponding surprise shock of the same magnitude, apart from the initial couple of years in the case of the output multiplier, and is consistently smaller in the cases of the consumption and investment multipliers. The present-value output multiplier of the government consumption news shock starts from about 0.72 and declines continuously to reach 0.16 after 40 years.     

Financial integration, entrepreneurial risk and global dynamics

How does financial integration impact capital accumulation, current-account dynamics, and cross-country inequality? We investigate this question within a two-country, general-equilibrium, incomplete-markets model that focuses on the importance of idiosyncratic entrepreneurial risk—a risk that introduces, not only a precautionary motive for saving, but also a wedge between the interest rate and the marginal product of capital. Our contribution is to show that this friction provides a simple explanation for the emergence of global imbalances, a resolution to the empirical puzzle that capital often fails to flow from the rich or slow-growing countries to the poor or fast-growing ones, and a set of policy lessons regarding the intertemporal costs and benefits of capital-account liberalization.