What does it mean to find the face of the franchise? Physical attractiveness and the evaluation of athletic performance

We show that attractiveness, as measured by facial symmetry, leads to greater rewards in professional sports. National Football League quarterbacks who are more attractive are paid greater salaries and this premium persists after controlling for player performance.     

Can experimental measures of sensitivity to social pressure predict public good contribution?

Public good contributions may be affected by the social demand to contribute that is implicit in them. Sensitivity to social pressure predicts behavior in paired dictator and money burning games; the evidence for effects on public good contribution is mixed.     

4Ps理论在中小企业品牌营销中的应用分析

随着国际大公司在品牌营销实战方面取得可观成绩,上个世纪中期以后品牌理论研究领域也形成了诸多成果。如今,品牌营销已经成为市场营销的高级竞争手段,具有强大的生命力。对于中小企业来讲,要想打好品牌营销这张牌,必须从企业可掌控的市场营销的微观因素抓起,充分运用传统的4Ps理论(即产品、价格、渠道和促销),严控产品质量,确定合理价格,铺设健康渠道,运用适当的促销方式,才能树立自己的品牌,从而取得成功。     

Financial development,institutional quality and maximizing-growth trade-off in government finance

This paper studies monetary and fiscal policies in an endogenous growth model with transaction costs. We show that the relation between long-run economic growth and both monetary and fiscal policies is subject to threshold effects, a result that gives account of a number of recent empirical findings. Furthermore, the model shows that, to finance public expenditures, growth-maximizing governments must choose relatively high seigniorage (respectively income taxation), if “institutional quality” and “financial development” indicators are low (respectively high). Thus, our model may explain why some governments resort to seigniorage and inflationary finance, and others rather resort to high tax rates, as a result of growth-maximizing strategies in different structural environments (notably concerning institutional and financial development contexts). In addition, the model allows examining how the optimal mix of government finance changes in response to different public debt contexts. A short empirical section confirms our theoretical results.     

Monetary shocks,exchange rates and trade balances: Evidence from inflation targeting countries

This paper investigates the relationship among monetary policy shocks, exchange rates and trade balances in five Inflation Targeting Countries (ITCs). The investigation is based on Structural Vector Error Correction Models (SVECMs) with long run and short run restrictions. The findings reveal that a contractionary monetary policy shock leads to a decrease in price level, a decrease in output, an appreciation in exchange rate, and an improvement in trade balance in the very short run. Our findings contradict the findings of price, output, exchange rate and trade puzzles that have been found in many empirical studies. Furthermore they are consistent with the theoretical expectations regarding the effect of a contractionary policy. The only long run restriction that we imposed on our models is that money does not affect real macroeconomic variables in the long run, which is consistent with both Keynesian and monetarist approaches.     

Destructive behavior in a Fragile Public Good game

Socially destructive behavior in a public good environment–like damaging public goods–is an underexposed phenomenon in economics. In an experiment we investigate whether such behavior can be influenced by the very nature of an environment. To that purpose we use a Fragile Public Good (FPG) game which puts the opportunity for destructive behavior (taking) on a level playing field with constructive behavior (contributing). We find substantial evidence of destructive decisions, sometimes leading to sour relationships characterized by persistent hurtful behavior. While positive framing induces fewer destructive decisions, shifting the selfish Nash towards minimal taking doubles its share to more than 20%.     

Spatial growth and industry age

Between 1970 and 2000 employment growth across U.S. counties exhibited very different patterns in manufacturing and services. Whereas manufacturing employment growth was negatively related to initial manufacturing employment across the entire distribution of counties, service employment growth was positively related to initial service employment for intermediate sized counties. This paper presents a theory to rationalize these facts. Local sectoral growth is driven by technological diffusion across space and depends on the age of the sector. The theory correctly predicts the relation between county employment growth and initial county employment in manufacturing at the turn of the 20th century.     

Entry in contests with incomplete information: Theory and experiments

This paper studies entry decisions in contests with private values. Potential contestants observe their value and the common opportunity cost of entry, and make entry decisions simultaneously. Theory predicts that whether or not contestants are informed of the number of entrants prior to choosing their expenditures has no effect on entry or aggregate expenditures. We test these assertions in our experiments. We find substantial over-entry in both information structures. However, entry is higher when contestants are informed. Since expenditures do not, on average, differ across information structures, aggregate expenditure is also higher when contestants are informed. Contestants earn on average less than the opportunity cost of entry.     

Structural transformation and productivity growth in India during 1960–2010

In this paper, we examine the role of structural change and sectoral productivity growth in explaining the aggregate productivity of India relative to the United Sates during 1960–2010. We set up a simple two sector general equilibrium model and calibrate it to fit the structural transformation of United States. Our calibrated model for India highlights the relative importance of agricultural productivity growth in explaining its slow process of catching up in terms of aggregate productivity. We show that India could have progressed at a much faster rate and closed a substantial part of its aggregate productivity gap if its agricultural sector had grown at a rate at par with the United States. It is India's relative productivity growth in the non-agricultural sector that explains all the recent success in its closing the aggregate productivity gap with the United States. We also found that an elimination of relative distortion in agriculture in India could result into a modest improvement in the aggregate labour productivity.     

Auctions with a random number of identical bidders

We examine and compare the (normally, mixed) symmetric equilibrium bidding strategies in first-price and all-pay common value multiple item auctions with a random number of bidders, who only seek one of the identical items and have the same budget.