Dear white boss. Do you remember that first management-team offsite

It's easy for white managers to assume that their colleagues of color face the same basic challenges they do. On one level that's true--the work itself is the same. But on another level, African-American managers often contend with an atmosphere of tension, instability, and distrust that can be so frustrating they lose the desire to contribute fully. Their white bosses and coworkers are simply unaware of the "miasma" and are often puzzled when African-Americans quit apparently for no reason or seemingly overreact to a minor incident. This portrayal of what it's like to be different in the workplace takes the form of a fictional letter from a black manager to a white boss. The letter, based on interviews and surveys the authors conducted with hundreds of mid- to senior-level African-American managers, is not about the lack of role models or mentors of color or any of the other barriers that limit opportunities for blacks in corporate America. Instead, the letter sheds light on the realities that lurk below the surface for black managers--the feeling that they leave some part of their identities at home and the sometimes subtle and often systemic racial biases that inhibit and alienate African-Americans. "Differences really do matter, although they may matter in ways you probably didn't expect. One of the big ways they matter is that race is always with us," the letter writer observes. "As a friend of mine said recently, 'I don't think a day goes by that I'm not reminded that I'm black.'" The letter may not apply to every leader, black or white, or to every organization, but the issues are more widespread than corporate America cares to acknowledge. It should be required reading for all white executives who don't want talent to slip through their fingers.     

Misspecified Recovery

Asset prices contain information about the probability distribution of future states and the stochastic discounting of those states as used by investors. To better understand the challenge in distinguishing investors' beliefs from risk‐adjusted discounting, we use Perron–Frobenius Theory to isolate a positive martingale component of the stochastic discount factor process. This component recovers a probability measure that absorbs long‐term risk adjustments. When the martingale is not degenerate, surmising that this recovered probability captures investors' beliefs distorts inference about risk‐return tradeoffs. Stochastic discount factors in many structural models of asset prices have empirically relevant martingale components.     

农村资金互助社可持续发展模式探讨及路径选择——以甘肃临夏回族自治州为例

资金互助社作为农村新型金融机构,在满足农村多样化资金需求,促进农民消费、投资、应对风险以及发挥扶贫功能上都发挥着十分重要的作用.本文以临夏回族自治州为例,探讨农村资金互助社可持续发展模式,及其与金融效率、金融稳定、地区经济协调发展的运营模式,旨在找到一条适合少数民族地区农村资金互助社发展的可行路径.     

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Existence and Uniqueness of Recursive Utilities

We obtain exact necessary and sufficient conditions for existence and uniqueness of solutions of a class of homothetic recursive utility models postulated by Epstein and Zin. The conditions center on a single test value with a natural economic interpretation. The test sheds light on the relationship between valuation of cash flows, impatience, risk adjustment, and intertemporal substitution of consumption. We propose two methods to compute the test value when an analytical solution is not available. We further provide several applications.     

Sabotage in rent-seeking contests

This article considers the interaction between two types ofeffort in lobbying contests: effort that improves the contestant'sown performance (standard rent seeking), and effort that reducesparticular rivals' performance (sabotage). Due to a positiveexternality, sabotage is a 'small number' phenomenon. Sabotagemay increase lobbying efforts and the dissipation rate in lobbyingcontests compared to a situation in which sabotage is not feasible.     

PLATFORM COMPETITION WITH ‘MUST‐HAVE’ COMPONENTS*

In platform‐component systems with indirect network effects, some ‘must‐have’ components are so popular with consumers that they create large, discrete indirect network effects when they become available on a platform. For example, ESPN is a must‐have component of cable TV platforms. This paper examines how platform market structures determine exclusive versus non‐exclusive contracts between platforms and components. It shows that a component provider is more likely to sign exclusive contracts with a single platform if its popularity is high, the platform market share difference is large, and cross‐platform indirect network effects are low.