The Right Choice at the Right Time: A Herding Experiment in Endogenous Time

Herding describes the phenomenon in decision-making where an economic agent disregards his own private information to follow the actions of his predecessors as in Banerjee (1992). With later decision-makers simply copying earlier decisions their private information cannot be inferred by other decision-makers and will be forever lost. There is some experimental evidence on simple sequential herding of this type in the literature, notably Anderson and Holt (1997). This paper differs by allowing subjects to delay their decision-making in order to benefit from observing others' actions as in more recent herding models such as Chamley and Gale (1994). The results in this paper suggest that subjects will indeed delay when their private information is not sufficiently strong. Despite this ability to wait, as predicted in the theoretical literature, cascades remained ubiquitous and more worrying still, reverse-cascades occurred in which incorrect decisions made by early decision-makers produced informational cascades on the wrong action. In an alternative design, informing subjects that they had made incorrect choices only made matters worse as subjects moved further away from rational behavior.     

Ownership of Cross–Listed Equities: An Investigation of Turnover, Diversification, and Risk

Using data for a sample of Malaysian stocks that are traded in both Malaysia and Singapore, we show that the turnover rate (trading volume relative to shares held) is significantly higher in the foreign market than in the domestic market. We also find that ownership of cross–listed shares by foreign investors is not motivated by diversification benefits. Instead, we find that the proportion of a firm's shares held in Singapore is directly related to the firm's level of systematic risk.     

Is the Optimal Labor Income Tax Progressive in a Unionized Economy?*

This paper concerns optimal nonlinear labor income taxation in an economy with union wage setting and endogenous hours of work. The purpose is to study the determinants of tax progression. We show that the optimal degree of progression of the labor income tax depends on the extent to which the government can influence the wage rate via tax policy as well as on its ability to redistribute income across individuals. In addition, the argument for progressive labor income taxation depends on whether hours of work are chosen by the employed themselves or the union.     

Relative risk aversion, relative prudence and comparative statics under uncertainty: The case of (μ, σ)‐preferences

From the expected‐utility approach, relative risk aversion being smaller than one and relative prudence being smaller than two emerge as preference restrictions that fully determine the optimal responses of decisions under uncertainty to certain shifts in probability distributions. We characterize the magnitudes of relative risk aversion and relative prudence in terms of the two‐parameter, mean‐standard deviation approach. We demonstrate that this characterization is instrumental in obtaining comparative static results in the two‐parameter setting. We further relate our findings to the results in the expected‐utility framework.     

Worker separations in a nonstationary corporate environment

Assessing ten years of unique personnel data from a large firm, this paper investigates how determinants of worker turnover differ between periods of corporate expansion and decline. Performance and career progress considerably reduce the hazard of job separation during downsizing for blue-collar workers, but are less important for white-collar workers. Effects of firm-tenure, occupation, education, training, part-time status, and gender are largely in accordance with the implications from existing models. But no model generates all patterns observed in the data. Age effects are sensitive to retirement options and discontinuous, dropping in response to the anticipation of becoming eligible for early retirement during downsizing and jumping at the actual retirement age.     

The fleeting nature of permanent reinvestment: Accounting for the undistributed earnings of foreign subsidiaries

Over the last decade, an increasing percentage of the profits reported by U.S. corporations were earned by their foreign subsidiaries and retained outside the United States resulting in the deferral of income taxes. The American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 provided a temporary federal tax incentive to remit such earnings, which resulted in the repatriation of $140 billion by the 30 firms comprising the Dow Jones Industrial Average. An analysis of the financial reporting disclosures made by these firms reveals that a tax expense was not fully recognized on a substantial portion of the earnings until repatriation because of an exception for foreign reinvestments deemed to be essentially permanent in duration. The implications of the currently acceptable accounting for undistributed foreign earnings are discussed as well as recommendations to improve the relevancy and reliability of the disclosures required for this exception to comprehensive recognition of deferred taxes.     

An alternative interpretation of multiple bounded WTP data—Certainty dependent payment card intervals

This paper analyzes the multiple bounded format, in which uncertainty is directly incorporated into the WTP question. A new approach for analyzing multiple bounded uncertainty data is presented. The intuition underlying the approach is that uncertain individuals would like to state their WTP as intervals rather than precise values and that the width of the intervals is determined by the degree of uncertainty. The approach is compared to the one applied in Welsh and Poe [Welsh, M., Poe, G.L., 1998. Elicitation effects in contingent valuation: comparisons to a multiple bounded discrete choice approach. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 36, 170–185] which treats uncertainty by conditioning responses on specific verbal probability statements. We argue that the conditioning approach overestimates mean and median WTP and that conditioning WTP estimates on probability statements like “probably” and “unsure” make them “fuzzy”. To empirically compare the two approaches we use data from 2004 concerning implementation of a predator protection policy in Sweden. Our analysis show that the suggested approach: (1) is more intuitive; (2) better fits the data; (3) estimates mean and median WTP with better precision; (4) is less sensitive to distributional assumptions; and (5) it is better suited for policy analysis.     

Understanding the Economic Factors Influencing Farm Policy Preferences

A survey conducted in Mississippi, Texas, Indiana, and Nebraska elicited producers' preferences for various farm policy changes. This permitted examination of the diversity of preferences that single-state studies have not allowed. Five policy choices, including deficiency payments, loan programs, crop insurance, export programs, and disaster payments were examined. Logit model results predicting producer preferences for each of the five dichotomous policy choices are reported. Explanatory variables based on expected utility theory such as risk aversion, price and yield variability, and price–yield correlation are significant in various models.     

Managerial Ownership, Information Content of Earnings, and Discretionary Accruals in a Non–US Setting

This study employs Danish data to examine the empirical relationship between the proportion of managerial ownership and two characteristics of accounting earnings: the information content of earnings and the magnitude of discretionary accruals. In previous research concerning American firms, Warfield et al. (1995) document a positive relationship between managerial ownership and the information content of earnings, and a negative relationship between managerial ownership and discretionary accruals. We question the generality of the Warfield et al. result, as the ownership structure found in most other countries, including Denmark, deviates from the US ownership configuration. In fact, Danish data indicate that the information content of earnings is inversely related to managerial ownership.