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Technology can help to reduce inefficiencies and inequalities in developing countries. Although whether this happens in practice often depends on the social and geographic context. Deployment of solar home systems (SHS) across Nepal provides one such example. We examine a policy to promote SHS through a subsidy for adoption and its downstream benefits - children’s education, time allocated to agricultural and household work (both unpaid), and working for a wage. We overcome the challenges of the non-random assignment of subsidies by using geographic regression discontinuity design using (cost) distance as the assignment variable. This is based on the assumption that households cannot perfectly control the assignment variable because migrating to a different region, simply to acquire an additional solar subsidy of maximum NRs4000, is challenging and unlikely in the case of Nepal. Our results show that subsidy-eligible households are about 43% more likely to adopt SHS. We find a positive effect of the SHS adoption on the grade for age and educational z-score of children’s educations with the effect being higher on girls than boys. We also find that females are 14.2% more likely to participate and spend more time (about 19 extra days in a year) in agricultural practices by reducing their engagement in family work. However, there is no effect on the participation rates across the labour market. Results also show that males increase their contribution to household work.

This paper investigates the effects of automation and offshoring on the dynamics of the occupational distribution of employment with a focus on Western Europe between 2000 and 2016. I use a general equilibrium model with three regions, three types of workers, ICT capital, trade in final goods and endogenous offshoring. Fed with exogenous measures of ICT-capital prices and trade costs, the model replicates key features of the data. It matches the observed dynamics of offshoring to Eastern Europe and Asian countries. It also reproduces accurately the observed polarization of the labor market: abstract and manual labor increase while routine labor falls. A counterfactual experiment reveals that automation is the main driver of polarization. Since it is also the only factor that drives individuals to become abstract (highskill) workers, it is welfare enhancing. The effects of falling trade costs on labor polarization are smaller, but imply welfare gains.

In a series of experiments, we test the relative efficiency of persuasion and commitment schemes to increase and sustain contribution levels in a Voluntary Contribution Game. The design allows to compare a baseline consisting of a repeated public good game to, respectively, four manipulation treatments relying on: an information strategy, a low commitment strategy, a high commitment strategy and a promise strategy. We confirm the advantages of psychologically orientated policies as they increase the overall level of contribution and for some, that is commitment and promises, question the decreasing trend traditionally observed in long term contributions to public goods.

We present results from a repeated public goods experiment where subjects choose by vote one of two sanctioning schemes: peer-to-peer (informal) or centralized (formal). We introduce, in some treatments, a moderate amount of noise (a 10 percent probability that a contribution is reported incorrectly) affecting either one or both sanctioning environments. We find that the institution with more accurate information is always by far the most popular, but noisy information undermines the popularity of peer-to-peer sanctions more strongly than that of centralized sanctions. This may contribute to explaining the greater reliance on centralized sanctioning institutions in complex environments.

The weight assigned to public information in Keynesian beauty contest depends on the signal precision and on the degree of strategic complementarities. This experimental study shows that the response of subjects to changes in the signal precision and in the degree of strategic complementarities is qualitatively consistent with theoretical predictions, though quantitatively weaker. The weaker subjects’ response to changes in the signal precision, however, mainly drives the weight observed in the experiment, making strategic complementarities and overreaction an issue of second order.

This paper explores the spatial variation of land prices in Belgium. The originality of the methodology is threefold: (1) to work at the spatial extent of an entire country, (2) to compute several accessibility measures to all jobs and several representations of the environmental amenities and, more importantly, (3) to test the hypothesis that jobs influence land prices only in the same linguistic region. Spatial autocorrelation is accounted for by estimating spatial models. The results show that the linguistic border acts as a strong barrier in the spatial pattern of land prices and that environmental variables have no significant effect at this scale of spatial analysis.

This paper evaluates the welfare gains arising from a deeper trade integration in the European Monetary Union. To do this, the European Monetary Union is represented in a realistic way by an intertemporal general equilibrium model with incomplete financial markets, sticky prices and home bias both in private consumption and production. The model is estimated and globally not rejected by the data. Two main results emerge: (i) an increase in vertical (intermediate goods) trade implies welfare gains while (ii) an increase in horizontal trade implies welfare losses.

We investigate conditions under which a government facing a large set of small private agents can implement its desired outcome when it has only a limited commitment ability to policy actions. We show that, in static contexts, more commitment ability always improves equilibrium outcomes and, in some widely used macro models, an arbitrarily small commitment ability suffices to implement a unique outcome. This contrasts with repeated settings where reputation forces make necessary a more substantial commit- ment ability to obtain a unique outcome and, paradoxically, more commitment ability may lead to worse outcomes and/or to a wider set of equilibria. We derive implications for models of bailouts, inflation bias, and capital taxation.

This paper explores the effects of online customer ratings on debt capacity. Using a large sample of Parisian restaurants, we find a positive and economically significant relation between customer ratings and bank debt. We use the locally exogenous variation in customer ratings resulting from the rounding of scores in regression discontinuity tests to establish causality. Customer ratings affect financial policy through a reduction in cash flow risk and higher resilience to demand shocks. Restaurants with good ratings use their extra debt capacity to invest in tangible assets. Finally, favorable online ratings relax credit constraints mostly for moderately constrained restaurants.

In the face of rising income inequality (Acemoglu & Autor, 2011; Atkinson, Piketty, & Saez, 2011; Piketty, 2014; World Economic Forum, 2014), one recent proposal is to provide consumers with information about the income inequality across those involved in the production of each good, at the point of purchase. This has been shown to depress overall inequality (Hill, 2020), though its impact depends crucially on whether people are willing to pay more for goods whose production involves less income inequality. Here we investigate this largely unexplored empirical question through an incentivised, behavioural choice experiment on a representative sample of the English population. We find that a large majority are willing to pay significantly more for goods associated with less inequality. How much more people are willing to pay varies with political leaning and increases with the extent of the inequality reduction, but is positive across the political spectrum and for all studied inequality differences. Moreover, it is typically higher when inequality is reported in more intuitive and informa- tive formats. Our results bode well for the effectiveness of product-level inequality information provision as a tool for moderating income inequality, promising impacts even in markets where all goods involve relatively high inequality levels and potential participation across the political spectrum.

Crossmodal sensory correspondences between shape and taste are well-established (e.g., angular–bitter, rounded–sweet). However, the extent to which these correspondences reliably influence consumer taste judgments is less clear, as are the processes underlying the effects. This research addresses both issues. Across seven experiments, we show that whether shape–taste correspondences influence taste judgments depends on their associative strength in memory, and that a significant shape–taste correspondence spontaneously affects taste judgments only when its associative strength reaches a sufficient threshold. We further demonstrate the effects in a child development context, in which children’s age, as a naturally occurring proxy of associative strength, moderates shape–taste crossmodal effects on taste judgments. We also demonstrate that the generation of shape–taste crossmodal effects is driven by a simple spreading activation model that is moderated by associative strength, is highly automatic, and occurs even when cognitive and visual resources are constrained. The findings suggest that 1) managers must go beyond establishing simple crossmodal correspondences to determine whether sufficient thresholds are met, 2) the shape–taste associations can apply to products marketed to older children, and 3) the effects are likely to occur even in cognitively noisy retail environments.

Stunning animals before slaughter and avoiding unnecessary suffering is mandatory throughout the EU. Although the EU Animal Slaughter Regulation allows for a ‘religious exception’ departing from such a practice, it also expressly enables Member States to adopt “national rules aimed at ensuring more extensive protection of animals at the time of killing”. That’s how Denmark, Sweden and Slovenia were able to, ban slaughter without stunning tout court. The Flemish region falls short of banning un-stunned slaughter, by prescribing instead reversible stunning. This method, by rendering the animal unconscious only for the time it takes to cut its throat, seems to respect the religious requirement of it remaining alive so the blood is pumped out by its still beating heart. According to well-established scientific evidence, this method is not only less traumatizing for the animal, and makes its handling easier for the butcher, but it is also accepted by a growing number of representatives of these religious communities. However, reversible stunning - as prescribed by the Flemish region - now faces a major legal challenge across Europe, having been challenged before the Belgian Constitutional Court, which has in turn referred the matter to the Court of Justice of the EU. This amicus curiae brief argues that a legislation – like the Flemish decree in question – prescribing an alternative stunning procedure for the slaughter carried out in the context of a religious rite is permissible under Union law, not least having regard to the guarantees of religious liberty and freedom contained in the Charter. It presents reversible stunning as a method that successfully balances the apparently competing values of religious freedom expressed in ritual slaughtering on the one hand and the concern for animal welfare on the other under current EU law.

We discuss the notion of a state of the world in axiomatic decision theory, and argue that it should be viewed as an "eventuality" that is implicitly assumed to be independent of the process by which prefer- ences are observed. The distinction between states, which are assumed to resolve all uncertainty, and eventualities suggests certain limitations on the axiomatic approach for defining and measuring mental concepts (such as belief ) by observed choices

Energy efficiency projects are often executed by specialized entities, namely energy service companies (ESCOs). A typical ESCO's core business is conducted using performance-based contracts, whereby payment terms depend on the energy savings achieved. Despite their success in public, commercial, and industrial sectors, ESCOs in the residential sector are involved in fewer projects and face several challenges. First, an energy efficiency project often leads to changed consumption behavior; hence it is more difficult to evaluate the energy savings that are due to the project itself. The second challenge is that residential clients are more risk averse and, thus, less willing to contract for projects whose outcomes are uncertain. Third, a lack of monitoring protocols leads to ESCO's moral hazard problems. This paper studies ESCO contract design issues, focusing primarily on the residential market for energy efficiency. As opposed to other sectors, coordinating contracts do not exist. We show, however, that simple piecewise linear contracts work reasonably well. To improve their profitability, ESCOs can reduce uncertainty about the technology employed and/or develop ways of verifying post-project energy efficiency. Since policy makers are understandably keen to promote energy efficiency, we show also how regulations and monetary incentives can reduce inefficiencies in ESCOs' relationships and thereby maximize environmental benefits.

Many decision situations involve two or more of the following divergences from subjective expected utility: imprecision of beliefs (or ambiguity), imprecision of tastes (or multi-utility), and state dependence of utility. Examples include multi-attribute decisions under uncertainty, such as some climate decisions, where trade-offs across attributes may be state dependent. This paper proposes and characterises a model of uncertainty averse preferences that can simultaneously incorporate all three phenomena. The representation supports a principled separation of (imprecise) beliefs and (potentially state-dependent, imprecise) tastes, and we pinpoint the axiom that ensures such a separation. Moreover, the representation supports comparative statics of both beliefs and tastes, and is modular: it easily delivers special cases involving various combinations of the phenomena, as well as state-dependent multi-utility generalisations of popular ambiguity models.

This Memorandum to the European Commission presents our professional opinion on the legal and ethical issues arising from the appointment of the former President of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso as non-executive chairman and director of Goldman Sachs. We identify a number of flaws of the Opinion of the Ad Hoc Ethical Committee which considered the issue and offer our own analysis of applicable law and the action the Commission is required to take. In our view, the Opinion represents a case of maladministration, on the ground of which it should have been set aside by the Commission in unequivocal terms. On our own analysis, Mr. Barroso’s acceptance of his new appointment was ethically inappropriate and, therefore, a violation of TFEU. Further we argue that the Commission has powers to take remedial action and is legally obliged to act to enforce the EU law and to protect the interests of the EU and its reputation. We show that, contrary to most comments in the media, the expiry of the eighteen months ‘cooling-off’ period does not put Mr. Barroso on the right side of the law, and does not preclude the obligation of the Commission to take remedial action.

We investigate the conflict between the ex ante and ex post criteria of social welfare in a new framework of individual and social decisions, which distinguishes between two sources of uncertainty, here interpreted as being objective and subjective, respectively. This framework makes it possible to endow the individuals and society not only with ex ante and ex post preferences, as is usually done, but also with interim preferences of two kinds, and correspondingly, to introduce interim forms of the Pareto principle. After characterizing the two social welfare criteria, we present two compromises between them, one based on the ex ante criterion and absorbing as much as possible of the ex post criterion (Theorem 1), the other based on the ex post criterion and absorbing as much as possible of the ex ante criterion (Theorem 2). Both solutions translate the assumed Pareto conditions into weighted additive utility representations, as in Harsanyi’s Aggregation Theorem, and both attribute to the individuals common probability values on the objective source of uncertainty, and different probability values on the subjective source. We discuss these solutions in terms of the by now classic spurious unanimity argument and a novel informational argument labeled complementary ignorance. The paper complies with the standard economic methodology of basing probability and utility representations on preference axioms.

This paper explores the impact of regulations imposed by the Chinese government on the development of the Chinese IPO market between 2000 and 2011. Some of these regulations have affected the population of Chinese firms that went public domestically, some firms being excluding from the domestic IPO markets, others being induced to list abroad. We also provide evidence that, because of limits on prices and proceeds, the Chinese IPO market does not attract companies that need cash the most. Some IPO firms that raise large amounts of cash decide to pay large dividends shortly after going public, which investors interpret as evidence that their growth options were overestimated at the time of their IPO.

We study the effects of financial shocks on labor markets in a model with both labor and financial frictions, two types of productive capital, physical and intangible, and in which only the former serves as collateral. A tighter borrowing constraint in this environment leads to a fall in credit and investment, skewed in detriment of intangibles, which in its turn lowers the marginal product of labor and reduces the incentives to hire workers. When feeding into the model financial shocks estimated from the data, we find that they explain labor outcomes during the last three downturns in the US, including the sharp increase in unemployment during the great recession.

We model the decision making process used by Experts at the Canadian Innovation Centre to classify early stage venture proposals based on potential commercial success. The decision is based on thirty-seven attributes that take values in { - 1 , 0 , 1 } . We adopt a conjunctive decision framework due to Astebro and Elhedhli (2005) that selects a subset of attributes and determines two threshold values: one for the maximum allowed negatives (n) and one for minimum required positives (p). A proposal is classified as a success if the number of positives is greater than or equal to p and the number of negatives is less than or equal to n over the selected attributes. Based on a data set of 561 observations, the selection of attributes and the determination of the threshold values is modeled as a large-scale mixed integer program. Two solution approaches are explored: Benders decomposition and Tabu search. The first, was very slow to converge, while the second provided high quality solutions quickly. Tabu search provides excellent classification accuracy for predicting commercial successes as well as replicating Experts’ forecasts, opening the venue for the use of Tabu search in scoring and classification problems.

French Abstract: Cet article decrit une methode d'Action Learning pour enseigner l'intelligence situationnelle. Elle vise a aider les managers a trouver des reponses appropriees aux situations complexes de management qu'ils rencontrent. Apres avoir revu les differentes ecoles de pensee concernant le leadership et les meilleurs pratiques de management, nous definissons l'intelligence situationnelle comme l'intelligence des situations, de soi et des autres, et la capacite a reconcilier autant que possible les interets des differents acteurs impliques dans la situation. Nous utilisons les contradictions sous jacentes au management de conquete et au management de finesse comme cadre de reference. La methode "Fidelio", evolution de l'approche "Solfi" utilisee a HEC depuis 1999, utilise les theories du leadership et met l'accent sur des concepts recents ou recemment renouveles comme l'intelligence emotionnelle, la theorie des roles, les contradictions et les paradoxes, l'incertitude et l'ambiguite dans le management, etc. Les ressources pedagogiques consistent en un questionnaire, des ateliers, des entretiens individuels, et des rapports post-ateliers. Elles contribuent au developpement personnel, a la decouverte des concepts du management et a l'animation des equipes. Les participants experimentent differentes facon de se representer leurs situations et par consequent font evoluer leurs comportements de leadership. Ils prennent conscience que le leadership est contextuel et qu'il est necessaire d'utiliser des references theoriques. Ils travaillent aussi leur capacite a manager les contradictions.English Abstract: This article describes an Action Learning resource teaching situational intelligence. It aims to help managers find appropriate responses to complex management situations that they encounter. After reviewing different schools of thought concerning leadership and best management practice, we define situational intelligence as the intelligence of situations, others and oneself, and the ability to reconcile as well as possible the interests of the different actors involved in a situation. We use the contradictions underlying conquest management and finesse management as a reference framework. The "FIDELIO" method, an extension of the "SOLFI" approach used at HEC since 1999, uses leadership theories and stresses recent or newly revived concepts such as emotional intelligence, role theory, contradictions and paradoxes, uncertainty and ambiguity in management, etc. The teaching resource consists of a questionnaire, workshops, individual interviews and post-workshop reports. It contributes to personal development, to the discovery of management concepts and the communication of skills to staff. Participants experiment with different ways to represent their situations and consequently their leadership behaviors evolve. They become aware that leadership is contextual and that it is necessary to used conceptual references. They also work on their own ability to manage contradictions.

This paper advocates for the adoption of freedom of panorama in the European Union. The term “freedom of panorama” (FoP) refers to an unconditional copyright exception vis-a-vis works of architecture and sculpture placed permanently in public places. The current lack of uniformity with respect to copyright exceptions at the EU level has proven problematic to end-users, service providers and other intermediaries. It has also frustrated the ultimate goal of promoting a single internal market throughout Europe, and safeguarding freedom of expression and free movement of services throughout the EU.The current system does not harmonize copyright exceptions throughout the EU. Rather, each Member State is free to adopt copyright exceptions as it sees fit. The result is a heavily fragmented system that leaves businesses and users with the necessity to individually deal with each Member State and rights holder concerned. A mandatory exception for FoP would play a key role in guaranteeing freedom of expression, access to education and the free movement of digital services in the internal single market.FoP is critical for ensuring freedom of expression and access to education. Additionally, the growth of net companies that rely on user generated conduct (UGC), such as through YouTube, Wikipedia and blogs, has led to the constant fear among most EU citizens of violating copyright law. This reiterates the need for a FoP exception that covers both commercial and non-commercial uses. Furthermore, many new cross-border educational initiatives in Europe do not fall within the “non-commercial educational and scientific research purposes” exempted under the current InfoSoc Directive. Some national systems that broadly extend the education exception to uses that fall outside the “non-commercial” definition do not extend the exception to online uses.The EU Copyright Directive should be re-written to include a mandatory FoP provision, as is already the case in the national law of EU Member States such as the United Kingdom and Germany, as well as third countries like Brazil. This solution would also comply with copyright-protective countries’ call – among them Italy, Spain and France – for such an exhaustive list. This solution would provide clear direction to Member States without becoming an overly lengthy and unwieldy document.Several problems remain with this approach. First, there has been reticence on the part of the European Court of Human Rights to protect FoP from a freedom of expression standpoint when the images’ use was commercial. Second, there is the possibility for Member States to use trademark law, cultural heritage law, or other national laws to get around a mandatory FoP exception. The uses of trademark and cultural heritage law do not pose a significant barrier to a mandatory FoP exception at present. However, the reforms ultimately decided upon must take into account the possibility of the use of this law to frustrate the Directive’s objectives.The HEC-NYU EU Public Interest Clinic (the “Clinic”) presents its justifications for a mandatory FoP exception below. We also include an annex and model legislation that addresses many of the deficiencies of current EU law.

This paper empirically investigates the effects of banks triggering contingent capital instruments by studying liability management exercises, which bear comparable regulatory capital effects. These actions create core tier one capital by crystalizing losses on hybrid debt holders. Banks' use of liability management exercises, and the market reaction to them, are consistent with these exercises relaxing a regulatory capital constraint. The created value mainly accrues to debt holders, and does not generate a negative signal. Liability management exercises prove effective at improving bank capitalization levels. These findings strengthen the case for contingent capital instruments as an alternative to raising bank capital requirements.

Warm-glow refers to other-serving behavior that is valuable for the actor per se, apart from its social implications. We provide axiomatic foundations for warm-glow by viewing it as a form of preference for larger choice sets driven by one's desire for freedom to act selfishly. Specifically, an individual who experiences warm-glow values the availability of selfish options even if she plans to act unselfishly. Our theory accommodates the empirical findings on motivation crowding out and provides clear-cut predictions for empirically distinguishing between warm-glow and other motivations for prosocial behavior, a task of obvious importance for policy. The choice behavior implied by our theory subsumes Riker and Ordeshook (1968) on voting and Andreoni (1989, 1990) on the provision of public goods.

Firms that are slow in the execution of investment projects often incur substantial revenue losses. However, accelerating investments generally results in higher investment costs. In this paper, we integrate this investment speed tradeoff in a reduced-form model of project development to create an empirical proxy for firm speed. We examine how deviations from industry-average speed in the execution of large investments in oil and gas facilities worldwide from 1996 to 2005 impact firm value, as measured by Tobin's q. We find that there is substantial variation in investment speed among firms in the oil and gas industry. Using a linear correlated random parameter model to account for unobserved firm heterogeneity, we show that faster firms have higher firm value when speed results from firms' dynamic capabilities. On average, accelerating a firm's investments by 5% (or 1 month) below the industry norm due to dynamic capabilities increases market value by $214.3 million. Additionally, we show that the effect of speed on firm value varies widely among firms and is amplified by good corporate governance but often mitigated by the level of firms' debt.