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Existing theoretical and empirical work on contracting highlights the efficiency gains possible from optimizing asset ownership when projects span firm boundaries. However, in settings where firms are able to choose among heterogenous projects, asset ownership can also determine which projects are selected for execution. Using a regulatory shock to the US broadcast television industry, this study finds restricting television network ownership over television shows altered the types of shows commissioned by the networks. This result extends prior theoretical and empirical work on contracting by showing asset ownership not only determines the efficiency of outcomes given a project but also can change the relative attractiveness of different projects. The relationship between asset ownership and project selection is especially important in innovation contexts where project selection has a cumulative effect by changing the marginal returns to future projects; an industry’s contracting environment can therefore be a driver of the direction of innovation.

Real estate—housing in particular—is a less profitable investment in the long run than previously thought. We hand-collect property-level financial data for the institutional real estate portfolios of four large Oxbridge colleges over the period 1901–1983. Gross income yields initially fluctuate around 5%, but then trend downward (upward) for agricultural and residential (commercial) real estate. Long-term real income growth rates are close to zero for all property types. Our findings imply annualized real total returns, net of costs, ranging from approximately 2.3% for residential to 4.5% for agricultural real estate.

We examine whether a firm’s decision to disclose non-financial proprietary information depends on peer disclosures of similar information. Using a sample of 5,035 unique clinical trials by U.S. pharmaceutical firms over the 2007-2014 period, we find that the firm is less likely to disclose its own clinical trial results if peers have published clinical trial results pertaining to the same medical condition. Conditional on disclosing clinical trial results, the firm is also less likely to disclose the trial results on time when peers have disclosed their clinical trial results. Our cross-sectional tests suggest that proprietary costs of disclosure play an important role in the relation between peer disclosures and the firm’s own disclosure. In particular, the negative relation is more pronounced when proprietary costs of disclosure are higher. Taken together, our findings provide new evidence on the interplay between peer and own disclosures of non-financial proprietary information.

The current paper complements and extends traditional Penrosean theories of firm growth by examining how a (supplier) firm’s relational embeddedness with its portfolio of existing buyers affects its business growth. Our theorizing rests on the foundation that a firm’s business growth stems from its breadth (or volume) of opportunities for creating added value with buyers, which more fully realizes the Penrosean vision that firm growth can be explained by a dynamic interaction between productive resources and demand-side market opportunities. While relational embeddedness may give a supplier some dyadic advantages with focal buyers, we theorize that it may lead to a narrower set of future added value business opportunities with the (supplier) firm’s entire portfolio of buyers. In addition, we hypothesize that this negative effect on business growth is moderated by a set of relational and demand-side attributes. These hypotheses are tested on a panel dataset of patent law firms (suppliers) and their relationships with corporate clients (buyers). Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that greater relational embeddedness is associated with slower supplier business growth, which is alleviated when these firms have greater cross-servicing ability and receive more relational commitment from buyers, but exacerbated when suppliers hold more buyer-specific knowledge and when buyers undertake more (internal) concurrent sourcing. In turn, our research demonstrates how the attributes of a supplier’s relationships with its portfolio of buyers can impact access to new business opportunities, and thus opens up new directions for research on firm growth, demand-side strategy and buyer-supplier relationships.

Do the rich always get richer by investing in a cryptocurrency for which new coins are issued according to a proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol? We answer this question in the negative: Without trading, the investor shares in the cryptocurrency are martingales that converge to a well-defined limiting distribution and, hence, are stable in the long run. This result is robust to allowing trading when investors are risk neutral. Then, investors have no incentive to accumulate coins and gamble on the PoS protocol but weakly prefer not to trade. This paper was accepted by Kay Giesecke, finance.

Unrealized gains and losses on available-for-sale securities (AFSGL) are included in Other Comprehensive Income (OCI) and directly affect shareholders’ equity but are not included in earnings. We investigate whether unrealized AFSGL help predict future earnings and whether analysts and investors incorporate the information conveyed by unrealized AFSGL in a timely manner. We conduct our investigation on a sample of banks because unrealized AFSGL are material in the banking industry. First, we show that unrealized AFSGL are material and help in predicting next period realized AFSGL and future earnings change. Second, we document that financial analysts are slow to react to unrealized AFSGL and update their forecasts after AFSGL are realized in earnings. Third, we find that investors are also slow to react to unrealized AFSGL and do so only after AFSGL are included (realized) in earnings and after financial analysts update their forecasts. We document an annual difference of 5% in future abnormal returns between banks in the top and bottom quintiles of past unrealized AFSGL. A zero-cost trading strategy that relies on public information about unrealized AFSGL generates a sizeable monthly alpha that ranges between 1.8% and 1.9%.

Scotland is the first jurisdiction in the world to introduce a minimum price per unit of alcohol to reduce consumption. The relevant industry did not hesitate to challenge this new alcohol control policy before courts. The ensuing judgment contains a wealth of insights stemming from regulatory autonomy to proportionality review. What is the role of a national court in the review of national measures restricting free movement? In particular, how should it review the proportionality of those measures when adopted on public health grounds, and on the basis of what evidence? What is the burden of proof that the relevant Member State must discharge? Those are essentially the questions referred by a Scottish court to the Court of Justice when called upon to determine the compatibility with EU law of Minimum Unit Prices for alcohol introduced by the Scottish Government. Although rather recurrent in the Court’s free movement case law, the question of the standard of review, and corresponding burden of proof epitomises the struggle currently faced by national courts in striking the right balance between the proper functioning of the market and due recognition and protection of national regulatory autonomy. As such, this preliminary reference offered an opportunity to address “the information gap on what the Court of Justice expects defendant States to establish” in order to justify their measures under the proportionality stages of free movement analysis. But there is more. This case also raises deeper epistemic and methodological questions faced by any court of law when asked to review the proportionality, and in particular the necessity, of an individual policy intervention that belongs to a wider ‘political strategy’. Indeed, those strategies – as exemplified in the present case by the Scottish policy designed to combat the devastating effects of alcohol – generally entail the enactment of a full ‘regulatory mix’ of policy interventions. In those circumstances, how can we pinpoint the effect of a given policy option when it is part of a set of measures? How can we distinguish the effect, in terms of health gains deriving from a drop in alcohol consumption, to be ascribed to the introduction of MUP when such a measure coexists with other measures (more than 40 in Scotland) that have been introduced? And what when the contested measure has never been tested before? While this judgment confirms the gradual empirical turn made by the Court in its own review of the proportionality of national restrictive measures, it also provides some pragmatic guidance on how national courts may realistically engage in that review. Given the growing number of Member States ready to experiment with new policies aimed at tackling inter alia lifestyle risk factors, such as tobacco use, harmful consumption of alcohol and unhealthy diets, this appears as welcome development. Ultimately, the ensuing number of national restrictive measures of trade enacted on public health grounds, such as the UK standardised packaging for cigarettes, its sugar tax or the Hungarian ‘fat tax’, is set to put to test the Court’s approach towards both the qualification of those measures as restrictions and their justification under EU law.

Stock prices occasionally move in response to unverified rumors. I propose a cheap talk model in which a rumormonger’s incentives to tell the truth depend on the interaction between her investment horizon and the information acquisition decisions of message-receiving investors. The model’s key prediction is that short investment horizons can facilitate credible information sharing between investors, thereby accelerating the information capitalization into market prices. Analyzing a data set of takeover rumors covered by U.S. newspapers, I find suggestive evidence in support of this prediction. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

This paper contains the on on-line appendix to the paper with the same title forthcoming in ILRR.; Is the Bayh-Dole intellectual property regime associated with more and better academic entrepreneurship than the Professor Privilege regime? The authors examine data on US PhDs in the natural sciences, engineering, and medical fields who became entrepreneurs in 1993–2006 and compare this to similar data from Sweden. They find that, in both countries, those with an academic background have lower rates of entry into entrepreneurship than do those with a non-academic background. The relative rate of academics starting entrepreneurial firms is slightly lower in the United States than in Sweden. Moreover, the mean economic gains from becoming an entrepreneur are negative, both for PhDs originating in academia and non-academic settings in both countries. Analysis indicates that selection into entrepreneurship occurs from the lower part of the ability distribution among academics. The results suggest that policies aimed at supporting entrepreneurial decisions by younger, tenure-track academics may be more effective than general incentives at increasing academic entrepreneurship in general.

Problem Definition: Project managers are responsible for setting and then revising projects' goals. As uncertainty related to project performance is resolved, a project manager is tasked with comparing ongoing costs, and potentially achieved scope, to a baseline plan. We question whether project managers can rationally anticipate and track this revision process. Academic/Practical Relevance: In practice, projects often fail to meet their goals and are subject to changes in scope, cost, and scheduled time. We consider the implications of behavioral tendencies and the revision strategy on decisions made and on overall project performance. Methodology: Our stylized model compares a rational project manager to a behavioral one. Specifically, we offer a framework for modeling mental accounting—which includes loss aversion and reference point updating—and narrow framing. We use the model to explore how project-level decisions are made. Results: We show that mental accounting results in insufficient adjustments of project scope and cost during revisions, and prevents abandoning projects even when doing so is optimal. Ultimately, mental accounting and narrow framing decrease projects' actual profits. Managerial Implications: We offer practical prescriptions for mitigating harmful effects of loss aversion, reference-point updating, and narrow framing. Beyond training, hiring less loss averse project managers, and practicing scenario planning, we show that reviewing a project using a cost milestone instead of a scope milestone helps maintain the reference cost equal to the budgeted cost, thereby inducing overall better decisions.

This article examines what difference – if any – the renewed EU Better Regulation Agenda has made for the EU Commission in terms of its own accountability and policy outcomes. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. By embracing such a panem et circenses approach to EU democracy – as such not too dissimilar from the Santer’s and Barroso’s previous administrations – the Juncker Commission raised new expectations. This is true not only in terms of output legitimacy – which was meant to become the privileged benchmark against which to measure the Commission’s success –, but also in terms of its own democratic and political accountability vis-à-vis EU citizens. Indeed, although unintelligible to the many, the Spitzenkandidaten logic entails that EU citizens contributed for the first time with their vote to shape the political orientation of this Commission and – as a result – could hold it accountable. While the very notion of political accountability is foreign to the EU constitutional setting – as citizens don’t have the possibility to replace the Commission if this does not meet their hopes –, the Juncker Commission has strived to frame its mandate as if such an oversight existed. This article concludes that at the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.

Problem definition: Contrary to classic applications of matching theory, in most contemporary on-demand service platforms, matches can not be enforced because workers are flexible – they choose their tasks. Such flexibility makes it difficult to manage workers while keeping customers satisfied. We build a framework to compare platform matching policies with less flexible and more flexible workers, and empirically quantify by how much worker flexibility hurts customer satisfaction and customer equity. Academic/Practical relevance: In academic literature, there is no established framework that allows for the comparison of matching policies in on-demand platforms. Further, the link between worker flexibility and customer satisfaction is understudied. Methodology: We propose a tripartite framework for empirical evaluation and comparison of the operational policies with different degrees of worker flexibility. Step 1: Predictive modeling of customer satisfaction based on estimation of individual unobservable characteristics: customer difficulty and worker ability (item-response theory model). Step 2: Evaluation of the effect of matching policy (under a given level of flexibility) on customer satisfaction (bipartite matching). Step 3: Quantification of the associated monetary impact (customer lifetime value model). Results: We apply our framework to the dataset of one of the world's largest on-demand platforms for residential cleanings. We find that customer difficulty and cleaner ability are good predictors of customer satisfaction. Granting full flexibility to workers reduces customer satisfaction by 3% and customer lifetime revenue by 0.2%. We propose a family of matching policies that provide sufficient flexibility to workers, while alleviating 75% of the detrimental effect of worker flexibility on customer satisfaction. Managerial implications: Our results suggest that, in platforms with flexible workforce, the presence of worker and customer heterogeneity reduces customer satisfaction through matching inefficiency. Our empirical framework helps practitioners to decide on the right level of worker flexibility and the means for achieving it.

We examine the impact of a new mobile-based, dockless bike-sharing service on public transportation. In contrast to traditional rental bikes that are parked at fixed stations, the dockless bikes can be picked up and returned at literally anywhere. This dockless feature of the shared bikes likely provides a solution to the last mile problem, potentially making it a complement to public transportation. Assembling a unique panel data of shared-bike rides and subway traffic, we estimate the relationship between shared-bike ridership and public transportation. Our results show that increases in shared-bike rides lead to increases in subway traffic. This positive effect is stronger for peak hours during weekdays and non-peak hours during weekends. We argue this effect is most likely driven by shared bikes promoting public transportation use and substituting for private cars (substitution effect) and also stimulating new travel (stimulating effect). Overall, we find that dockless shared bikes, in contrast to most of the other sharing economy phenomenon, acts as a complement rather than a substitute for public transportation. In addition, increased use of dockless shared bikes has a positive societal impact, leading to less urban congestion and better environmental protection.

Advances in robotics now permit humans to work collaboratively with robots. However, humans often feel unsafe working alongside robots. Our knowledge of how to help humans overcome this issue is limited by two challenges. One, it is difficult, expensive and time-consuming to prototype robots and set up various work situations needed to conduct studies in this area. Two, we lack strong theoretical models to predict and explain perceived safety and its influence on human–robot work collaboration (HRWC). To address these issues, we introduce the Robot Acceptance Safety Model (RASM) and employ immersive virtual environments (IVEs) to examine perceived safety of working on tasks alongside a robot. Results from a between-subjects experiment done in an IVE show that separation of work areas between robots and humans increases perceived safety by promoting team identification and trust in the robot. In addition, the more participants felt it was safe to work with the robot, the more willing they were to work alongside the robot in the future.

This time was supposed 'to be different', at least this was the motto of the 2014 European Parliament elections campaign. With less than a year before the next European elections, the time is ripe to examine how different this EU political cycle has actually been. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. While the Better Regulation Agenda might have improved the Commission’s public accountability – with both citizens and stakeholders being better informed about and engaged with EU policy-making –, without however increasing its responsiveness to public preferences. This is the case at the input, throughput and output stage. Rather, the techno-political approach to policymaking – which characterizes the Juncker’s Better Regulation – might have paradoxically led to a compression of participatory democracy and somehow chilled stakeholder engagement. At a time of unprecedented contestation of the EU project – a trend which is combined by a record-demand for new forms of political representation –, it appears paradoxical that the EU – an early promoter of participation – is missing out the chance to seize the momentum to diversify and redesign its participatory structures being busy delivering on its electoral promises no one will ever judge.At the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.

Engaging in unethical consumption behaviors is an acute societal problem that can have severe consequences for adolescents, and businesses in particular have been accused of making such consumption particularly appealing and accessible. However, the causes of unethical behaviors are not well understood and research on the causes has been mixed. In this research, we investigate the effects of coping strategies for loneliness on adolescents’ adoption of unethical behaviors, a topic that business ethics research has not explored. In a large-scale study (n = 409) of adolescents (ages 13–17), we show that whether loneliness leads to the adoption of unethical behaviors depends on the strategies adolescents use to cope with their loneliness: active coping strategies are associated with fewer unethical behaviors, whereas passive coping strategies are associated with more unethical behaviors. In addition, we show that active and passive coping strategies can be executed through consumption practices. We show that the relation between active coping and fewer unethical behaviors is mediated by sharing of possessions, whereas the relation between passive coping strategies and more unethical behaviors is mediated by product acquisition. Finally, we also show that these mediated relations differ as a function of age cohort (grade level). The indirect effect of active coping on fewer unethical behaviors via sharing holds only for middle school adolescents, whereas the indirect effect of passive coping on more unethical behaviors via product acquisition holds only for high school adolescents. We shed new light on both the bright and dark sides of materialism and unethical behaviors and provide practical implications for research on loneliness, business ethics, and unethical behaviors.

International audience; What causes adolescents to develop consumer’ ethical beliefs? Prior research has largely focused on the negative influence of peers and negative patterns of parent–child interactions to explain risky and unethical consumer behaviors. We take a different perspective by focusing on the positive support of parents and peers in adolescent social development. An integrative model is developed that links parental and peer support with adolescents’ self-worth motives, their materialistic tendencies, and their consumer ethical beliefs. In a study of 984 adolescents, we demonstrate support for a sequential mediation model in which peer and parental support is positively related to adolescents’ self-esteem and feelings of power, which are each associated with decreased materialism as a means of compensating for low self-worth. This reduced materialism is, in turn, associated with more ethical consumer beliefs.

We propose a new model of interdealer trading. Dealers trade together to reduce their inventory holding costs. Core dealers share these costs efficiently and provide liquidity to peripheral dealers, who have heterogeneous access to core dealers. We derive predictions about the effects of peripheral dealers' connectedness to core dealers and the allocation of aggregate inventories between core and peripheral dealers on the distribution of interdealer prices, the efficiency of interdealer trades, and trading costs for the dealers' clients. For instance, the dispersion of interdealer prices is higher when fewer peripheral dealers are connected to core dealers or when their aggregate inventory is higher.

An important challenge for many firms is to identify the life transitions of its customers, such as job searching, expecting a child, or purchasing a home. Inferring such transitions, which are generally unobserved to the firm, can offer the firms opportunities to be more relevant to their customers. In this paper, we demonstrate how a social network platform can leverage its longitudinal user data to identify which of its users are likely to be job seekers. Identifying job seekers is at the heart of the business model of professional social network platforms. Our proposed approach builds on the hidden Markov model (HMM) framework to recover the latent state of job search from noisy signals obtained from social network activity data. Specifically, we use the latent states of the HMM to fuse cross-sectional survey responses to a job-seeking status question with longitudinal user activity data, resulting in a partially HMM. Thus, in some time periods, and for some users, we observe a direct measure of the true job-seeking status. We demonstrate that the proposed model can predict not only which users are likely to be job seeking at any point in time but also what activities on the platform are associated with job search and how long the users have been job seeking. Furthermore, we find that targeting job seekers based on our proposed approach can lead to a 29% increase in profits of a targeting campaign relative to the approach that was used by the social network platform. This paper was accepted by Juanjuan Zhang, marketing.

Automakers, including Toyota and General Motors, were recently caught by the U.S. regulator for deliberately hiding product defects in an attempt to avoid massive recalls. Interestingly, regulators in the United States and United Kingdom employ different policies in informing consumers about potential defects: the U.S. regulator publicly announces all ongoing investigations of potential defects to provide consumers with early information, whereas the UK regulator does not. To understand how these different announcement policies may affect cover-up decisions of automakers, we model the strategic interaction between a manufacturer and a regulator. We find that, under both countries’ policies, the manufacturer has an incentive to cover up a potential defect when there is a high chance that the defect indeed exists and it may inflict only moderate harm. However, if there is only a moderate chance that the defect exists, only under the U.S. policy does the manufacturer have an incentive to cover up a potential defect with significant harm. We show that the U.S. policy generates higher social welfare only for very serious issues for which both the expected harm and recall cost are very high and the defect is likely to exist. We make four policy recommendations that could help mitigate manufacturers’ cover-ups, including a hybrid policy in which the regulator conducts a confidential investigation of a potential defect only when it may inflict significant harm. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

We argue that a precedent is important not only because it changes the relative frequency of a certain event, making it positive rather than zero, but also because it changes the way that relative frequencies are weighed. Specifically, agents assess probabilities of future events based on past occurrences, where not all of these occurrences are deemed equally relevant. More similar cases are weighed more heavily than less similar ones. Importantly, the similarity function is also learnt from experience by "second-order induction". The model can explain why a single precedent affects beliefs above and beyond its effect on relative frequencies, as well as why it is easier to establish reputation at the outset than to re-establish it after having lost it. We also apply the model to equilibrium selection in a class of games dubbed "Statis- tical Games", suggesting the notion of Similarity-Nash equilibria, and illustrate the impact of precedents on the play of coordination games.

We use French matched employer-employee data to track skilled individuals entering the labor market during the late 1990s tech bubble. The boom led to a sharp increase in the share of skilled entrants in the tech sector, which offers relative higher wages at the time. When the boom ends, however, the wage premium reverses and these skilled workers end up with a 5.5% wage discount ten years out, relative to similar peers who started in a non-tech sector. Other moments of the wage distribution of the boom, pre-boom, and post-boom cohorts are inconsistent with explanations based on a selection effect or a cycle effect. Instead, we provide suggestive evidence that workers allocated to the booming tech sector accumulate human capital early in their career that rapidly becomes obsolete.

International audience; This article examines the concept of “significant imbalance” (SI) under French law and its impact on international business transactions. “Significant imbalance” is a legal standard meant to assess whether a contractual clause is unfair (abusive). Although initially restricted to consumer law, it has been extended to general contract law with the implementation of a reform entered into force on 1st October 2016. Previously, the Commercial Court of Paris in the ruling Ministry of Economy et al. v. Expedia, Inc. et al. (2015) had qualified SI as an “overriding mandatory provision” (loi de police) under EU Regulation No. 593/2008 on the applicable law to contractual obligations (Rome I). As a consequence, SI became operative in respect of international contracts despite an express choice of a foreign governing law made by the parties to the transaction. This article argues that, as a result of Expedia and the 2016 reform, French courts can interfere with international business transactions by striking down contractual terms that they deem unfair according to the SI standard. The analysis focuses on two key issues. On the one hand, notwithstanding recent judicial precedents, SI still fails to provide a reliable test for predicting which clauses or contracts are at risk of being deemed unfair. On the other hand, the legal arsenal supporting French legislator’s disapproval of SI allocates great power to French courts and the French government to pursue tort lawsuits against foreign companies allegedly oppressing their commercial partners with SI clauses. Empirical evidence shows that these actions are highly successful compared to those commenced by private actors. The article concludes that all these aspects, together with SI’s turbulent case-law throughout the years, will sprout uncertainty in international business transactions and may eventually disparage France in the global competition in such a field.

The EU’s approach to fake news, as epitomised by the European External Action (EEAS) Service East Stratcom Disinformation Review, violates the rights to freedom of expression and due process of those accused of distributing disinformation. The EU Disinformation Review is a publication of the European External Action Service (the European Union’s diplomatic service) to target fake news and online disinformation. Following our request for access to documents, EEAS conceded that the EU Disinformation Review uses an “ad hoc” methodology for conducting its fact-checks, which makes it an outlier in the international fact-checking community led by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). Despite being a well-intentioned initiative to respond to the challenges posed by pro-Kremlin disinformation, the EU should ensure the respect of fundamental rights when engaging in fact-checking. The EU Disinformation Review seeks to control the right to freedom of expression by labelling publishers as “disinforming outlets” and their content as “disinformation,” creating a chilling effect on the work of journalists that is central to democracy. The right to freedom of expression is expressed in Article 11.1 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2000/C 364/01) and Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The labelling of publishers as “disinformation outlets” is contrary to principle of the freedom of press established by the European Court of Human Rights: “[a] general requirement for journalists systematically and formally to distance themselves from the content of a quotation that might insult or provoke others or damage their reputation is not reconcilable with the press’ role of providing information on current events, opinion and ideas.” In addition, the methodology used by EEAS in the EU Disinformation Review is “ad hoc,” which constitutes a violation of the fundamental right to good administration in Article 41 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights. Specifically, the ad hoc design and operation of the EU Disinformation Review fails to ensure the review acts “impartially, fairly and within a reasonable time.” First, publications are not provided with the right to be heard or proper notice. The EU Disinformation Review’s homepage offers an opportunity to contact the Task Force report a suspected mistake in a fact-check but the page is only available in English, in violation of the principle of multilingualism, and no notice if given to outlets accused of being “disinforming outlets” before or after fact-checks of their content are published. Second, the EEAS does not fulfil its duty to motivate. EEAS is given a broad margin of discretion to identify disinformation, but fails to do so according to a consistent methodology. Therefore, EEAS cannot justify, on the basis of objective criteria, its choice of which content to review and how to determine its truth or falsehood. To comply with EU law and ensure the respect of fundamental rights, the EEAS should develop and make public (1) a methodology for selecting partnerships and reviewing fact-checks in line with international standards and (2) a notice and response mechanism for journalists, publishers and citizens whose content is being reviewed. If EEAS is unable to comply with the above, the EU Disinformation Review should be shut down.

How do resolution frameworks affect the private restructuring of distressed banks? We model a distressed bank’s shareholders and creditors negotiating a restructuring given asymmetric information about asset quality and externalities onto the government. This yields negotiation delays used to signal asset quality. We find that strict bail-in rules increase delays by worsening informational frictions and reducing bargaining surplus. We characterize optimal bail-in rules for the government. We then consider the government’s possible involvement in negotiations. We find this can lead to shorter or longer delays. Notably, the government may gin from committing not to partake in negotiations.

Relying on a literal interpretation of Weber's law in psychophysics, we show that a simple condition of independence across good categories implies the Cobb-Douglas preferences.

We consider a decision maker who follows a status quo without reconsidering her implicit decision at every period. Only as a result of certain events will she ask herself whether she would like to change her choice. We ask when this mode of decision making is compatible with optimality. We state conditions on the set of databases that would make the decision maker take an explicit decision, which are equivalent to the following representation: the decision maker entertains a set of theories, of which one is that her current choice is the best; she is inert as long as that theory beats any alternative theory according to a maximum likelihood criterion.

Decision theory offers a formal approach to decision making, which is often viewed and taught as the rational way to approach managerial decisions. Half a century ago it generated high hopes of capturing and perhaps replacing intuition, and providing the “right” answer in practically all managerial situations. Today it seems fair to say that decision theory has not lived up to these expectations. Behavioral science provides ample evidence that managers fail to follow the dicta of decision theory, even when these are explained to them. As a result, executives often find decision theory frustrating and useless and prefer to rely on their intuition. This paper suggests that this extreme conclusion is unwarranted and calls for a re-appraisal of decision theory. We propose that it should not always be regarded as a mathematical tool that produces the answer; rather, it can be viewed as a framework for a dialog between the decision maker and the decision theorist. In one extreme, the decision theorist studies the problem and provides the “correct’’ answer. But in another, the decision theorist only challenges the decision maker’s intuition and logic. In between, a whole gamut of possible dialogs exists, in which decision theory doesn’t replace intuition, but supports and refines it.

Firms sometimes obtain soft private information about growth prospects along with hard information about current or past performance. In this environment, we find that optimizing disclosures over multiple periods yields nonlinear stock price reactions following both voluntary and mandatory disclosures. Further, we derive several predictions about distinct short-run and long-run effects of disclosures and nondisclosures on security prices. Under specified conditions, when the volatility of the firm’s earnings increases, the average contemporaneous and prospective post-mandatory disclosure market premia (for voluntary disclosures over nondisclosures) rise, while farther-in-future market discounts (for such voluntary disclosures) also become larger. Our analysis moreover predicts that both the disclosure probability and the information content of nondisclosures can increase in the persistence of earnings.

We use clickstream data to show that investors' demand for information about macroeconomic factors affecting the path of future interest rates is a measure of their uncertainty about this path. In particular, an increase in information demand ahead of influential economic announcements affecting investors' beliefs about future interest rates predicts a stronger reaction of U.S. Treasury note yields to these announcements, as it should if information demand covaries positively with uncertainty. This relationship does not vanish after using standard measures of uncertainty as predictors, suggesting that clickstream data contain unique information about investors' uncertainty.

French Abstract: Les economistes ont coutume de distinguer entre une composante positive et une composante normative de leurs travaux, ce qui est une singularite de leur discipline, car cette distinction n'a pas de repondant exact dans les autres sciences sociales. Elle a fortement evolue au cours du temps et les differentes manieres de la concevoir aujourd'hui en refletent l'histoire. On se propose ici d'en retracer les origines et les premieres formes, de l'economie politique classique anglaise de la premiere moitie du XIXe siecle jusqu'a l'apparition de l'economie du bien-etre dans la premiere moitie du XXe siecle. Ce parcours sequentiel vise aussi a identifier les positions les plus representatives et les arguments invoques pour les soutenir, en preparant ainsi une discussion qui serait moins historique et plus strictement conceptuelle. English Abstract: Economists are accustomed to distinguishing between a positive and a normative component of their work, a distinction that is peculiar to their field, having no exact counterpart in the other social sciences. The distinction has substantially changed over time, and the different ways of understanding it today are reflective of its history. Our objective is to trace the origins and initial forms of the distinction, from the English classical political economy of the first half of the 19th century to the emergence of welfare economics in the first half of the 20th century. This sequential account will also serve to identify the main representative positions along with the arguments used to support them, and it thus prepares the ground for a discussion that will be less historical and more strictly conceptual.

This is a study of analysts’ use of accounting information for valuation purposes in a venture capital setting. This setting is characterized in terms of the distinctive scouting and coaching work of venture capital funders, and the unproven and incomplete nature of the ventures and entrepreneurs, which seek funding to scale operations, pivot into new markets, internationalize, or undertake some other kind of fundamental change. Based on interviews with entrepreneurs (project-makers) and venture funders (analysts), a four phase model of valuation is proposed. The model illuminates that, in contrast with common assumptions in the existing literature, accounting is mobilized neither to reveal truth nor constitute knowledge about the objects of investment, but to promise and to care. This paper articulates these two concepts in the context of accounting. Promising is shown to be a means not to implement a predesigned business plan and a budgeted set of activities but to commit to a new and unclear future and agree high and sometimes unrealistic expectations. Caring is shown not to be a means to predict a final fate for the organization, but to give and take, interact and sometimes discipline in order to determine what is necessary to preserve and possible to change. Understanding that what is valued is not what exists but what is possible to create helps to resolve puzzles about accounting’s uncertain and ambiguous status and significance in the entrepreneurial economy. It also and more generally illustrates how accounting operates in relation to an unknowable object and future: not as a means to know or reveal but to write and rewrite a daring and ambitious narrative in which the protagonists (here the project-maker and venture) become something else (a manager and an organization).

We develop an asset pricing model to analyze the joint impact of liquidity costs and market segmentation. The freely traded securities command a premium for liquidity level and global market and liquidity risk premiums whereas securities that can only be held by a subset of investors additionally command a local market and liquidity risk premiums. Based on a new methodology, we find that the liquidity level premium dominates the liquidity risk premiums for our sample of 24 emerging markets. Whereas the local liquidity risk premium is empirically small, the global market liquidity risk premium dramatically increases during crises and market corrections.

We provide a new methodology to empirically investigate the respective roles of systematic and idiosyncratic skewness in explaining expected stock returns. Using a large number of predictors, we forecast the cross-sectional ranks of systematic and idiosyncratic skewness which are easier to predict than their actual values. Compared to other measures of ex ante systematic skewness, our forecasts create a significant spread in ex post systematic skewness. A predicted systematic skewness risk factor carries a significant risk premium that ranges from 7% to 12% per year and is robust to the inclusion of downside beta, size, value, momentum, profitability, and investment factors. In contrast to systematic skewness, the role of idiosyncratic skewness in pricing stocks is less robust. Finally, we document how the determinants of systematic and idiosyncratic skewness differ.

Agents make predictions based on similar past cases, while also learning the relative importance of various attributes in judging similarity. We ask whether the resulting "empirical similarity" is unique, and how easy it is to find it. We show that with many observations and few relevant variables, uniqueness holds. By contrast, when there are many variables relative to observations, non-uniqueness is the rule, and finding the best similarity function is computationally hard. The results are interpreted as providing conditions under which rational agents who have access to the same observations are likely to converge on the same predictions, and conditions under which they may entertain different probabilistic beliefs.

Problem definition: Process innovation is commonly claimed to be a major source of competitive advantage for firms. Despite this perceived influence it has received substantially less attention than product innovation and much uncertainty remains about its true association with firm performance. We investigate the relationship between a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm's process-innovation portfolio and its economic performance. Academic/Practical relevance: Our study uniquely conducts a multi-dimensional evaluation of a firm's portfolio of process innovations at the product level. This allows a quantitative evaluation of both the relative benefit of the different dimensions of a portfolio as well as the potential complementarities between these. Methodology: Through a collaboration with expert patent attorneys we develop a unique longitudinal dataset that combines secondary data and evaluations of a firm's portfolio of process patents along three key dimensions: novelty, scope, and locus. We conduct econometric analyses for a large-scale sample of drugs open to competition from generics, where process innovation is the main source of competitive advantage. Results: We find a positive association between overall process innovation and firm performance. When differentiating between dimensions of process innovation, results further suggest that high novelty is beneficial, and complemented by a broad scope, but only for patents applying to the later phase of the pharmaceutical manufacturing process. Managerial Implications: Our results provide important practical insights that can inform process-related R&D investments in the pharmaceutical sector. In particular, it may not be economically beneficial to invest in high-novelty process innovations in early production stages, which are characterized by numerous opportunities to innovate with potentially higher but less predictable economic payoffs. On the other hand, at later stages of the production process, where the opportunities to innovate are less numerous with potentially lower but more predictable economic payoffs, portfolios that are jointly characterized by high novelty and high scope could be more valuable.

This article hinges on the preliminary ruling rendered by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) (Grand Chamber) on 18 October 2016 and the related judgment of the German Federal Labour Court of 26 April 2017 in the Nikiforidis case to investigate an area of private international law that is undergoing a substantial development: overriding mandatory provisions. In Nikiforidis, the CJEU excluded that two Greek laws cutting the salary of public employees may be enforced against a teacher working in Germany for the Greek Government under an employment contract governed by German law. The question addressed to the CJEU was whether the said laws were “overriding mandatory provisions” according to the Rome I Regulation. The Court denied it, and left to the referring court to determine whether they could nevertheless operate “as matter of fact” under the governing law. This article explains how the CJEU’s conclusion has broader implications by regulating third countries’ interference in international business transactions. Starting with an analysis of the case, the article examines the history and nature of overriding mandatory provisions under EU private international law and argues that the solution embraced by the CJEU leaves room for uncertainty and unpredictability in the operation of foreign mandatory provisions.This material was firstly published by Thomson Reuters Limited in Edoardo Avato & Matteo Winkler, Reinforcing the Public Law Taboo: A Note on Hellenic Republic v Nikiforidis, 43 European Law Review (2018), 569-582, and is reproduced by agreement with the publisher

We consider a model of bottleneck congestion in discrete time with a penalty cost for being late. This model can be applied to several situations where agents need to use a capacitated facility in order to complete a task before a hard deadline. A possible example is a situation where commuters use a train service to go from home to office in the early morning. Trains run at regular intervals, take always the same time to cover their itinerary, and have a fixed capacity. Commuters must reach their office in time. This is a hard constraint whose violation involves a heavy penalty. Conditionally on meeting the deadline, commuters want to take the train as late as possible. With the intent of considering strategic choices of departure, we model this situation as a game and we show that it does not have pure Nash equilibria. Then we characterize the best and worst mixed Nash equilibria, and show that they are both inefficient with respect to the social optimum. We then show that there exists a correlated equilibrium that approximates the social optimum when the penalty for missing the deadline is sufficiently large.

We study the effect of dividend taxes on the payout and investment policies of publicly listed firms. To do so, we exploit a unique setting in Switzerland where, following the corporate tax reform of 2011, some but not all firms were suddenly able to pay tax-exempt dividends to their shareholders. Using a difference-in-differences specification, we show that treated firms swiftly and permanently increase their dividend payout by around 30% compared to control firms after the tax cut. When studying the effect of agency conflicts, we show that the impact on the payout is less pronounced for firms in which the controlling shareholders have more voting rights than cash-flow rights. We find a significant positive abnormal stock return after the announcement of the payment of a tax-exempt dividend. However, reducing dividend taxes does not boost investment. This is due to a significant drop in retained earnings and to the fact that equity issuances do not surge after the tax cut. Our evidence is consistent with models where the marginal source of finance is retained earnings, and inconsistent with the neoclassical theory of dividend taxation.

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

With metrics and analytics spreading into every profession and discipline, evidence-based decision-making is on the rise. Legal practice is also concerned by this trend, as reflected in the growing use of quantitative data by law firms with respect to their corporate clients. Based on the examination of the potential uses of legal indicators in an evidence-based approach to transnational law practice, this article argues that indicators can provide lawyers operating in a transnational context with a relevant source of evidence to move towards a quantitatively informed practice of law. While most academic literature on legal indicators focuses on their governance effects, writings on evidence-based law have not yet investigated the contribution that indicators can make to law practice. This article aims to bridge this gap. It provides a methodological assessment of eight major business law indicators and illustrates four potential applications: (1) ranking and benchmarking, (2) screening, (3) measuring legal risk, and (4) supporting litigation. The article concludes that transnational lawyers should employ transnational legal indicators on a daily basis as an opportunity to reengineer legal practice along the lines of the management culture in which transnational firms now live in.

This paper provides a critical assessment of the realities of EU participatory democracy and offers a set of innovative democratic innovations capable of making the Union more responsive to public input. It argues that today’s limited effectiveness of citizen participation to EU decision-making is due to the design, nature and practice of those instruments more than to the inherent inability of citizens to participate. As such, it concludes, the democratizing potential of the EU participatory tool-box remains not only fundamentally misaligned with societal participatory expectations, but also largely untapped.The paper suggests that the time has come for the EU to create an enabling and collaborative political environment fostering citizen participation beyond elections. Such a space may give birth to alternative, unconventional forms of participation capable of channeling citizens’ pluralistic and increasingly chaotic input into the political conversation to bring citizens closer to our representatives and, moreover, doing so in-between elections and across countries. Thus, for instance, by centralising all public input in a one-stop-shop entailing the participation of all EU institutions, a European Question Time might crystallise and eventually connect the daily realities of Europeans with the day-to-day operation of their institutions. A European Democratic Jury of randomly selected citizens from all over the Union could further contribute to such an objective by ‘humanising’ the EU decision-making.While this participatory framework would not magically fix the European accountability deficit, it may compensate for that by making the system responsive to citizen-driven agenda-setting and monitoring and eventually making it more intelligible and accessible to the many.

Previous research has shown that non-local household investors make sub-optimal asset selection and market timing decisions. However, in real estate markets, heterogeneity in returns can exist even with identical ex ante investment (timing) choices, given that transaction prices are the outcome of a complex search-and-bargaining process. Analyzing notarial data for the Paris housing market, we find that “out-of-country” buyers indeed buy at higher prices and resell at substantially lower prices than local investors, ceteris paribus. Furthermore, our evidence suggests that this pattern is not due to higher search costs and information asymmetries, but instead stems from wealth-related differences in bargaining intensity. Finally, we estimate the causal effect of out-of-country demand shocks on property prices in Paris to be positive but small.

© 2020 The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for Financial Studies. All rights reserved. There is a discrepancy between CAPM-implied and realized returns. Using the CAPM in capital budgeting - as recommended in textbooks - should thus have real effects. For instance, low beta projects should be valued more by CAPM users than by the market. We test this hypothesis using M&A data and show that bids for low-beta private targets entail lower bidder returns. We provide further support by testing several ancillary predictions. Our analyses suggest that using the CAPM when valuing targets leads to valuation errors (relative to the market's view) corresponding on average to 12% to 33% of the deal values.

We examine empirically how different information types and information channels affect both the intention and the decision to adopt photovoltaic (PV) technology as affected by adoption stage. Analyzing data on a large European utility’s current and potential clients reveals how the effects of various drivers of adoption can change across phases of the adoption process. Our results challenge the common wisdom that information necessarily and homogeneously supports innovation adoption; instead, they strongly support the hypothesis that information types and channels have distinct effects on adoption rates. These results also highlight that, throughout the adoption process, the value of information changes. In addition, we clarify the effects of economic incentives on both the intention to adopt PV technology and actual adoption behavior. Our findings have critical implications for policy makers and for any technology manufacturing company that must optimize its marketing strategy and distribution channels to promote renewable energy systems.

International audience; This paper proposes an indirect inference (Gourieroux, Monfort and Renault, 1993; Smith, 1993) estimation method for a large class of dynamic equilibrium models. Our approach is based on the observation that the econometric structure of these systems naturally generates auxiliary equilibria that can serve as building blocks for estimation. We use this insight to develop an accurate estimator for the long-run risk model of Bansal and Yaron (2004). We demonstrate the accuracy of our method by Monte Carlo simulation and estimate the long-run risk model on U.S. data. We also illustrate the good performance of the methodology on an asset pricing model with investor learning.

In this paper, we develop a theoretical model and offer a first empirical test of how competitive dethronement affects managerial risk taking. Drawing on the mechanism of endowment effect and reference-dependent utility theory, we predict that former market leaders take more risks compared to, otherwise identical, competitors. We empirically test this prediction using two contexts allowing us to use different methods to operationalize risk. The first setting draws on field data from a two-month banking sales contest. The second, quasi-laboratory, data comes from an educational game. Consistent with model’s prediction, we find that dethronement is associated with increased risk taking but that the endowment effect leading to such response decays over time. In contrast, a mere decline in performance ranking does not have the same effect.

While single-brand reward programs encourage customers to remain loyal to that one brand, coalition programs encourage customers to be “promiscuous” by offering points redeemable across partner stores. Despite the benefits of this “open relationship” with customers, store managers face uncertainty as to how rewards offered by partners influence transactions at their own stores. We use a model of multi-store purchase incidence to show how the value of points shared among partner stores can explain patterns in customer-level purchases across them. The model is used to empirically test hypotheses on how reward spillovers among partners are driven by: (1) differences in policies on reward redemption, (2) the overlap in product categories between stores, and (3) geographic distance between stores within a city. In addition, we leverage variation generated by a natural experiment, i.e., a devaluation of the program's points, to demonstrate how the value of points influences the positioning of partner stores within the coalition and the purchasing patterns across them. We conclude by delineating some managerial implications for the design of a coalition's reward policies, including a simulation showing that customer-centric targeted rewards can be an effective strategy to compensate for the devaluation.

We provide a microfoundation for a weighted utilitarian social welfare function that reflects common moral intuitions about interpersonal comparisons of utilities. If utility is only ordinal, interpersonal comparisons are meaningless. Nonetheless, economics often adopts utilitarian welfare functions, assuming that comparable utility functions can be calibrated using information beyond consumer choice data. We show that consumer choice data alone are sufficient. As suggested by Edgeworth (1881), just noticeable differences provide a common unit of measure for interpersonal comparisons of utility differences. We prove that a simple monotonicity axiom implies a weighted utilitarian aggregation of preferences, with weights proportional to individual jnd's.

Research has suggested that firms may benefit from price uncertainty - about input commodities - because it creates an "option value". We use a stylized mathematical model to explore and generalize this claim and to specify its implications for firms' investment decisions under various setups. In particular, we study firms' motivation for investing in such risk management measures as financial hedging (FH) and technology improvement (TI): technology changes that result in less consumption of an input commodity, fewer waste products and emissions, and lower production costs. We derive a simple expression that explicitly quantities firm's attitude toward input-price risk by considering the firm's (positive or negative) risk premium (i.e., what it would pay to "lock in" the unit input price at its mean) and linking that premium to various firm and industry-level characteristics. Also, we examine the comparative risk management advantages of TI and FH and characterize conditions under which these strategies are complements or substitutes. We find that although input-price uncertainty may be beneficial even for risk-averse firms, they can benefit from investing in risk reduction measures (e.g., TI, FH) because they could increase the option value of that uncertainty. A firm's ability to adjust its price in response to both market competition and input-price variation mediates the benefit of risk-reducing measures and also affects the two strategies' complementarity.