recall in consumer search abstract this paper experimentally examines individual decision making in a sequential search environment when consumers sequentially search for the lowest price from a known distribution of prices theory suggests that decisions will be based on a comparison of the marginal cost of an additional search and the expected return from that search additionally in a finite time horizon model it is possible that individuals may choose to return to a price previously rejected exercise recall the data are used to determine if individuals do exercise recall the extent to which that option is chosen and to determine if the use of recall is dependent on the cost of search

stabilization policy in a currency union abstract we show that the monetary authority of a currency union chooses to do nothing in the face of an asymmetric shock generating inefficiently high inflation and employment fluctuations in the member countries moreover adjustment is equivalent to that under a mckinnon rule

is the european community an optimal currency area optimal taxation versus the cost of multiple currencies the authors propose a view of optimal currency areas that is based on the principles of public finance inflation taxes are distortionary and an optimal spreading of tax distortions may require high inflation in one region and low inflation in another each region would need its own currency to do this on the other hand multiple currencies imply valuation and currency conversion costs which impede trade between regions this tradeoff is explored in the context of the european community s debate over a common currency using a two country variant of robert lucas and nancy stokey s cash in advance model copyright 1990 by american economic association

executive incentives and the horizon problem an empirical investigation abstract this paper investigates the hypothesis that ceos in their final years of office manage discretionary investment expenditures to improve short term earnings performance we examine the behavior of r d expenditures for a sample of firms in industries that have significant ongoing r d activities the results suggest that ceos spend less on r d during their final years in office however we find the reductions in r d expenditures are mitigated through ceo stock ownership there is no evidence that the reduced r d expenditures are associated with either poor firm performance or reductions in investment expenditures that are capitalized for accounting purposes

direct tests of the reservation wage property this paper provides the first direct experimental tests of the reservation wages predicted by finite horizon job search models previous indirect tests were based on search duration and search income the authors show that such indirect tests are weak by demonstrating that a naive rule performs essentially as well as the risk neutral model in predicting search duration in contrast direct tests of predicted reservation wages imply rejections of both the naive rule and the risk neutral model the general concave model survives direct tests with reservation wage data as does a specific logistic concave model copyright 1992 by royal economic society

experiments on unemployment benefit sanctions and job search behavior this paper presents the results of an experimental study on unemployment benefit sanctions the experimental set up allows us to distinguish between the effect of benefit sanctions once they are imposed the ex post effect and the threat of getting a benefit sanction imposed the ex ante effect we find that both effects matter moreover the ex ante effect turns out to be substantial and bigger than the ex post effect benefits sanctions stimulate the outflow from unemployment

dynamic decisions in a laboratory setting many economic models involve a trade off between current and future rewards for example in neoclassical one sector growth models there is a trade off between immediate consumption and investment for future consumption in sequential job search models of labor economics workers must decide between continuing their job search at a cost or accepting the best wage offered so far in oligopoly models of tacit collusion firms decide whether or not to defect from collusive behavior and the defection leads to short term benefit but future punishment these models are all dynamic in the sense that an action at one stage influences the available actions or rewards at a future stage many such examples fall into the class of dynamic programming problems and for large classes of such problems techniques for finding optima are well understood less well understood however are the decisions which individuals actually make in such dynamic settings this is an empirical issue which lends itself to the methodology of laboratory investigation there have already been a number of experiments in which subjects face a sequence of related decisions examples include the asset market studies of camerer and weigelt 3 and smith suchanek and williams 13 the predictions of dynamic game theory have been tested extensively for example in the contexts of the centipede game by mckelvey and palfrey 9 of the repeated prisoner s dilemma by selten and stoecker 11 and andreoni and miller 1 and of bargaining by ochs and roth 10 dynamic job search has been studied by cox and oaxaca 4 and two armed bandits have been studied by banks olson and porter 2 in the market and game theory studies the decisions made by subjects are complicated by the strategic aspects of the games subjects decisions must take into account the strategies they expect the other players to use in asset markets subjects seem to have difficulty making decisions and speculative bubbles frequently result as noted by mccabe rassenti and smith 8 the robust tendency of laboratory stock markets to produce bubbles is attributable to the myopic trading behavior of subjects in effect subjects fail to act according to the backward induction

a fundamental asymmetry of asymmetric shocks a simple n country specific factor type model with imperfectly mobile labour is developed it is shown that the effects of country specific productivity shocks hitting a small country have fundamentally asymmetric effects a positive shock will be accommodated by a moderate wage increase and sizeable in migration whereas a negative shock will be accommodated by a significant decrease in wages and moderate out migration it is argued that the results of the model are consistent with the recent irish experience the welfare effects of small economic fluctuations are also discussed c 2002 elsevier b v all rights reserved

bank firm relationships financing and firm performance in germany abstract close bank firm relationships that characterize the financial systems in germany and japan are often credited for reducing agency costs and increasing access to capital thus improving the performance of firms critics of these banking systems cite the alternative possibility that conflicts of interests may also arise from both the banks multiple roles with the firm and the opportunity the banks have to use private information to shift risk or to otherwise participate in rent seeking activities we extend the empirical literature by systematically investigating the impact of bank influence on the financing choices and performance of the firm we find that bank influenced firms in germany do benefit from increased access to capital there is however no evidence to support the hypothesis of either higher profitability or growth for bank influenced firms results suggest that the interest payments to debt ratio is significantly higher for bank influenced firms which supports the hypothesis that german universal banks may engage in rent seeking activities and provides evidence of a conflicting interests between creditors and shareholders

keynesian involuntary unemployment and sticky nominal wages this paper presents a model in which sticky nominal wages and keynesian involuntary unemployment result as a consequence of the intertemporal optimisation decisions of profit maximising monopsonistic firms and fully rational and informed workers in an uncertain environment uncertainty associated with the business cycle and its impact on product price generates disequilibrium wages and identifies the labour demand function in contractions and the supply of labour in expansions the theoretical prediction of a negative relationship between real wages and employment during contractions and a positive relationship during expansions is strongly supported by the empirical evidence presented central to keynesian macroeconomics is the concept of involuntary unemployment the existence of which once was a commonly agreed upon stylised fact however as noted by hoover i988 and mccafferty i990 among others existing models either fail to provide a satisfactory reason why wages do not adjust to clear the market or seek some sort of equilibrium explanation in which unemployment is not strictly involuntary in the sense of keynes moreover the failure of recent empirical studies to support the keynesian prediction of a countercyclical wage has led some to doubt the relevance of keynesian economics and even the meaningfulness of the notion of involuntary unemployment lucas 1978 farmer 1993 keynes i 939 cited findings of a countercyclical real wage during the great depression argued that the relationship between real wages and employment depends upon whether changes in employment are due to changes in effective demand or due to other factors and recommended that observations on real wages ought to be classified by periods of contraction and expansion an examination of us data for the period 1920 89 presented in section ii of this paper confirms the importance of keynes s argument and motivated the development of the new keynesian model of employment and wages presented in section iii the model is characterised by a market structure in which representative monopsonistic firms post nominal wage rates which they may find optimal to partially but not totally index in advance of knowing product price and of hiring labourers who may have complete knowledge relevant to their choices price forecasts are assumed to be rational while prices vary with the state of the economy the theoretical framework i incorporates all of the characteristics of keynesian involuntary unemployment while not attributing the cause of unemployment to the supply behaviours of labourers 2 provides an explanation of why wages do not adjust to clear the market that is based explicitly on the optimising behaviour of firms and implicitly on that of

are optimal search rules reasonable and vice versa and does it matter anyway abstract the economics of search has made rapid progress in recent years and its results have contributed siginificantly to economic knowledge recent work has been particularly marked for the steadily increasing realism of the assumptions describing the environment surrounding the searcher however concomitant with this improvement has been a steady growth in the technical complexity of the problem supposedly solved by the searcher indeed many of the recent models are so complicated that their solutions are beyond the capacity of even modern day computers after elaborating on this impracticability of optimal search rules the paper goes on to consider two more realistic and practical alternatives the adoption of either suboptimal or reasonable rules paradoxically reasonable rules may in some circumstances be better than optimal rules the paper contains a preliminary discussion of what might be meant by reasonable behaviour and shows that a minimal set of criteria for reasonableness leads to the major qualitative conclusions at a market level of optimal search theory

modeling co2 emission allowance prices and derivatives evidence from the european trading scheme this paper studies the three main markets for emission allowances within the european union emissions trading scheme eu ets powernext nord pool and european climate exchange ecx the analysis suggests that the prohibition of banking of emission allowances between distinct phases of the eu ets has significant implications in terms of futures pricing motivated by these findings we develop an empirically and theoretically valid framework for the pricing and hedging of intra phase and inter phase futures and options on futures respectively

do corporate global environmental standards create or destroy market value arguments can be made on both sides of the question of whether a stringent global corporate environmental standard represents a competitive asset or liability for multinational enterprises mnes investing in emerging and developing markets analyzing the global environmental standards of a sample of u s based mnes in relation to their stock market performance we find that firms adopting a single stringent global environmental standard have much higher market values as measured by tobin sq than firms defaulting to less stringent or poorly enforced host country standards thus developing countries that use lax environmental regulations to attract foreign direct investment may end up attracting poorer quality and perhaps less competitive firms our results also suggest that externalities are incorporated to a significant extent in firm valuation we discuss plausible reasons for this observation

the effects of direct trade within china on regional and national co2 emissions curbing national carbon emissions and clarifying regional carbon reduction responsibility are two challenges faced by china both of which are influenced by interregional trade to exclude the influence of trade balance this paper proposes a methodology to parcel the pollution haven hypothesis into a multi regional input output model applies it to a longer time gap which is made up of two representative periods of chinese economy 1997 2002 and 2002 2007 and clarifies the provincial and sectoral contributions to national emissions we find that 1 embodied co2 emissions first remain relatively stable and then increase sharply for the two periods and the changing trends are mainly determined by the decreasing carbon intensity and the expanding trade scale respectively 2 with the secondary industry as the main contributor regional carbon spillover is mainly concentrated in the coastal provinces but it contributes to an increase of co2 emissions in the central and western regions 3 the coastal and inland provinces contribute to the increase of national carbon emissions through interregional imports and exports respectively but the pollution haven hypothesis is not obvious and is only observed in 2002

understanding and assessing financial risk tolerance a biological perspective 1990 understanding and assessing financial risk tolerance a biological perspective financial analysts journal vol 46 no 6 pp 50 62 80

driving factors of carbon embodied in china s provincial exports in this paper we use the multi regional input output model mrio and logarithm mean divisia index approach to analyze the changes in china s carbon embodied in exports cee at the national and provincial levels the results indicate that the total cee and the cee of 17 provinces including all eastern provinces decreased between 2007 and 2010 the largest decrease in total cee is caused by an input structural effect which decreases the cee of most of the provinces the technique effect arising from changes in provincial carbon intensities causes the second largest decrease in total cee and it effectively reduces the cee of most of the provinces especially the eastern provinces changes in the export composition of most of the provinces also decrease the provincial cee a change in the provincial distribution of exports decreases the cee in 11 provinces on the one hand and increases the cee in 19 provinces on the other hand a change in export volume increases the cee of each province and the whole country but its total effect is evidently lower than the input structural effect and the technique effect c 2015 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the emergence of migration theory and a suggested new direction abstract the literature on internal labour migration is surveyed using a fourfold taxonomic scheme the potential migrant as presented in the existing literature can be viewed as a supplier of labour an investor in human capital and a consumer of regional amenities such as public goods the paper develops a fourth approach which treats the household rather than the individual as the migrating unit and which views the potential migrant as a producer of home produced commodities the continuities as well as the contrasts between the four approaches are discussed in the paper

bargaining a monetary union abstract two governments bargain over the benefits of a monetary union in a cash in advance world a novel feature of the model is that because households trade every period market behavior affects and is affected by the government negotiations as a result in addition to objective costs of delay market expectations about the bargaining outcome emerge as crucial determinants of a monetary union there is a continuum of bargaining outcomes indexed by market expectations some outcomes imply that the monetary union is delayed for an arbitrary number of periods journal of economic literature classification numbers f4 c7

investor protection and corporate governance recent research has documented large differences among countries in ownership concentration in publicly traded firms in the breadth and depth of capital markets in dividend policies and in the access of firms to external finance a common element to the explanations of these differences is how well investors both shareholders and creditors are protected by law from expropriation by the managers and controlling shareholders of firms we describe the differences in laws and the effectiveness of their enforcement across countries discuss the possible origins of these differences summarize their consequences and assess potential strategies of corporate governance reform we argue that the legal approach is a more fruitful way to understand corporate governance and its reform than the conventional distinction between bank centered and market centered financial systems

industry wide corporate fraud the truth behind the volkswagen scandal corporate fraud committed under climate mitigation pressures is becoming more frequently observed in line with the ever increasing environmental standards and relevant regulation enforcements one example is the volkswagen emission gate scandal using firm level panel data of major automobile manufacturers from 2000 to 2015 this study empirically identifies the motives behind the corporate deception scandal we develop a conceptual model summarising the factors affecting decision making and the firms environmentally responsible investments eris including the truthfulness of related public communications our findings identify legal and regulatory pressures the firm s existing level of eris competency and expertise pressures from emission regulation market competitors consumers owners or shareholders as the key factors inducing the scandal the empirical findings show that firms are more likely to experience corporate fraud if their senior managers are paid with substantial variable components that may lead them to engage in riskier business behaviour and to be more short term focused thereby supporting the well established contract theory to avoid corporate fraud and engage in legitimate business competitiveness we suggest that firms should focus on technological innovation as well as improving corporate governance and leverage ratios to effectively control and monitor management in addition policy makers should be more realistic about practical and commercial limitations in the policy setting process and take on a more supporting role in achieving technological innovations and effective corporate governance in summary we argue that cleaner production is not only the result of technologically progress and research but importantly it also involves issues associated with corporate governance and business ethics

decomposition of co2 emissions over 1980 2003 in turkey abstract there is a multi dimensional need for studying the energy situation in turkey and to obtain insight into the development of co2 emissions on the one hand recent projections of the oecd show that turkey has a yearly gdp growth potential of over 7 on the other hand recent projections of undp and world bank indicate that the level of co2 emission is going to rise six fold by 2025 with respect to the level of emissions in 1990 it is a great challenge to both meet the growth target and keep the co2 under control thereupon this paper tries to unfold factors that explain co2 emissions by undertaking a complete decomposition analysis for turkey over the period 1980 2003 the analysis shows as is common to relatively fast growing economies that the biggest contributor to the rise in co2 emissions is the expansion of the economy scale effect the carbon intensity and the change in composition of the economy which nearly move in tandem also contribute to the rise in co2 emissions albeit at a slower rate the energy intensity of the economy which is decreasing is responsible for a modest reduction in co2 emissions hence in congruence with the scale effect a decoupling of carbon emissions and economic growth is not found in turkey over the period 1980 2003

economic search an experimental study this paper presents results of experiments designed to test several of the hypotheses present in the theoretical literature on optimal economic search first we test whether the subjects searchers actually search for wages in ways that are consistent with setting an optimal reservation wage we then proceed to determine experimentally the effects of risk aversion increased search costs changes in risk brought about by a mean preserving transformation of the distribution of wage offers the presence or absence of recall the existence of a finite horizon and the searcher s state of knowledge about the underlying distribution of wages in general we find that the searchers exhibit behavior that is consistent with that predicted by theory differences between risk neutral and risk averse searchers are found and the responses of both groups to changes in search costs in the degree of risk or in the state of knowledge are consistent with theoretical predictions

technology adoption subsidies an experiment with managers we evaluate the impact of technology adoption subsidies on investment behavior in an individual choice experiment in a laboratory setting professional managers are confronted with an intertemporal decision problem in which they have to decide whether or not to search for and possibly adopt a new technology technologies differ in the per period benefits they yield and their purchase price increases with the per period benefits provided we introduce a subsidy on the more expensive technologies that also yield larger per period benefits and find that the subsidy scheme induces agents to search for and adopt these more expensive technologies even though the subsidy itself is too small to render these technologies profitable we speculate that the result is driven by the positive connotation affect that the concept subsidy invokes

promoting sustainable consumption in china a conceptual framework and research review various theories and approaches have been introduced in the debate on how to address sustainable consumption in this study we first discuss different theoretical perspectives on sustainable consumption particularly developed in the fields of economics social psychology and environmental sociology we argue that neither an individualist nor a system or structural perspective alone is sufficient for understanding and analysing the transition towards sustainable consumption therefore we propose to apply the social practices approach spa that combines both human agency and social structures to understand sustainable consumption issues following the spa framework we review and summarize research on sustainable consumption in china in particular on three consumption fields food housing energy and mobility it is found that introducing more efficient production technology is commonly taken as the focal point in these sectors when sustainable consumption was introduced to china despite a rising interest in consumers perceptions of products sustainability in recent years research has rarely paid any attention to consumers behavioural change or to the transition dynamics towards sustainable consumption in general individualist perspectives have largely dominated chinese sustainable consumption research this paper proposes to move attention to a better understanding of chinese consumption issues by emphasizing the link between the provision of sustainable products and the diverse sustainable consumption practices also images of food energy mobility and other consumption products that are undergoing transitions need to be considered in future research as these have consequences for socio technical changes material infrastructures and for lifestyle innovations

labor market search an experimental study the theoretical results derived from models of economic search have implications which relate to the structure and performance of labor markets utilizing a series of laboratory experiments we attempt to capture many of the features of workers search and also the conditions under which labor markets operate by varying certain of the experimental conditions we are able to determine the searchers responses to changes in the terms of unemployment insurance to the existence of a minimum wage and to different states of information about the underlying distribution of wages in most cases the behavior of the searchers is consistent with that predicted by theory

china s inter regional spillover of carbon emissions and domestic supply chains in this study we apply the inter regional input output model to explain the relationship between china s inter regional spillover of co2 emissions and domestic supply chains for 2002 and 2007 based on this model we propose alternative indicators such as the trade in co2 emissions co2 emissions in trade and the regional trade balances of co2 emissions our results do not only reveal the nature and significance of inter regional environmental spillover within china s domestic regions but also demonstrate how co2 emissions are created and distributed across regions via domestic and global production networks results show that a region sc o2 emissions depend on its intra regional production technology energy use efficiency as well as its position and participation degree in domestic and global supply chains 2013 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

risk attitudes and reservation wages of unemployed workers evidence from panel data abstract this paper studies risk attitudes of unemployed job seekers and their relationship to self reported reservation wages we find that risk aversion is prevalent and that reservation wages decrease slightly over time furthermore risk aversion and reservation wages are negatively correlated

participation in a currency union in any voluntary cooperative agreement the potential gain from deviation should determine the minimum influence required over common decision making this paper begins by observing that a highly asymmetric distribution of power between two partners is not sustainable if the choice variables are strategic substitutes it then studies a simple general equilibrium model of a monetary union and shows that a small economy will not take part in the agreement unless it can secure influence that is more than proportional to its size and a transfer of seigniorage revenues in its favor copyright 1992 by american economic association

real time search in the laboratory and the market the standard model of labor market search posits repeated infinite horizon search from a fixed distribution of wages in a stationary environment under these circumstances the optimal search policy has a reservation wage property i e the decision to accept an offer involves a comparison of the offer with a time invariant constant w which itself is a function of the parameters characterizing the search environment a wage offer greater than or equal to w is accepted while any other is rejected and search is continued some early empirical job search studies however accumulated evidence of a declining trend in reservation wages over the course of an unemployment spell 1 since then several theoretical explanations for the declining reservation wage profiles have emerged all of which relax the stationarity assumption of the standard model for example reuben gronau 1971 assumes searchers have finite lives kenneth burdett 1977 gerard j van den berg 1990 james albrecht and susan vroman 2005 and others model short term unemployment benefits albrecht pieter a gautier and vroman 2006 permit directed search to heterogeneous prospects 2 john p danforth 1979 and silvio rendon 2006 consider general liquidity con strained search and burdett and tara vishwanath 1988 model learning about the job offer distribution behavioral explanations for declining reservation wages have been suggested by braunstein and schotter 1981 schotter and braunstein 1982 and others in this paper we present the results of the first ever to our knowledge real time search laboratory experiment performed in an effort to investigate this falling res ervation wage phenomenon where field studies of unemployed search often rely on strong identifying assumptions to recover searchers unobservable reservation wages in the laboratory we are able to elicit subjects complete reservation wage profiles in an incentive compatible manner 3 further in the laboratory we are able to

carbon emissions embodied in demand supply chains in china abstract using the multi regional input output model mrio the paper distinguishes the carbon emissions embodied in commodities for domestic final consumption cbes consumption based emissions and those for export ebes export based emissions and then calculates carbon emissions embodied in the demand supply chains for consumption and export based on technical coefficients matrix of the mrio for one country taking china as an example we provide a dynamic analysis of cbes ebes and carbon emissions embodied in consumption and export demand supply chains at the sub national level based on the mrio tables for 1997 and 2007 the results show that in china the transferred carbon emissions embodied in demand supply chains driven by consumption and export both showed rapid growth during 1997 2007 and the net transferred carbon emissions embodied in the demand supply chains showed an increasing trend as well less developed regions with abundant fossil fuels tend to net flow out carbon emissions

free riding convergence and two speed monetary unification in europe this paper shows that two speed monetary unification carries a danger low inflation countries in europe have an interest in delaying entry of the high inflation country because it would raise the average inflation rate however this country might refuse to join when the first group find it qualified to that is when convergence has taken place this is because the high inflation country can employ its monetary policy to stabilize against shocks given that the currency union members have optimally chosen a lower inflation rate hence a tradeoff exists between the necessity for convergence and the free rider problem

consumer search behavior and sunk costs abstract this paper presents the results of four economic experiments involving 41 undergraduate students who were assigned the task of searching for the lowest price from a known distribution of prices economic theory predicts that individuals should continue to draw until the expected gain of another search is less than the marginal search cost additionally once individuals have made a draw and then continued they should never return to a price drawn earlier exercise recall both of these predictions are tested in the paper and the results show that behavior is not always consistent with them it appears that individuals are making decisions based on the total return from searching rather than simply the marginal return from another draw

establishing a central bank issues in europe and lessons from the us list of figures list of tables preface list of conference participants 1 introduction part i the design of a central bank 2 designing a central bank for europe a cautionary tale from the early years of the federal reserve system 3 the european central bank reshaping monetary politics in europe 4 the ecb a bank or a monetary policy rule part ii transition from national central banks to a european central bank 5 hard erm hard ecu and european monetary union 6 voting