off floor trading disintegration and the bid ask spread in experimental markets this article uses experimental methods to establish that greater uncertainty in the environment increases the naturally emerging bid ask spread in double auction trading the opportunity to trade off floor is then introduced off floor trading is greater in the environment with a wider bid ask spread increases with block trading and increases still more with increasing subject experience finally the authors find that the preponderance of off floor trades are inside the bid ask spread supporting the hypothesis that a motive for such trades is to split privately the gain represented by the bid ask spread without revealing publicly a willingness to make price concessions coauthors are shawn lamaster vernon l smith and mark van boening copyright 1991 by university of chicago press

social influence and mne strategic response to political risk a global network approach abstract according to the conventional view of mne host country relations mnes faced with political risk condition their strategic responses on each party s relative power positions or bargaining influence drawing insight from network theory institutional theory and international relations research i argue that firm sensitivity to political risk is contingent upon a complementary concept social influence social influence arises through the mutual embeddedness of mne and host government in a complex global network of nations to test my hypotheses i construct a global network of trade relations that i combine with a unique transaction level dataset from the global petroleum industry my results demonstrate that social influence as modeled by home host structural equivalence moderates the effects of political risk further my findings provide support for a conceptual and empirical distinction between social influence and the traditional bargaining influence examined in the literature

experimental tests of core theory and the coase theorem inefficiency and cycling abstract we examine experimentally the bargaining process and the final allocation of payoffs in games that differ in terms of whether the core exists and in the initial allocation of property rights among the players this paper highlights the interaction among property rights transaction costs and the empty core our experimental results indicate that the existence of the core is an important determinant of bargaining generally and the coase theorem in particular they confirm our conjecture that when the core is empty and property rights are ill defined coasean efficiency breaks down among other results our experiments show that the number of inefficient non pareto optimal agreements and bargaining rounds with cycling are significantly greater when the core is empty than when the core exists especially when property rights are ill defined our results suggest an economic role for specific property right arrangements to resolve the empty core

equilibrium selection in an experimental macroeconomy author affiliation vivian lei department of economics university of wisconsin milwaukee milwaukee wi 53201 usa vlei uwm edu corresponding authorcharles n noussair department of economics faculty of economics and business tilburg university p o box 90153 5000 le tilburg the netherlands c n noussair uvt nl acknowledgment we are grateful to the college of letters and science and center for research on international economics at the university of wisconsin milwaukee for financial support we thank colin camerer katarina kellar lutz hendricks nazrul islam tomomi tanaka filip vesely and two anonymous referees for helpful comments 1 introductionone of the most influential literatures in economics is the theory of growth for surveys see azariadis 1993 barro and sala i martin 1995 romer 1996 sala i martin 2002 the basis of much of the literature is the ramsey 1928 cass 1965 koopmans 1965 growth model in this model the economy is assumed to behave like a benevolent social planner who chooses capital stock and consumption levels over an infinite time horizon with the goal of maximizing the discounted utility of the consumption stream the principal result of the model is that consumption and capital stock converge to unique optimal steady state levels that are independent of the initial endowment and the utility function of the social planner an implication of the model therefore is that different countries would converge toward a common income level even if their initial endowment of capital differed provided that they have access to the same production technology relatively poor countries would exhibit higher growth rates than richer ones these two predictions are testable with field data however field studies have generally failed to support the hypothesis of convergence toward a common income level see durlauf and quah 1999 temple 1999 and islam 2003 for surveys rather the data are more consistent with the alternative hypothesis of club convergence baumol 1986 which postulates that a small number of steady states exist and that each country has a tendency to converge toward one of them 1 such a framework can explain the observed pattern over time of an increase in income differences between the organisation for economic cooperation and development countries and the developing world as well as a decrease in the differences within each of the two groups the empirical support for club convergence has encouraged the development of theoretical models with multiple equilibria while some countries may reach optimal equilibria unfortunate countries might find themselves in low income equilibria which are often labeled as poverty traps these countries are unable to reach a better equilibrium without coordination originally due to rosenstein rodan 1943 the insight that the existence of multiple equilibria might provide an explanation of international income differences has led to a literature that considers a variety of growth models with multiple equilibria for example azariadis and drazen 1990 construct an overlapping generations model with two stable pareto rankable equilibria in the inferior equilibrium no agent trades with members of other generations murphy shleifer and vishny 1989 build a model with synergies between industries each industry is profitable only if other industries are operating and there are equilibria where all of the industries operate and other pareto dominated equilibria where none operate galor and zeira 1993 and banerjee et al 2001 show that inequality and differential access to credit can keep an economy in a pareto dominated equilibrium recognizing whether or not an economy has multiple equilibria is important because policy prescriptions differ depending on whether an economy is in an inferior equilibrium or whether it is in an equilibrium that is unique

the effects of nonstationarities on performance in call markets abstract this experiment investigates the responsiveness of laboratory call markets to repetitive systematic shocks in underlying demand or supply conditions results of nine call markets conducted under three treatment conditions are compared with nine previously reported double auctions the informationally sparse call auctions perform no worse than the double auctions allocative efficiency is similar across institutions and call markets appear to track underlying equilibrium price movements more accurately than double auctions

the effects of rent asymmetries in experimental auction markets abstract we report the results of twelve double auction market experiments designed to analyze the effects of asymmetric induced supply and demand configurations on the price convergence path toward a competitive equilibrium the proposition convergence bias that prices tend to approach the competitive equilibrium from above below when consumer surplus is greater less than producer surplus cannot be rejected we do however reject the proposition convergence symmetry that these convergence biases are of equal absolute magnitude excesses of producer over consumer surplus are found to have a more pronounced effect on the sequence of contract prices

markov switching causality and the money output relationship the causal link between monetary variables and output is one of the most studied issues in macroeconomics one puzzle from this literature is that the results of causality tests appear to be sensitive with respect to the sample period that one considers as a way of overcoming this difficulty we propose a method for analysing granger causality which is based on a vector autoregressive model with time varying parameters we model parameter time variation so as to reflect changes in granger causality and assume that these changes are stochastic and governed by an unobservable markov chain when applied to us data our methodology allows us to reconcile previous puzzling differences in the outcome of conventional tests for money output causality

residual state ownership policy stability and financial performance following strategic decisions by privatizing telecoms we question previous research assuming that privatizing firm performance generally benefits from decreasing state ownership and the passage of time both of which purportedly align principal agent incentives promoting organizational decision making that increases shareholder value when state ownership shifts from majority and controlling to minority and non controlling the performance impact may be positive in the short run particularly where there is instability in the local investment policy environment consistent with this proposition we develop and test hypotheses derived from a minority and non controlling or residual state ownership framework grounded in credible privatization and institutional theory we propose that 1 residual state ownership positively affects shareholder returns after strategic decisions by privatizing firms because it signals state support for managerial initiatives 2 the passage of time since initial privatization negatively affects shareholder returns after strategic decisions by privatizing firms because initial undertakings in support of the privatizing firm are reversed and 3 home country investment policy stability moderates these two effects greater stability obviates the need for residual state ownership and slows policy reversals over time we find empirical support for our residual state ownership framework in event study analyses of cumulative abnormal returns cars associated with 196 major investments announced from 1986 to 2001 by 15 privatizing telecoms from around the world cars are positive at 5 25 state ownership levels but turn negative at higher state ownership levels cars turn sharply negative within 1 2 years from initial privatization dates increasing policy stability diminishes positive ownership and negative time effects on cars results confirm the potential supporting role that residual state ownership can play in enhancing strategic decision making and financial performance by privatizing firms particularly where there is instability in the home country investment policy environment

state ownership and transparency in foreign direct investment we contribute to ib literature on state owned multinationals by examining an understudied element of mne strategy transparency drawing insight from accounting finance and political science we develop theory and hypotheses regarding ownership effects on fdi disclosure we argue that transparency of outward fdi depends on both state ownership and home and host country institutions we also posit that host governments harness their soes to exploit information disclosed by foreign mnes discouraging inward fdi transparency we test our hypotheses using a unique transaction level database from the global petroleum industry analyzing a sample of 965 investment disclosures across 81 developing and developed countries we find state ownership reduces mne transparency soes are less sensitive to host country political risk than private firms soes from better governed countries are more transparent and regardless of ownership foreign mnes are more opaque when investing in the presence of a host country soe

bubbles crashes and endogenous expectations in experimental spot asset markets1 spot asset trading is studied in an environment in which all investors receive the same dividend from a known probability distribution at the end of each of t 15 or 30 trading periods fourteen of twenty two experiments exhibit price bubbles followed by crashes relative to intrinsic dividend value when traders are experienced this reduces but does not eliminate the probability of a bubble the regression of changes in mean price on lagged excess bids number of bids minus the number of offers in the previous period p pt a f b 1 o l supports the hypothesis that a e d the one period expected value of the dividend and that f 0 where excess bids is a surrogate measure of excess demand arising from homegrown capital gains losses expectations thus when bt 1 o goes to zero we have convergence to rational expectations in the sense of fama 1970 that arbitrage becomes unprofitable the observed bubble phenomenon can also be interpreted as a form of temporary myopia tirole 1982 from which agents learn that capital gains expectations are only temporarily sustainable ultimately inducing common expectations or priors tirole 1982 four of twenty six experiments all using experienced subjects yield outcomes that appear to the chart s eye to converge early to rational expectations although even in these cases we get 0 and small price fluctuations of a few cents that invite scalping

political risk and foreign exchange rates an efficient market approach this paper examines the reaction of the foreign exchange market to the announcement of changes in the business environment of a country our results suggest that sampled political risk news conveys important information about a country s investment climate and causes its currency s exchange rate to vary it appears however that the reaction of the foreign exchange market is more dramatic for unfavorable events than for favorable events the evidence presented is also consistent with the hypothesis that the foreign exchange market is efficient in interpreting the type of event considered in this study

price bubbles and crashes in experimental call markets abstract price bubbles relative to intrinsic dividend value are observed using a call market trading institution market prices tend to track intrinsic value only when the same group of highly experienced traders participate in three consecutive 15 round markets

experimental evidence of a sunk cost paradox a study of pricing behavior in bertrand edgeworth duopoly a well known implication of microeconomic theory is that sunk costs should have no effect on decision making we test this hypothesis with a human subjects experiment students recruited from graduate business courses with an average of over six years of work experience played the role of firms in a repeated price setting duopoly game in which both firms had identical capacity constraints and costs including a sunk cost that varied across experimental sessions over six different values we find contrary to the prediction of microeconomic theory that subjects pricing decisions show sizable differences across treatments the effect of the sunk cost is non monotonic as it increases from low to medium levels average prices decrease but as it increases from medium to high levels average prices increase these effects are not apparent initially but develop quickly and persist throughout the game cachon and camerer s 1996 loss avoidance is consistent with both effects while cost based pricing predicts only the latter effect and is inconsistent with the former

a limit of bilateral contracting institutions i introduction the double auction da institution has a solid and deserved reputation as the archetypal efficient market institution beginning with smith 1962 30 years of experimental research shows that the da achieves very high and stable efficiency for a wide variety of underlying market structures davis and holt 1993 the da resembles many naturally occurring market institutions including some of the world s largest financial exchanges in the da any agent may at any time unilaterally make a price quantity quote to other agents revise his or her quote or accept an outstanding quote made by another agent these actions occur publicly at some central location whether spatial or electronic so all traders may continuously view quote and contract activity in both the field and the laboratory these basic rules are often augmented with bid ask improvement rules variations on the display of bid ask queues or books limit orders and so on many of these augmentations improve the da s price stability and trading efficiency smith and williams 1982 but more recent studies e g banks et al 1989 van boening and wilcox 1996 show that the da has its limits in particular it fails to produce stable and efficient allocations when market structures contain nonstandard preferences and or technological features particularly when markets are relatively thin in our own previous work the nonconvexity of batch production was the source of the difficulty walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this case and the da is inefficient in those situations this article describes our attempt to generalize the da institution so that it might encourage efficient nonuniform pricing in such situations taken at face value this attempt must be judged a failure and other past attempts to solve this problem durham et al 1996 archibald et al 2002 have not been wholly satisfying either yet examination of these results and the process of elimination strongly suggest that an implicit restriction to bilateral contracting is an essential part of the received da s limitations as we have briefly described it the da may initially appear to be the very essence of free contracting but it does not provide a mechanism whereby three or more agents may simultaneously negotiate and then enter into a mutually agreeable multiagent contract all contracts are necessarily bilateral ones under the da and in fact under almost all conventional marketlike institutions in market structures where preferences and technologies are convex the restriction to bilateral contracts is generally unimportant but when nonconvexities are severe it may be impossible to reliably achieve efficiency under the constraint of bilateral contracting telser 1987 in this article we show this is true even if the da is modified so that bilateral negotiation and contracting possibilities are made particularly rich we believe these results have important policy implications privatization and deregulation initiatives have gained momentum around the globe over the past 20 years and many economists including us have little doubt of their potential for good nonetheless poorly articulated calls for regulation by the market carry an unnecessary potential for harm although the possible institutional rules governing negotiation and contracting under private property come in nearly infinite varieties regulation by the market typically means the adoption of traditional bilateral contracting institutions like the da yet there are good theoretical reasons to doubt that these are always the best choice telser 1987 and accumulating experimental evidence supports these doubts moreover there are now promising alternatives to traditional bilateral contracting institutions that outperform the da in several nonstandard structural situations bossaerts et al 2002 bykowski et al 2000 ishikida et al 2001 we conclude that calls for regulation by the market are sometimes too vague to unambiguously serve the public interest

the multiple unit double auction the note outlines institutional features of an open outcry market that permit multiple unit or block trades the purpose of the note is to introduce the process as a tool to be used in economics experiments the detailed rules governing the multiple unit double auction muda are stated for the case where offers are tendered by voice as opposed to through a computer the results of markets that use the rules are reported as a demonstration that convergence to equilibrium price traditionally observed in experimental markets remains with the use of the muda process

warm glow giving earned money and the option to take giving in dictator games has been shown to vary with the nature of the endowment earned vs house money and the action space give only vs the option to give or take this article is the first to test if these factors similarly affect warm glow giving alone there is no reason that one would expect the same outcomes given that the motivations for warm glow giving are different from the motivations for total warm glow plus purely altruistic giving we find that warm glow giving to charity or philanthropic institutions in a real donation experiment increases when the endowment is earned the option to take does reduce warm glow giving to charity but significant giving remains our results suggest that donating earned income creates greater utility than donating an equal amount from a windfall gain and that warm glow comes not merely from the act of giving but also from the characteristics of the recipient jel c90 d64 h41

the disposition effect and investor experience we examine whether investing experience can dampen the disposition effect that is the fact that investors seem to hold on to their losing stocks to a greater extent than they hold on to their winning stocks to do so we devise a computer program that simulates the stock market we use the program in an experiment with two groups of subjects namely experienced investors and undergraduate students the inexperienced investors as a control procedure we consider random trade decisions made by robot subjects we find that though both human subjects show the disposition effect the more experienced investors are less affected

the chinese warrants bubble in 2005 2008 over a dozen put warrants traded in china went so deep out of the money that they were almost certain to expire worthless nonetheless each warrant was traded more than three times each day at substantially inflated prices this bubble is unique in that the underlying stock prices make warrant fundamentals publicly observable and that warrants have predetermined finite maturities this sample allows us to examine a set of bubble theories in particular our analysis highlights the joint effects of short sales constraints and heterogeneous beliefs in driving bubbles and confirms several key findings of the experimental bubble literature jel g12 g13 o16 p34

competitivity in auction markets an experimental and theoretical investigation the authors report successive rounds of theory and laboratory experiments investigating price taking behavior and market efficiency they focus on the impact of structural parameters as well as trading institution the structural parameters involve noncompetitive supply and demand and a new odd lot trading procedure for divisible goods the trading institutions include the continuous double auction and the one shot clearinghouse as well as a new quantities only clearinghouse institution the authors present and justify an as if complete information theory that explains the competitive outcomes and that correctly predicts highly noncompetitive outcomes in quantities only clearinghouse markets copyright 1995 by royal economic society

speculation in international crises report from the gulf recent years have seen recurring international financial crises as well as a tremendous rise in trading and speculation how are the two related are speculators and trading responsible for market volatility this paper presents a study of the gulf crisis of 1990 1991 examining the behavior of the international oil market during a period of unprecedented volatility the analysis suggests that a combination of political events and market fundamentals rather than trading was behind this volatility

explaining deviations from equilibrium in auctions with avoidable fixed costs abstract bidders often face avoidable fixed costs or other synergies that can make bidding decisions complex and risky and market outcomes volatile if bidders deviate from risk neutral best responses either due to faulty optimization or a preference to avoid volatility then equilibrium predictions can perform poorly in this paper we confront laboratory bidders with three auction formats that make bidding difficult in different ways we find that measures of difficulty provide a consistent explanation of deviations from best response bidding across the three formats

money does granger cause output in the bivariate money output relation abstract a bivariate granger causality test on money and output finds statistically significant causality when data are measured in log levels but not when they are measured in first differences of the logs bootstrap simulation experiments indicate that most probably the first difference results reflect lack of power whereas the level results reflect granger causality that is actually in the data the reason for the lack of power in the first difference f statistic is that first differencing the data appears to entail a specification error by showing that money does granger cause output in the bivariate relation we remove a potential embarrassment for models that assign an important role to money in business fluctuations

political risk in emerging and developed markets using analyst estimates of political risk we show that political risk represents a more important determinant of stock returns in emerging than developed markets average returns in emerging markets experiencing decreased political risk exceed those of emerging markets experiencing increased political risk by approximately 11 per quarter in contrast the difference is only 2 5 per quarter for developed markets further the difference between the impact of political risk in emerging and developed markets is statistically significant we also document a global convergence in political risk over the last 10 years political risk has decreased in emerging markets and increased in developed markets if this trend continues the differential impact of political risk in emerging vs developed markets may narrow

on booms that never bust ambiguity in experimental asset markets with bubbles we study the effect of ambiguity on the formation of bubbles and on the occurrence of crashes in experimental asset markets a la smith suchanek and williams 1988 we extend their framework to an environment where the fundamental value of the asset is ambiguous we show that when the fundamental value is ambiguous asset prices tend to be lower than when it is risky although bubbles form in both the ambiguous and the risky environments additionally bubbles do not crash in the ambiguous case whereas they do so in the risky one these findings regarding depressed prices and the absence of crashes in the presence of ambiguity are in line with recent theoretical work stressing the crucial role of ambiguity to account for surprisingly low equity prices high returns as well as herding in asset markets

institutions sans frontieres international agreements and foreign investment we examine whether the presence of international investment agreements iias negotiated among countries for foreign investor protection lowers political risk faced by multinational enterprises mnes drawing on research from international business political science and international law we argue that iias increase expected future cash flows and hence the value of foreign assets by limiting the ability of host governments to make discriminatory policy changes however the need for iia protection and the ability to benefit from it varies with firm characteristics using detailed transaction level data for sale of petroleum assets in 45 countries we find that mnes pay significantly higher amounts for those protected by iias than similar but unprotected assets an effect moderated by the firm s reserve size and state ownership

empirical models of political risks in u s oil production operations in venezuela in 9 of the years between 1961 and 1978 venezuelan regimes took actions adverse to the profitability of u s oil companies local production operations in this study 2 time series discriminant models were developed for classifying each of the 18 years according to the occurrence of such action in the first model adverse government action was found more likely to occur following years of economic decline and periods when u s companies earned high profits from petroleum investments in venezuela in the second model government action tended to occur after periods of relative deprivation experienced by venezuelans to illustrate the use of discriminant models in forecasting political risks hypothetical scenarios were formulated from which projections were made through 1985 of the likelihood of government action against those u s oil companies operations remaining since the nationalization of petroleum

bubbles and financial professionals the efficiency of financial markets and their potential to produce bubbles are central topics in academic and professional debates yet little is known about the contribution of financial professionals to price efficiency we run 116 experimental markets with 412 professionals and 502 students we find that professional markets with bubble drivers capital inflows or high initial capital supply are susceptible to bubbles although they are more efficient than student markets in mixed markets with students bubbles also occur but professionals act as price stabilizers we show that heterogeneous price beliefs drive overpricing especially in bubble prone market environments

complexity and economic policy a paradigm shift or a change in perspective a review essay on david colander and roland kupers s complexity and the art of public policy in their recent book colander and kupers 2014 argue that viewing the economy as a complex adaptive system should change the way in which we make economic policy this would necessitate a paradigm shift economics has over time tried to produce a coherent model to underpin the dominant laissez faire liberal approach but we have never proved in that model that left to their own devices the participants in an economy will self organize into a satisfactory state this is an assumption complex interactive systems with direct interaction between heterogeneous agents may show no tendency to self equilibrate and will undergo endogenous crises economists should concentrate on the emergence of certain patterns colander and kupers suggest that we may be able to nudge the system into good basins of attraction a more radical view is that there are no fixed basins of attraction these change with the evolution of the system and it is illusory to believe that we can choose good basins we may be able to recognize and influence the emergence of certain states of the economy but we are far from leon walras s dream of economics as a science like astrophysics

price formation in double auction markets abstract this paper reports 14 laboratory experiments that examine existing theories of the price formation process in the continuous double auction the experiments feature random values and costs and therefore a new price formation observation each period we find that efficiency is high and rises with experience in this environment we also find that trades with greater exchange surplus tend to occur earlier in the period that increased trader experience reduces an anomalous intertemporal arbitrage opportunity observed previously and that only when traders are very experienced does exchange surplus accrue disproportionately to the side of the market with a smaller number of traders

money output granger causality revisited an empirical analysis of eu countries in this paper the evidence collected in the large literature on testing for granger causality from money to output is revisited using a broad data base of 14 eu countries plus canada the us and japan and quarterly data from the mid 1960s to mid 1990s a number of hypotheses from this literature is evaluated it is found that very few general conclusions can be sustained for instance in most countries it is not the case that the use of data in levels creates a bias in favour of finding granger causality effects of money on output compared to using differences neither does the significance of money lags decline when increasing the number of variables included in the model what appears to be robust though is that allowing for asymmetries clearly increases the likelihood of finding significant causality effects based on the granger causality test results a number of country groups are obtained using cluster analysis which are characterized by a similarly behaviour with respect to the money output

the impact of political risk on the volatility of stock returns the case of canada this paper examines the impact of political risk in canada on the volatility of stock returns our results suggest that political news associated with the possible separation of quebec from canada plays an important role in the volatility of stock returns however our evidence indicates that investors do not require a risk premium supporting the idea that political risk is diversifiable we also show that stock return volatility varies with the degree of a firm s exposure to political risk namely the structure of assets and the extent of foreign involvement which indicates that firms most exposed to political risk bear the burden of diversification

the effect of transaction costs on double auction markets abstract the ability of the continuous double auction to attain the competitive equilibrium outcome is one of the most robust results in experimental economics in this paper we study the sensitivity of the behavior of the double auction to the imposition of a monetary cost on the submission of offers to buy and sell we find that even with the transaction cost prices converge toward the competitive equilibrium level however the presence of the transaction cost leads to lower quantity exchanged and market efficiency than in the competitive equilibrium

allocating uncertain and unresponsive resources an experimental approach we identify an important class of economic problems that arise naturally in several applications the allocation of multiple resources when there are uncertainties in demand or supply unresponsive supplies no inventories and fixed capacities and significant demand indivisibilities rigidities examples of such problems include scheduling job shops airports or supercomputers zero inventory planning and the allocation and pricing of nasa s planned space station using experimental methods we show that the two most common organizations used to deal with this problem markets and administrative procedures can perform at very low efficiencies 60 65 efficiency in a seemingly robust example thus there is a need to design new mechanisms that more efficiently allocate resources in these environments we develop and analyze two mechanisms that arise naturally from auctions used to allocate single dimensional goods these new mechanisms involve computer assisted coordination made possible by the existence of networked computers both mechanisms significantly improve on the performance of administrative and market procedures

how to grow a bubble a model of myopic adapting agents abstract we present a simple agent based model to study the development of a bubble and the consequential crash and investigate how their proximate triggering factor might relate to their fundamental mechanism and vice versa our agents invest according to their opinion on future price movements which is based on three sources of information i public information i e news ii information from their friendship network and iii private information our bounded rational agents continuously adapt their trading strategy to the current market regime by weighting each of these sources of information in their trading decision according to its recent predicting performance we find that bubbles originate from a random lucky streak of positive news which due to a feedback mechanism of these news on the agents strategies develop into a transient collective herding regime after this self amplified exuberance the price has reached an unsustainable high value being corrected by a crash which brings the price even below its fundamental value these ingredients provide a simple mechanism for the excess volatility documented in financial markets paradoxically it is the attempt for investors to adapt to the current market regime which leads to a dramatic amplification of the price volatility a positive feedback loop is created by the two dominating mechanisms adaptation and imitation which by reinforcing each other result in bubbles and crashes the model offers a simple reconciliation of the two opposite herding versus fundamental proposals for the origin of crashes within a single framework and justifies the existence of two populations in the distribution of returns exemplifying the concept that crashes are qualitatively different from the rest of the price moves

the effect of asset and ownership structure on political risk some evidence from mitterrand s election in france abstract previous research suggests that political risk varies considerably from firm to firm yet few empirical tests of the cross sectional variation in political risk exist french assets were massively revalued the day after mitterrand was elected in 1981 providing a unique opportunity to test for the effect of firm specific factors on political risk although foreign ownership tends to increase political risk other factors can reduce it a simple model of political behavior is presented in which politicians value among other things economic growth a foreign firm with significant future growth options is likely to experience less political risk than other foreign firms and under certain circumstances less risk than even other domestic firms tests of these hypotheses are conducted using data from the french and u s capital markets the results are generally consistent with the hypotheses

nonspeculative bubbles in experimental asset markets lack of common knowledge of rationality vs actual irrationality we report the results of an experiment designed to study the role of speculation in the formation of bubbles and crashes in laboratory asset markets in a setting in which speculation is not possible bubbles and crashes are observed the results suggest that the departures from fundamental values are not caused by the lack of common knowledge of rationality leading to speculation but rather by behavior that itself exhibits elements of irrationality much of the trading activity that accompanies bubble formation in markets where speculation is possible is due to the fact that there is no other activity available for participants in the experiment

government intervention in the venezuelan petroleum industry an empirical investigation of political risk two important aspects of political risk analysis that have not received much attention in the literature are a the reasons why multinational firms experience different types of intervention and b the timing of intervention in order to address these issues this research develops a conceptual model of political risk based on the premise that host government intervention is related to specific objectives of the government vis a vis multinational firms information reflecting the attainment of objectives motivates the government to intervene in a given manner the application of this model to the case of the venezuelan petroleum industry from years 1947 to 1976 provides some support for this model and gives insight into the timing of specific types of intervention

money and output viewed through a rolling window abstract we examine the extent to which fluctuations in the money stock anticipate or granger cause fluctuations in real output using a variety of rolling window and increasing window estimation techniques various models are considered using simple sum as well as divisia measures of m 1 and m 2 income prices and both the t bill rate and the commercial paper rate findings indicate that the relation between income money prices and interest rates is stable as long as sufficient data are used and that there is cointegration among the variables considered although cointegration spaces become very difficult to estimate precisely when smaller windows of data are used further both m 1 and m 2 are shown to be important predictors of income for the entire period from 1960 2 1996 3 based on modified versions of what we term the most damaging specifications from friedman and kuttner 1993 and thoma 1994 our new evidence is based in part on a rather novel model selection approach to examining the relationship between money and income 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

oligopoly competition in fixed cost environments abstract many industries with avoidable fixed costs face competitive price instability problems in an attempt to maintain profitability we designed an experimental environment where profitability is eroded by the addition of sunk and avoidable fixed costs while we cannot reject the hypothesis that sunk fixed costs have no effect on prices we observe a pattern of price signaling and responses which maintain above normal profits this success implies that a firm does not have to exit such an industry in order to avoid loses and may help to explain why some competitive industries appear to maintain an inefficient number of firms

margin short selling and lotteries in experimental asset markets the robustness of bubbles and crashes in markets for assets with finite lives is perplexing this paper reports the results of experimental asset markets in which participants trade two assets in some markets price bubbles form in these markets traders pay higher prices for the asset with lottery characteristics i e a claim on a large unlikely payoff however institutional design has a significant impact on deviations in prices from fundamental values particularly for an asset with lottery characteristics price run ups and crashes are moderated when traders finance purchases of the assets themselves and are allowed to short sell

don t let your robots grow up to be traders artificial intelligence human intelligence and asset market bubbles abstract researchers who have examined markets populated by robot traders have claimed that the high level of allocative efficiency observed in experimental markets is driven largely by the intelligence implicit in the rules of the market furthermore they view the ability of agents artificial or human to process information and make rational decisions as unnecessary for the efficient operation of markets this paper presents a new series of market experiments that show that markets populated with standard robot traders are no longer efficient if time is a meaningful element as it is in all asset markets while simple two season markets with human subjects reliably converge to an efficient equilibrium markets with minimally intelligent robot traders fail to attain this equilibrium instead these markets overshoot the equilibrium and then crash below it in addition to firmly establishing the role of trader intelligence in asset market equilibrium these experiments also provide insights into why bubbles and crashes are consistently observed in many asset market laboratory experiments using human subjects

futures contracting and dividend uncertainty in experimental asset markets prices in experimental asset markets tend to bubble and then crash to dividend value at the end of the asset s useful life explanations for this phenomenon are 1 that participants cannot form reliable future price expectations or 2 dividend risk aversion we report the results of experiments to test these hypotheses in one experimental series a futures market is introduced so that participants can obtain information on future share prices in another series of experiments the per period dividend is known with certainty the futures market treatment reduced the bubble the certain dividend treatment had little effect on the character of bubbles with inexperienced traders copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

momentum and overreaction in experimental asset markets abstract price volatility and investor overreactions are commonplace in experimental asset markets understanding the price dynamics in these markets is crucial for designing successful new trading institutions we report on a series of experiments to test the predictions of a new momentum model using a dynamical systems approach this model is then pitted against several standard models to predict prices as well as against expert human forecasters the comparative results suggest that each model has its advantages and regions of best performance overall the best predictive methods are the momentum model and expert human forecasters

u s oil and natural gas reserve prices 1982 2003 abstract a time series is estimated of in ground prices of u s oil and natural gas reserve prices for the period 1982 2003 using market transaction data reserves sold are considered as proved errors in this respect may affect estimates in either direction the data are also used to examine the impact of reserve status production rate and well head prices on reserve prices both oil and gas current values rose after 2000 in real terms the reserve value of oil rose sharply in 2003 but stayed below the 1985 peak that of gas remained below the mid 1980s oil reserve values hold for the worldwide industry gas values only for north america

political risk and dividend policy evidence from international political crises we examine the impact of political risk on firms payout policy using a large international sample across 35 countries over the period from 1990 to 2008 we find that global political crises raise the market perceived uncertainty and cost of external financing using crisis events as a proxy for political risk we document that past dividend payers are more likely to terminate dividends and that non payers are less likely to initiate dividends during periods of high political risk these findings suggest a precautionary incentive of managers in response to political shocks further analysis shows that the effect of political risk on payout policy is stronger for multinational corporations but can be attenuated by country specific institutional settings such as more stable political systems and stronger investor legal protection

the institutional environment for infrastructure investment the empirical evidence that links political institutions to economic outcomes has grown dramatically in recent years however virtually all of this analysis is undertaken using data from the past three decades this paper extends this empirical framework by performing a two century long historical analysis of the determinants of infrastructure investment in a panel of over 100 countries the results demonstrate that political environments that limit the feasibility of policy change are an important determinant of investment in infrastructure copyright 2002 oxford university press

market power in tradable emission markets a laboratory testbed for emission trading in port phillip bay victoria abstract in theory competitive emission permit markets minimize total abatement costs permit markets are often imperfectly competitive however and may be thin and dominated by large firms the dominant firm s could exercise market power and increase other firms costs of pollution control while reducing their own emission control costs this paper reports a testbed laboratory experiment to examine whether a dominant firm can exercise market power in a permit market organized using the double auction trading institution our parameters approximate the abatement costs of sources in a proposed tradable emissions market for the reduction of nitrogen in the port phillip watershed in victoria australia we vary across treatments the initial allocation of permits to sources so that in one treatment the seller of permits is a monopolist and in another treatment the market is duopolistic we also vary the information that subjects have about the number and abatement costs of their competitors we find that prices and seller profits are higher and efficiency is lower on average in the monopoly sessions compared with the duopoly sessions but the differences are not substantial and are not statistically significant due to pronounced variation across sessions moreover prices profits and transaction volumes are usually much closer to the competitive equilibrium ce than the monopoly equilibrium

the exposure problem and market design markets have an exposure problem when getting to the optimal allocation requires a sequence of transactions which if started but not completed leaves at least one trader with losses we use laboratory experiments to evaluate the effect of the exposure problem on alternative market mechanisms the continuous double auction performs poorly efficiency is only 20 when exposure is high and 55 when it is low a package market effectively eliminates the exposure problem in low and high exposure treatments efficiency is 82 and 89 respectively building on stability notions from matching theory we introduce the concept of mechanism stability a model of trade that combines mechanism stability with noisy best responses and imperfect foresight explains the difference in market performance finally decentralized bargaining with contingent contracts performs well with perfect information and communication but not in the more realistic case when traders preferences are privately known

avoidable cost ride a double auction roller coaster the double auction trading institution has been highly efficient across diverse marginal cost market structures whether human subjects or zero intelligence robots populated those markets accordingly many researchers suspect that double auction performance transcends market structure and agent strategy but the authors show that large avoidable costs undermine the efficiency and stability of human subject double auctions and these low human efficiencies are simultaneously well above zero intelligence efficiencies their results dramatically illustrate the potential havoc wrought by highly competitive institutions when they must cope with nonconvex technologies copyright 1996 by american economic association

allocative efficiency of markets with zero intelligence traders market as a partial substitute for individual rationality we report market experiments in which human traders are replaced by zero intelligence programs that submit random bids and offers imposing a budget constraint i e not permitting traders to sell below their costs or buy above their values is sufficient to raise the allocative efficiency of these auctions close to 100 percent allocative efficiency of a double auction derives largely from its structure independent of traders motivation intelligence or learning adam smith s invisible hand may be more powerful than some may have thought it can generate aggregate rationality not only from individual rationality but also from individual irrationality

a simple testable model of double auction markets abstract we propose a model of price formation in double auction markets which employs the strong simplifying assumption that agents neglect strategic feedback effects and regard themselves as playing a game against nature agents otherwise are strict expected utility maximizers employing bayesian updating procedures we prove the optimality of simple aggressive reservation price strategies in our general model and propose a parametric form that yields very detailed and computable predictions of market behavior

resource nationalism meets the market political risk and the value of petroleum reserves this paper investigates the effect of resource nationalism on the value of petroleum crude oil and natural gas reserves we develop a framework for treating resource nationalism as political risk and utilize data on reserve transactions from john s herold and political risk ratings from international country risk guide and institutional investor for the period 2000 2006 controlling for other factors that affect reserve value we demonstrate the value destruction of political risk and estimate the political risk discount for 37 countries the paper contributes to both the international business literature and practitioner approaches to political risk analysis in demonstrating use of publicly available market data from real asset transactions to measure the cost of political risk we also show that the discount depends on market conditions the higher expected future petroleum prices are the larger is the discount at any level of political risk this insight adds a new dimension to analysis of political risk which is typically measured and examined without regard to market conditions

money and output new evidence based on wavelet coherence abstract we reassess the relationship between money and output using quarterly data from the us economy we use several tools based on wavelets the wavelet power transform and the wavelet coherence with which we analyze this relationship in both time and frequency we find evidence of a weaker relationship within the great moderation as well as a stronger relationship during the great recession

how do mncs vote in developing country elections research on multinational corporations mncs and host government political risk in developing countries has largely ignored local electoral politics economic policies and the mnc investment ince

does money still matter for u s output abstract in this note we use an out of sample approach to investigate whether money growth granger causes output growth in the united states we find that after the great moderation the granger causal role of money appears to have vanished completely

a test of the hotelling valuation principle time series tests of the hotelling r percent rule for natural resource prices have not been strongly supportive but the tests and the data are subject to serious difficulties we propose here an alternative testing strategy based on another but less widely known implication of the hotelling model we test this implication which we call the hotelling valuation principle by regressing the market values of the reserves of a sample of u s domestic oiland gas producing companies on their estimated hotelling values we find that the estimated hotelling values account for a significant portion of the observed variations in market values and that the hotelling measures are better indicators of the market values of petroleum properties than two widely cited publicly available alternative appraisals

why doesn t capital flow from rich to poor countries an empirical investigation we examine the empirical role of difierent explanations for the lack of ows of capital from rich to poor countries the lucas paradox the theoretical explanations include difierences in fundamentals across countries and capital market imperfections we show that during 1970i2000 low institutional quality is the leading explanation for example improving peru s institutional quality to australia s level implies a quadrupling of foreign investment recent studies emphasize the role of institutions for achieving higher levels of income but remain silent on the speciflc mechanisms our results indicate that foreign investment might be a channel through which institutions afiect long run development

a test of the modigliani miller invariance theorem and arbitrage in experimental asset markets modigliani and miller show that the total market value of a firm is unaffected by a repackaging of asset return streams to equity and debt if pricing is arbitrage free we investigate this invariance theorem in experimental asset markets finding value invariance for assets of identical risks when returns are perfectly correlated however exploiting price discrepancies has risk when returns have the same expected value but are uncorrelated in which case the law of one price is violated discrepancies shrink in consecutive markets but persist even with experienced traders in markets where overall trader acuity is high assets trade closer to parity

how international oil and gas companies respond to local content policies in petroleum producing developing countries a narrative enquiry this paper uses narrative analysis to critically examine the business practices used by five international oil and gas companies iocs chevron exxonmobil shell bp and total to respond to local content policies in petroleum producing developing countries nigeria angola venezuela kazakhstan brazil indonesia yemen and indonesia during the period 2000 2012 the business practices include the formulation of local content strategies that are implemented through programmes and initiatives aimed at developing and using host country suppliers and workforce such practices and the narratives used to communicate them implicitly reflect the context in which the effectiveness of local content policies on economic development can be assessed by comparing and contrasting the narratives across the five iocs in relation to the wider literature four emergent narrative strategies justifying the business practices of iocs are identified and discussed they include 1 direct engagement to renegotiate local content requirements with governments 2 legal compliance framework 3 the business case for local content strategies and 4 corporate social responsibility csr initiatives the conclusion considers the policy implications of these findings for local content development in petroleum producing developing countries

market power in oral double auctions this paper reports the results of a series of oral double auction experiments in which some traders possess market power a market is set up in which the configuration of the supply and demand curves leads to an asymmetry between buyers and sellers in their abilities to influence transactions prices this market structure does not always lead to convergence to the competitive equilibrium price despite the competitive nature of the oral double auction institution the nonconvergence occurs most frequently in the experiments involving experienced subjects

financial and political risks in us direct foreign investment this paper examines the risk of us direct foreign investments over the period 1982 98 in 59 host countries the first part of the analysis builds an empirical model to explain the time series and cross country patterns of return on capital the estimation then uses the return on assets roa as a measure of the return on capital and investigates its determinants there are four main findings first the roa in a majority of countries does not simply track the worldwide roa second some cross country differences are explained by financial risks third unexplained country risk is qualitatively and quantitatively related to unobserved political risk fourth unexplained country risk is also compensated with a higher roa enhancing its credibility as a measure of political risk the unexplained country risk is thus used to calculate a new index of political risk ratings for 56 host countries that may be useful to managers investors policymakers and academics