ethnic discrimination evidence from china abstract we study the role of ethnicity in experimental labor markets where employers determine wages of workers who perform a real effort task this task requires a true skill which we show is not affected by minority status in some treatments we provide subtle priming to employers about minority status of workers as commonly depicted on chinese hukou identification system we conduct our experiments at two sites located in provinces that differ by their historical shares of ethnic groups in the population we find that 1 han and minority workers are equally productive in both provinces 2 in the diverse province there is no difference in the wages between han and minority workers 3 in the non diverse province minority workers receive 4 7 lower wages than han workers

market power and firm risk a test of the quiet life hypothesis abstract this paper presents an empirical investigation of john r hicks quiet life hypothesis that firms in monopolistic markets will be more risk averse than firms in competitive markets a sample of 6 500 unit banks is used in a multivariate regression analysis to test the relationship between market concentration and overall risk measured by the coefficient of variation as well as certain financial ratios financial data are for the years 1969 1978 test results are consistent with hicks quiet life hypothesis it is also notable that while most structure performance studies in banking have found a quantitatively small effect of structure on performance these results suggest that the effect may be fairly substantial

competitiveness through management of diversity effects on stock price valuation this study s premise is that firms that can lower their costs and enhance their differentiation through the effective management of their human resources have a competitive advantage using data fr

a note on the risk adjusted price concentration relationship in banking abstract price concentration studies in banking typically find a significant and negative relationship between consumer deposit rates i e prices and market concentration this implies highly concentrated banking markets are bad for depositors it also provides support for the structure conduct performance hypothesis and rejects the efficient structure hypothesis however these studies have focused almost exclusively on supply side control variables and neglected demand side variables when estimating the reduced form price concentration relationship for example previous studies have not included in their analysis bank specific risk variables as measures of cross sectional derived deposit demand we find that when bank specific risk variables are included in the analysis the magnitude of the relationship between deposit rates and market concentration decreases by over 50 we offer an explanation for these results based on the correlation between a bank s risk profile and the structure of the market in which it operates these results suggest that it may be necessary to reconsider the well established assumption that higher market concentration necessarily leads to anticompetitive deposit pricing behavior by commercial banks this has direct implications for the antitrust evaluations of bank merger and acquisition proposals by regulatory agencies and in a more general sense these results suggest that any structure conduct performance based study that does not explicitly consider the possibility of very different risk profiles of the firms analyzed may indeed miss a very important set of explanatory variables and thus the results from those studies may be spurious

on the performance of differently regulated financial institutions some empirical evidence abstract the paper raises two questions about the industrial economics of banking first why are financial market configurations so different across nations we discuss the theoretical arguments by following the sequence regulation structure performance section 2 second do the differences in regulation and structure matter section 3 provides empirical evidence pertaining to that question throughout the paper we refer to two polar cases of financial systems market m and bank b based systems as for banks we distinguish between specialised and universal banks universal banking is a particular institutional representation of b systems a first empirical test relating macroeconomic growth to financial variables suggests that these variables matter we then test with a set of 88 banks the effects of regulatory and structural variables on the level and variability of bank performance we conclude that universal banks achieve a better risk return trade off due to superior monitoring and information collection capacity

google search keywords that best predict energy price volatility abstract internet search activity data has been widely used as an instrument to approximate trader attention in different markets this method has proven effective in predicting market indices in the short term however little attention has been paid to demonstrating search activity for keywords that best grab investor attention in different markets this study attempts to build the best practically possible proxy for attention in the market for energy commodities using google search data specifically we confirm the utility of google search activity for energy related keywords are significant predictors of volatility by showing they have incremental predictive power beyond the conventional garch models in predicting volatility for energy commodities prices starting with a set of ninety terms used in the energy sector the study uses a multistage filtering process to create combinations of keywords that best predict the volatility of crude oil brent and west texas intermediate conventional gasoline new york harbor and us gulf coast heating oil new york harbor and natural gas prices for each commodity combinations that enhance garch most effectively are established as proxies of attention the results indicate investor attention is widely reflected in internet search activities and demonstrate search data for what keywords best reveal the direction of concern and attention in energy markets

earnings news and small traders an intraday analysis abstract this study separates trading volume into buyer and seller initiated activities and examines the directional volume reaction in small and large trades to different types of earnings news good bad news triggers brief but intense buying selling in the large trades however a persistent period of unusually high buying activity is observed in the small trades irrespective of the news this anomalous proclivity of small traders to buy is robust across firm size trading volume and different earnings expectation models several explanations are discussed although the behavior does not seem fully explained by existing theories

competition and commercial banks risk taking evidence from sub saharan africa region abstractthis study investigates the relationship between competition and the risk taking attitude of banks we test how this relationship manifests in the sub saharan african ssa region s commerci

the dynamic dependence of fossil energy investor sentiment and renewable energy stock markets abstract this study investigates the dynamic directional information spillover of return and volatility between the fossil energy market investor sentiment towards renewable energy and the renewable energy stock market using the connectedness network approach empirical results show that the spillover effects of the volatility system are generally stronger than that of the return system which suggest that risk transmission among the markets is more obvious in both systems the impact of the fossil energy market especially crude oil on the renewable energy stock market is greater than the impact of investor sentiment on the renewable energy stock market this finding shows that the renewable energy stock market is closely related to the fossil energy market furthermore the rolling window approach is adopted to examine the time varying information spillover among them the dynamic findings suggest that investor sentiment towards renewable energy can explain the return and volatility of renewable energy stock to a certain degree

single equation multiple regression methodology is it an appropriate methodology for the estimation of the structure performance relationship in banking abstract tests of the structure performance paradigm of the industrial organization literature have been carried out almost exclusively using a single equation multiple regression methodology the purpose of this paper is to suggest that where the firms being considered are multiple product in nature and may pursue objectives in addition to maximizing the value of the firm such a methodology may be inappropriate the results presented in this paper suggest that the absence of a consistently strong positive and statistically significant relationship between market concentration and bank profitability may be traced in part to such an inappropriate methodology

do government owned banks trade market power for slack the quiet life hypothesis qlh posits that banks with market power have less incentives to maximize revenues and minimize cost especially government owned banks with a public mandate precluding profit maximization might succumb to a quiet life we use a unified approach that simultaneously measures market power and efficiency to test the quiet life hypothesis of german savings banks we find that average local market power declined between 1996 and 2006 cost and profit efficiency remained constant nonparametric correlations are consistent with a quiet life regarding cost efficiency but not regarding profit efficiency the quiet life on the cost side is negatively correlated with bank size quality of loan portfolio and local per capita income the last result indicates that the quiet cost life is therefore potentially due to benevolent excess consumption of local input factors by public savings banks

enjoying the quiet life under deregulation evidence from adjusted lerner indices for u s banks abstract the quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents we propose a simple adjustment to lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis for a large sample of u s commercial banks we find that adjusted lerner indices are significantly larger than conventional lerner indices and trending upward over time instrumental variable regressions reject the quiet life hypothesis for cost inefficiencies however lerner indices adjusted for profit inefficiencies reveal a quiet life among u s banks

community and capital in entrepreneurship and economic growth we argue that social integration in the sense of within community interconnectedness and venture capital have a complementary relationship in fostering innovation entrepreneurship and economic gr

competition and risk in south east asian commercial banking this article investigates the effects of competition on bank risk taking behaviour in four south east asian countries indonesia malaysia philippines and vietnam our main finding is that competition does not increase bank risk taking behaviour and the results appear robust to different model specifications estimation approaches and variable construction we also find that concentration is inversely related to bank risk whereas regulatory restrictions positively influence bank risk taking

does diversity pay race gender and the business case for diversity the value in diversity perspective argues that a diverse workforce relative to a homogeneous one is generally beneficial for business including but not limited to corporate profits and earnings this is in contrast to other accounts that view diversity as either nonconsequential to business success or actually detrimental by creating conflict undermining cohesion and thus decreasing productivity using data from the 1996 to 1997 national organizations survey a national sample of for profit business organizations this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value in diversity thesis the results support seven of these hypotheses racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue more customers greater market share and greater relative profits gender diversity is associated with increased sales revenue more customers and greater relative profits i discuss the implications of these findings relative to alternative views of diversity in the workplace

bending the pipeline executive search and gender inequality in hiring for top management jobs we study the sources of women s underrepresentation in hiring for top management jobs by focusing on the context of executive search using data that include proprietary information on 10 970 individuals considered by a search firm we examine the sources of the low proportion of women placed in senior roles contrary to received wisdom we find limited evidence that demand side screeners strongly contribute to gender disadvantage in this setting what gender differences exist tend to play out at the start of the hiring process and are driven both by supply side and demand side actors once considered for a position women are no less likely than men to be hired though they are slightly less likely to be interviewed by the search firm our findings highlight the theoretical importance of disentangling candidates self steering behavior from the pipeline bending of hiring agents we discuss the implications of our results for understanding gender inequality at upper echelons of the labor market this p

spillovers between the oil sector and the s p500 the impact of information flow about crude oil crude oil is one of the most important commodities in the real economy and as such the relationship between oil prices and broader equity markets has attracted a lot of research attention recent work has considered directional spillovers or links between oil and equity markets in recent times there has been a growing body of research into the impacts of news and media attention on asset returns both in the context of and in particular with both the oil and equity markets but also within each of these this paper considers how news or information flows about crude oil influence the spillover links between these assets using realized volatility estimates based on high frequency data the empirical analysis reveals a number of novel results in terms of the behavior of these linkages increased news flow about oil reduces the impact of the broader equity market on the oil sector implying that it is driven more by oil specific shocks and less by more general financial market conditions it also increases the impact of the oil sector on the broader equity market these results have potential implications for hedging and portfolio allocation

opec in the news abstract this paper introduces a newspaper article count index related to opec that rises in response to important opec meetings and events connected with opec production levels i use this index to measure how interest in opec varies over time and investigate how oil price volatility behaves when the index unexpectedly changes i find that unexpected increases in the newspaper index are strongly associated with higher levels of oil price volatility both realized and implied in some cases these unexpected movements appear to be driven by an unpredictable opec event such as the iraq invasion of kuwait in other cases such as the oil price collapses in late 2008 and late 2014 unforeseen developments in the oil market or broader economy seem to generate the unexpected movements in price volatility and interest in opec the newspaper index is highly correlated with google search volume data on opec an alternative measure of the amount of attention paid to opec events

investor attention and crude oil prices evidence from nonlinear granger causality tests abstract using the google search volume index gsvi to measure investor attention this paper investigates the relationships between investor attention and crude oil prices for the main crude oil markets worldwide to account for possible structural breaks and nonlinearity in the relation between investor attention and oil returns fourier unit root test and nonlinear granger causality tests are employed the empirical results suggest that the bidirectional nonlinear granger causality exists only between investor attention and wti future crude oil return however wti crude oil return granger causes investor attention weakly for dubai spot daqing spot wti spot and brent future oil markets unidirectional nonlinear granger causality runs from investor attention to oil returns which is relatively weak

workforce diversity and religiosity workforce diversity has received increasing amounts of attention from academics and practitioners alike in this article we examine the empirical association between a firm s workforce diversity hereafter diversity and the degree of religiosity of the firm s management by investigating their unidirectional and endogenous effects employing a large and extensive u s sample of firms from the years 1991 2010 we find a positive association between a measure of the firm s commitment to diversity and the religiosity of the firm s management after controlling for various firm characteristics in addition after controlling for endogeneity with the dynamic panel generalized method of moment we still find a positive association between the firm s diversity and management s religiosity we interpret these results as supportive of the religious motivation explanation that views the firm as a human community and considers religion as a factor that influences managers to more positively embrace diversity our results however provide no support for the resource constraint hypothesis that views the firm as a nexus of contracts and sees managers as aiming to maximize shareholder returns under resource constraints that force them to invest only in projects that have a positive net present value npv and reject diversity initiatives since these do not have a positive npv

gender diversity in firms this paper explores the recent efforts by the corporate world and public policy to increase the number of women in leadership positions in the workplace we review and empirically evaluate the business case for gender equality showing some evidence in favour of it despite the evidence and growing support progress towards more diversity in leadership positions has been slow we study the importance of supply side constraints as well as the main diversity policies gender quotas mentoring and network programs diversity training to change firm culture and family friendly policies that have been implemented we focus on the effectiveness of these policies their shortcomings as well as potential future steps that could help guide policy

the great industry gamble market structure dynamics as a survival contest industry dynamics are studied as an endogenous tournament with infinite horizon and stochastic entry in each period firms investments determine their probability of surviving into the next period this generates a survival contest which fuels market structure dynamics while the evolution of market structure constantly redefines the contest more concentrated markets endogenously generate less profit rivals that are more difficult to outlive and more entry the unique steady state distribution exhibits ongoing turbulence correlated exit and entry rates and shakeouts the model s predictions fit empirical findings in markets where firms trade off profits for smaller risk of failure e g banking