Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? Is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We combine several Norwegian data sets to ...answer these questions. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points and provides plausibly exogenous variation in the availability and adoption of broadband internet in firms. Our results suggest that broadband internet improves (worsens) the labor market outcomes and productivity of skilled (unskilled) workers. We explore several possible explanations for the skill complementarity of broadband internet. We find suggestive evidence that broadband adoption in firms complements skilled workers in executing nonroutine abstract tasks, and substitutes for unskilled workers in performing routine tasks. Taken together, our findings have important implications for the ongoing policy debate over government investment in broadband infrastructure to encourage productivity and wage growth.
The Credit Ratings Game BOLTON, PATRICK; FREIXAS, XAVIER; SHAPIRO, JOEL
The Journal of finance (New York),
February 2012, Letnik:
67, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The collapse of AAA-rated structured finance products in 2007 to 2008 has brought renewed attention to conflicts of interest in credit rating agencies (CRAs). We model competition among CRAs with ...three sources of conflicts: (1) CRAs conflict of understating risk to attract business, (2) issuers' ability to purchase only the most favorable ratings, and (3) the trusting nature of some investor clienteles. These conflicts create two distortions. First, competition can reduce efficiency, as it facilitates ratings shopping. Second, ratings are more likely to be inflated during booms and when investors are more trusting. We also discuss efficiency-enhancing regulatory interventions.
Firms have an incentive to manage media coverage to influence their stock prices during important corporate events. Using comprehensive data on media coverage and merger negotiations, we find that ...bidders in stock mergers originate substantially more news stories after the start of merger negotiations, but before the public announcement. This strategy generates a short-lived run-up in bidders' stock prices during the period when the stock exchange ratio is determined, which substantially impacts the takeover price. Our results demonstrate that the timing and content of financial media coverage may be biased by firms seeking to manipulate their stock price.
We provide evidence for the importance of information asymmetry in asset pricing by using three natural experiments. Consistent with rational expectations models with multiple assets and multiple ...signals, we find that prices and uninformed demand fall as asymmetry increases. These falls are larger when more investors are uninformed, turnover is larger and more variable, payoffs are more uncertain, and the lost signal is more precise. Prices fall partly because expected returns become more sensitive to liquidity risk. Our results confirm that information asymmetry is priced and imply that a primary channel that links asymmetry to prices is liquidity.
The growing number of academic studies about online customer loyalty shows that diversity, if not divergence, exists regarding the measurement and conceptualization of online loyalty. By multiplying ...the theoretical foundations for the study of online loyalty, researchers have identified different determinants of online loyalty and different impacts on business relationships. Considering this theoretical and conceptual diversity, the purpose of this paper is to systematically review and summarize the literature dealing with loyalty to a commercial website. Specifically, the goal is to realize a descriptive meta-analysis of the empirical literature focusing on the conceptualization, measurement, antecedents, and consequences of e-loyalty, and to provide an integrative model for these antecedents and consequences. This framework provides us with a cohesive view of online customer loyalty and helps identify potential unexplored research opportunities in this area. The paper ends with a research agenda for future studies.
Using data on auctions of companies, we estimate valuations (maximum willingness to pay) of strategic and financial bidders from their bids. We find that a typical target is valued higher by ...strategic bidders. However, 22.4% of targets in our sample are valued higher by financial bidders. These are mature, poorly performing companies. We also find that (i) valuations of different strategic bidders are more dispersed and (ii) valuations of financial bidders are correlated with aggregate economic conditions. Our results suggest that different targets appeal to different types of bidders, rather than that strategic bidders always value targets more because of synergies.
We evaluate the consequences of a recent regulatory reform in Portugal, which substantially reduced the cost of firm entry. Our analysis uses matched employer-employee data, which provide unusually ...rich information on the characteristics of founders and employees associated with new firms before and after the reform. We find that the short-term consequences of the reform were as one would predict with a standard economic model of entrepreneurship: the reform resulted in increased firm formation and employment, but mostly among ' marginal firms' that would have been most readily deterred by existing heavy entry regulations. These marginal firms were typically small, owned by relatively poorly educated entrepreneurs, and operating in low-technology sectors (agriculture, construction and retail trade). In comparison to firms that entered in the absence of the reform, these marginal firms were less likely to survive their first two years.
This article provides one of the first rigorous estimations of the labor-market returns to community college certificates and diplomas, as well as estimations of the returns to the more commonly ...studied associate’s degrees. Using administrative data from Kentucky, we estimate panel-data models that control for differences among students in precollege earnings and educational aspirations. Associate’s degrees and diplomas have quarterly earnings returns of nearly $2,400 for women and $1,500 for men, compared with much smaller returns for certificates. There is substantial heterogeneity in returns across fields of study. Degrees, diplomas, and—for women—certificates correspond with higher levels of employment.
Immigration, offshoring, and American jobs Ottaviano, Gianmarco I. P; Peri, Giovanni; Wright, Greg C
The American economic review,
08/2013, Letnik:
103, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the ...effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born workers. We find that immigrant and native-born workers do not compete much due to the fact that they tend to perform tasks at opposite ends of the task complexity spectrum, with offshore workers performing the tasks in the middle. An effect of offshoring and a positive effect of immigration on native-born employment suggest that immigration and offshoring improve industry efficiency. (JEL J24, J41, J61, L24) PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
DIRECTED SEARCH WITH PHANTOM VACANCIES Albrecht, James; Decreuse, Bruno; Vroman, Susan
International economic review (Philadelphia),
20/May , Letnik:
64, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
When vacancies are filled, the job ads often remain, creating phantom vacancies. Older listings more likely represent phantoms. We assume job seekers direct their search based on listing age. Forming ...a match with an age‐a vacancy creates an age‐a phantom with probability β and generates an externality affecting vacancies aged a and older. Thus, the externality decreases with the match's listing age. Relative to efficient behavior, job seekers overapply to younger listings. We calibrate using U.S. data. The contribution of phantoms to inefficiency is large, but, given their existence, the planner cannot improve much on the directed search allocation.
PDF
