This paper investigates the role of peer effects in the employee welfare policies of organizations. Using US panel data for a sample of 11,451 firm‐year observations from 1996 to 2017, we find that ...firms’ employee welfare decisions are driven by their peers and show that peer firms play a significant role in defining corporate employee welfare policies. Our findings are robust to various sensitivity checks, including alternative definitions of employee welfare, alternative peer proxies and several identification strategies. Our additional analysis shows that herding behaviour is prevalent in followers, who mimic leaders’ behaviour, but we do not find any such relationship for industry leaders. Further, we show evidence suggesting that mimetic and normative isomorphic pressures are driving the peer effects. Finally, we examine the economic consequences of peer mimicking in employee welfare policies and show that it improves focal firms’ value and innovation. Our findings on firms’ peer effects and herding behaviour have policy implications.
This paper tests for the presence of the symbolic management of women board directors. The data are based on companies in the UK FTSE All‐Share Index between 1996 and 2017. Our sample experiences a ...sharp increase in the number of women board directors after a major reform in 2011, known as the Davies Review. While the Davies Review has triggered a rise in the number of women in non‐executive director positions, these women continue to experience a disproportionate exit rate around 9 years of tenure. This is a symbolically significant moment because at 9 years directors are no longer considered ‘independent’ under the UK Governance Code. Notwithstanding the progress made following the Davies Review, the evidence presented here supports the view that women often serve on company boards for symbolic rather than substantive motives.
Abstract
We label the degree to which individuals are more optimistic at long horizons relative to short horizons as the horizon bias. We examine whether time-series variation in the horizon bias can ...explain the time-series variation in the equity term structure. We use analyst earnings forecasts to measure the degree of the horizon bias in the stock market. Consistent with the intuition from a stylized present value model, we find that periods of above-average horizon bias are associated with negative term premiums, whereas periods of below-average horizon bias are associated with positive term premiums.
Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
Volatility Expectations and Returns LOCHSTOER, LARS A.; MUIR, TYLER
The Journal of finance (New York),
April 2022, Letnik:
77, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
ABSTRACT
We provide evidence that agents have slow‐moving beliefs about stock market volatility that lead to initial underreaction to volatility shocks followed by delayed overreaction. These ...dynamics are mirrored in the VIX and variance risk premiums, which reflect investor expectations about volatility, and are also supported in both surveys and firm‐level option prices. We embed these expectations into an asset pricing model and find that the model can account for a number of stylized facts about market returns and return volatility that are difficult to reconcile, including a weak or even negative risk‐return trade‐off.
In this paper, we analyze the effect of light conditions on road accidents and estimate the long-run consequences of different time regimes for road safety. Identification is based on variation in ...light conditions induced by differences in sunrise and sunset times across space and time. We estimate that darkness causes annual costs of more than £500 million in Great Britain. By setting daylight saving time year-round, 8% of these costs could be saved. Thus, focusing solely on the short-run costs related to the transition itself underestimates the total costs of the current time regime.
We conduct a decomposition analysis based on recentred influence function (RIF) regressions to disentangle the relative importance of automation and robotization for wage inequality in the ...manufacturing sector in Germany between 1996 and 2017. Our measure of automation threat combines occupation‐specific scores of automation risk with sector‐specific robot densities. We find that besides changes in the composition of individual characteristics, structural shifts among different automation threat groups are a non‐negligible factor associated with wage inequality between 1996 and 2017. Moreover, the increase in wage dispersion among the different automation threat groups has contributed significantly to higher wage inequality in the 1990s and 2000s.
While school choice may enhance competition, incentives for public schools to raise productivity may be muted if public education is imperfectly substitutable with alternatives. This paper estimates ...the aggregate effect of charter school expansion on education quality while accounting for the horizontal differentiation of charter programs. Our research design leverages variation following the removal of North Carolina’s statewide cap to compare test score changes for students who lived near entering charters to those farther away. We find learning gains that are driven by public schools responding to increased competition from non-horizontally differentiated charter schools, even before those charters actually open.
In the aftermath of armed conflict, how do new generations of young people learn about peace, justice, and democracy? Michelle J. Bellino describes how, following Guatemala's civil war, adolescents ...at four schools in urban and rural communities learn about their country's history of authoritarianism and develop civic identities within a fragile postwar democracy.Through rich ethnographic accounts,Youth in Postwar Guatemala, traces youth experiences in schools, homes, and communities, to examine how knowledge and attitudes toward historical injustice traverse public and private spaces, as well as generations. Bellino documents the ways that young people critically examine injustice while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as civic actors. In a country still marked by the legacies of war and division, young people navigate between the perilous work of critiquing the flawed democracy they inherited, and safely waiting for the one they were promised.
The study aims at examining possible impacts of the changes in oil prices and income on crude oil import demand in Turkey using monthly data between 1996:1 and 2017:9. To this end, the study uses a ...recently introduced Fourier Shin cointegration test of Tsong et al. (2016) and Fourier Toda–Yamamoto approach of Nazlioglu et al. (2016). The study also constructs error correction model to estimate the short‐run parameters. Our empirical findings detect that oil imports are more sensitive to changes in income relative to changes in oil price in the long‐run. Furthermore, 81.4 per cent of the disequilibrium of the shocks converges back to the equilibrium level within the next month. Also, the causality test results provide an evidence for conservation hypothesis in Turkey. Thus, energy conservative policies do not have adverse effects on real economic activity. These results include policy implications for future prospects.
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