Organizations & Markets

The article shows that outside ownership of media moves in stages -- from media properties as the mouthpiece for personal and business interests, to a second stage of conglomerates seeking economic “synergies” of performance, to a third stage dominated by financial portfolio diversification. These phases of outside media ownership correspond to the stages of economic development in that country.The article finds that in rich countries, the ownership of media by industrial companies as a way to create political influence has been declining.

We examine the relation between shareholder activism and voluntary disclosure. An important consequence of voluntary disclosure is less adverse selection in the capital markets. One class of traders that finds less adverse selection unprofitable is activist investors who target mispriced firms whose valuations they can improve. Consistent with this idea, we find that managers issue earnings and sales forecasts more frequently when their firm is more at risk of attack by activist investors, and that these additional disclosures reduce the likelihood of becoming an activist's target.

This paper shows that local economic shocks spill over to distant regions through firms' internal networks, and that such spillovers matter economically by affecting aggregate employment in those regions. Using confidential micro data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we find that establishment-level employment responds strongly to shocks in other regions in which the firm is operating. Consistent with theory, the elasticity of establishment-level employment with respect to shocks in other regions increases with firms' financial constraints.

Past research paints a mixed picture of rationales in negotiations: Some findings suggest rationales might help, whereas others suggest they may have little effect or backfire. Here, we distinguish between two kinds of rationales buyers commonly employ — constraint rationales (referring to one's own limited resources) and disparagement rationales (involving critiques of the negotiated object) — and demonstrate their divergent effects.

Whether in everyday disagreements, bargaining episodes, or high-stakes disputes, people typically see a spectrum of possible responses to dealing with differences with others, ranging from avoidance and accommodation to competition and aggression. We believe people judge their own and others' behaviors along this dimension, which we call interpersonal assertiveness, reflecting the degree to which someone stands up and speaks out for their own positions when they are faced with someone else who does not want the same outcomes.

To align employees' interests with the firm's goals, employers often use performance-based pay, but designing such a compensation plan is challenging because performance is typically multifaceted. For example, a sales employee should be incentivized to sell the company's product, but a focus on current sales without rewarding the salespeople according to the quality of the product and/or customer service may result in fewer future sales.

This study incorporates a recent preference specification of expectations-based loss aversion, which has been applied broadly in microeconomics, into a classic macro model to offer a unified explanation for three empirical observations about life-cycle consumption. First, loss aversion explains excess smoothness and sensitivity — that is, the empirical observation that consumption responds to income shocks with a lag. Intuitively, such lagged responses allow the agent to delay painful losses in consumption until his expectations have adjusted.

We examine the international equity allocations of over 3 million individuals in 296 401(k) plans over the 2006-2011 period. These allocations show enormous cross-individual variation, ranging between zero and over 75%, as well as an upward trend that is only partially accounted for by the slight decrease in importance of the US market relative to the world market. International equity allocations also display strong cohort effects, with younger cohorts investing more internationally than older ones, but also each cohort investing more internationally over time.

This paper proposes an institutional solution that can help unlock the flow of low yielding long-term savings towards high-return infrastructure investments. The solution is to transform public–private partnerships (PPPs) in infrastructure as well as the classic model of multilateral development banks. Instead of thinking of PPPs as bilateral contracts between a private concession operator and a government agency, we argue that they should be conceived as partnerships that also involve a development bank and long-term institutional investors as partners.