Organizations & Markets

We review limitations of the traditional paradigm for cultural research and propose an alternative framework, polyculturalism. Polyculturalism assumes that individuals' relationships to cultures are not categorical but rather are partial and plural; it also assumes that cultural traditions are not independent, sui generis lineages but rather are interacting systems. Individuals take influences from multiple cultures and thereby become conduits through which cultures can affect each other.

We estimate the elasticity of exports to credit using matched customs and firm-level bank credit data from Peru. To account for non-credit determinants of exports, we compare changes in exports of the same product and to the same destination byfirms borrowing from banks differentially affected by capital-flow reversals during the 2008 financial crisis. We find that credit shocks affect the intensive margin of exports, but have no significant impact on entry or exit of firms to new product and destination markets.

This article studies the causes of China’s Great Famine, during which 16.5 to 45 million individuals perished in rural areas. We document that average rural food retention during the famine was too high to generate a severe famine without rural inequality in food availability; that there was significant variance in famine mortality rates across rural regions; and that rural mortality rates were positively correlated with per capita food production, a surprising pattern that is unique to the famine years.

Researchers typically invoke theoretical assumptions to estimate mark-ups. Instead, we directly obtain mark-ups by surveying Pakistani soccer-ball producers.

In the wake of recent revelations about US involvement in torture, and widespread and seemingly-growing support of torture in the US, we consider how people judge the value of information gained from informants under coercion. Drawing on past work on confirmation biases and moral judgments, we predicted, and found, that American torture supporters are more likely than opposers to see coerced information as relatively valuable and necessary in a scenario describing the foiling of an al-Qaeda terrorist attack.

Intergroup researchers have the opportunity to access to a wide variety of methods to help deepen theoretical insights about intergroup relations. In this paper, we focus on neuroendocrine measures, as these physiological measures offer some advantages over traditional measures used in intergroup research, are noninvasive, and are relatively easy to incorporate into existing intergroup paradigms. We begin by discussing the major neuroendocrine systems in the body and their measurable biological products, emphasizing systems that have conceptual relevance to intergroup relations.

We ask nearly 400 CFOs about the definition and drivers of earnings quality, with a special emphasis on the prevalence and detection of earnings misrepresentation. CFOs believe that the hallmarks of earnings quality are sustainability, absence of one-time items, and backing by actual cash flows. Earnings quality is determined in about equal measure by controllable factors like internal controls and corporate governance, and non-controllable factors like industry membership and macroeconomic conditions.

The fields of judgment and decision making (JDM) and cultural psychology have not seen much overlap, but recent research at the intersection of culture and JDM has provided new insights for both fields. This chapter reviews recent advances, with a focus on how studying cultural variations in JDM has yielded novel perspectives on basic psychological processes. JDM perspectives can propose novel explanations for differences across national cultures beyond those suggested by the prevailing models of culture.

We examine the relationship between the organization of a multi-divisional firm and its ability to adapt production decisions to changes in the environment. We show that even if lower-level managers have superior information about local conditions, and incentive conflicts are negligible, a centralized organization can be better at adapting to local information than a decentralized one. As a result, and in contrast to what is commonly argued, an increase in product market competition that makes adaptation more important can favor centralization rather than decentralization.