學術論文

This study estimates the direct and spillover effects of a free education programme on educational outcomes in rural China. We find that, although the programme encourages more eligible children to attend secondary school, it also leads to a decrease in high school enrolment among ineligible girls with eligible siblings, as they are more likely to choose work instead. In the long run, males exposed to free education have more years of schooling than their non-exposed counterparts. However, such effect is not found among females. This disparity suggests that a gender-neutral policy may have an asymmetric effect between males and females because of spillover effects through intra-household resource allocation.

We build on AGM belief revision (Alchourrón et al. (1985)) and propose a class of updating rules called pragmatic rules. Pragmatic updating applies to multiple priors and requires that the agent's posteriors be the subset of her priors under which the realized event occurs with probability 1, if such priors exist. We construct a propositional language based on qualitative probability and demonstrate the strong relation between belief updating rules and belief revision rules in this language. We show that an updating rule is consistent with AGM belief revision if and only if it is pragmatic. While maximum likelihood updating is pragmatic in general, full-Bayesian updating is not. We characterize maximum likelihood updating within the AGM framework, and show that full-Bayesian updating can be obtained by dropping one of AGM's postulates.

We introduce a learning model in which the decision maker does not know how recommendations are generated, called the contraction rule. We present behavioral postulates that characterize it. The contraction rule can be uniquely identified and reveals how the decision maker interprets and how much she trusts the recommendation. In a dynamic stationary setting, we show that the contraction rule is not dominated by completely following recommendations and is incompatible with a property called compliance with balanced recommendations. Following this negative result, we demonstrate that the contraction rule may generate and reinforce recency bias and disagreement.

Environmental and social (ES) funds in non-ES families must balance incorporating the stakeholders’ interests they advertise and maximizing shareholder value favored by their families. We find that these funds support ES proposals that are far from the majority threshold, while opposing them when their vote is more likely to be pivotal. This strategy results in a high average support for ES proposals, seemingly consistent with their fiduciary responsibilities, while opposing contested ES proposals. This greenwashing strategy is driven by ES funds in non-ES families who cater to institutional investors. Indeed, these funds experience lower inflows when providing low average support for ES proposals. This strategic voting is not exhibited in governance proposals, nor by ES funds in ES families or by non-ES funds in non-ES families, reinforcing the notion of strategic voting to accommodate family preferences while appearing to meet the fiduciary responsibilities of the funds.

Many organizations have adopted internet monitoring to regulate employees’ cyberloafing behavior. Although one might intuitively assume that internet monitoring can be effective in reducing cyberloafing, there is a lack of research examining why the effect can occur and whether it can be sustained. Furthermore, little research has investigated whether internet monitoring can concurrently induce any side effects in employee behavior. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal field quasi-experiment to examine the impacts of internet monitoring on employees’ cyberloafing and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Our results show that internet monitoring did reduce employees’ cyberloafing by augmenting employees’ perceived sanction concerns and information privacy concerns related to cyberloafing. The results also show that internet monitoring could produce the side effect of reducing employees’ OCB. Interestingly, when examining the longitudinal effects of internet monitoring four months after its implementation, we found that the effect of internet monitoring on cyberloafing was not sustained, but the effect on OCB toward organizations still persisted. Our study advances the literature on deterrence theory by empirically investigating both the intended and side effects of deterrence and how the effects change over time. It also has important broader implications for practitioners who design and implement information systems to regulate employee noncompliance behavior.

We document and explain the sharp performance deterioration of smart beta indexes after the corresponding smart beta ETFs are launched for investment. While smart beta is purported to deliver excess returns through factor exposures, the market-adjusted return of smart beta indexes drops from about 3% “on paper” before ETF listings to about −0.50% to −1% after ETF listings. This performance decline cannot be explained by variation in factor premia, strategic timing, or diminishing returns to scale. Instead, we find strong evidence of data mining in the construction of smart beta indexes, which helps ETFs attract flows, as investors respond positively to backtests.

Banks’ information technology (IT) capabilities affect their ability to serve customers during the COVID-19 pandemic, which generates an unexpected and unprecedented shock that shifts banking services from in-person to digital. Amid mobility restrictions, banks with better IT experience larger reductions in physical branch visits and larger increases in website traffic, implying a larger shift to digital banking. Stronger IT banks are able to originate more Paycheck Protection Program loans to small business borrowers, especially in areas with more severe COVID-19 outbreaks, higher internet use, and higher bank competition. Those banks also attract more deposit flows and receive better mobile customer reviews during the pandemic.

We study how proprietary information flows in strategic alliances facilitate banks’ information collection in private debt markets. We argue that lenders that have previously worked with a borrower’s alliance partners have an information advantage and show that firms entering a strategic alliance receive a lower interest spread on loans from banks that have previously lent to their strategic partners than loans from other banks. Cross-sectional tests on alliances’ economic importance and participants’ information environment support our hypothesis that the loan price effect is driven by reduced information asymmetry between borrowers and their partners’ relationship banks. Last, we find borrowers are more likely to obtain debt financing from alliance-related banks than from other banks. Overall, our findings are consistent with lenders that have previously worked with an alliance counterparty possessing debt contracting-relevant information about the soft nature of alliance value and the partners’ commitment to alliances.

What is the most cost-efficient way to impose trade sanctions against Russia? We build a quantitative model of international trade with input–output connections. Sanctioning countries choose import tariffs to simultaneously maximize their income and minimize Russia’s income, with different weights placed on these objectives. We find, first, that for countries with low willingness to pay for sanctions against Russia, the most cost-efficient sanction is an approximately 20% tariff on all Russian products. Second, if countries are willing to pay at least US$0.70 for each US$1 drop in Russian welfare, an embargo on Russia’s mining and energy products is the most cost-efficient policy.