Baker (2002) has demonstrated theoretically that the quality of performance measures used in compensation contracts hinges on two characteristics: noise and distortion. These criteria, though, will only be useful in practice as long as the noise and distortion of a performance measure can be...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the 'Journal of Economics and Management Strategy', forthcoming.<P> Distorted performance measures in compensation contracts elicit suboptimal behavioral responses that may even prove to be dysfunctional (gaming). This paper applies the empirical...</p>

Since Black (1976), the source of the stock price volatility smirk has remained a controversy. The volatility smirk is a side effect of agency conflict. An important distinction is that the smirk occurs in the optimum, even after agency conflict has been resolved. The slope of the smirk is found...

This paper uses monthly data from April 2005 to August 2013 for Taiwan to propose a novel tourism indicator, namely the Tourism Conditions Index (TCI). TCI accounts for the spillover weights based on the Granger causality test and estimates of the multivariate BEKK model for four TCI indicators...

Of the two most widely estimated univariate asymmetric conditional volatility models, the exponential GARCH (or EGARCH) specification can capture asymmetry, which refers to the different effects on conditional volatility of positive and negative effects of equal magnitude, and leverage, which...

Of the two most widely estimated univariate asymmetric conditional volatility models, the exponential GARCH (or EGARCH) specification can capture asymmetry, which refers to the different effects on conditional volatility of positive and negative effects of equal magnitude, and leverage, which...

One of the most popular univariate asymmetric conditional volatility models is the exponential GARCH (or EGARCH) specification. In addition to asymmetry, which captures the different effects on conditional volatility of positive and negative effects of equal magnitude, EGARCH can also...

We develop an economic theory of “flexibility”, which we interpret as the discretion orability to make a decision that others disagree with. We show that flexibility is essentiallyan option for the decisionmaker, and can be valued as such. The value of the flexibilityoption is decreasing in...

We propose a simple network–based methodology for ranking systemically important financial institutions. We view the risks of firms –including both the financial sector and the real economy– as a network with nodes representing the volatility shocks. The metric for the connections of the...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>Journal of Economic Dynamics & Control</I>. Volume 33(11), pp. 1912-1928.<P> This paper formalizes the idea that more hedging instruments may destabilize markets when traders are heterogeneous and adapt their behavior according to experience based...</p></i>