We develop univariate regime-switching GARCH (RS-GARCH) models wherein the conditional variance switches in time from one GARCH process to another. The switching is governed by a time-varying probability, specified as a function of past information. We provide sufficient conditions for geometric...

Conventional wisdom suggests that a global increase in monetary rewards should induce agents to exert higher effort. In this paper we demonstrate that this may not hold in team settings. In the context of sequential team production with positive externalities between agents, incentive reversal...

The importance of various motivations for altruistic behavior is still an open question. We use data from a field experiment at Kiva, the online microfinance platform, to examine the role of transactions costs and social distance in philanthropy. Requests for loans are either written in English...

We show that current measures of welfare changes which are all based on the compensated variation (CV) and the equivalent variation (EV) do not apply to an economy with cities. In addition, since these measures are utilized in a partial equilibrium analysis they capture only part of the effect...

We study the optimal design of organizations under the assumption that agents in a contest care about their relative position. A judicious de?nition of status categories can be used by a principal in order to in?uence the agents?performance. We first consider a pure status case where there are...

We show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior. Each of 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point...

This study proposes models that can be used as shorthand analysis tools for CDS spreads and CDS spread changes. For this purpose we examine the determinants of CDS spreads and spread changes on a broad database of 718 US firms during the period from early 2002 to early 2013. Contrary to previous...

We study two-player common-value all-pay auctions in which the players have ex-ante asymmetric information represented by finite partitions of the set of possible values of winning. We consider two families of such auctions: in the first, one of the players has an information advantage...

Merton (1974) suggested a structural model for default prediction which allows using timely information from the equity market. The literature describes several specifications to the application of the model, including methods presumably used by practitioners. However, recent studies demonstrate...

This paper compares two leading approaches to analyzing standardized test data: leastsquares value-added analysis, used mainly to support accountability by identifying teacher and school effects; and Betebenner’s (2009) student growth percentiles method, which focuses on normative tracking of...