Portail HAL HEC
Not a member yet
4784 research outputs found
Sort by
The Wage of Temporary Agency Workers
No full textUsing French administrative data we estimate the wage gap distribution between in-house and temporary agency workers working in the same establishment and the same occupation. The average wage gap is about 3%, but the gap is negative in more than 25% of establishment × occupation cells. We develop and estimate a search and matching model which shows that while the wage gap is largely inefficient, eliminating it reduces efficiency, as it also arises from objective factors that contribute to the efficient allocation of jobs
Social Skills and the Individual Wage Growth of Less Educated Workers
No full textThis study employs matched employee-employer data from the UK to highlight the importance of social skills, in particular workers’ ability to work well in a team and communicate effectively with co-workers, as a driver of wage growth for workers with lower formal education. Our findings indicate that in tasks emphasizing social skills, such workers not only enjoy greater wage progression with tenure but also accrue higher returns in environments with a higher concentration of more educated colleagues. Additionally, workers’ exit occur sooner from jobs where social skills are more important. We rationalize these dynamics through a model that assesses social skills based on their complementarity with a firm’s assets and where a worker’s social skills, initially opaque to both the employee and employer, become increasingly apparent ove
Estimating sparse spatial demand to manage crowdsourced supply in the sharing economy
No full textThis paper develops a structural approach to guide decisions regarding the acquisition, retention, and development of individual providers by a sharing-economy platform that crowdsources supply, which we call Provider Relationship Management. Taking the context of a French car-sharing platform for which we have historical data, we lay out a random-coefficient logit (RCL) model of spatial demand, combined with a Bertrand model of price competition between providers. Sparsity brings challenges in demand estimation; we resolve them through an approximation that brings new insights on a recent model with Poisson consumer arrivals. We then perform counterfactuals to evaluate the incremental value brought by existing potential providers to the platform. The results show that ignoring externalities between providers leads to large biases: provider incremental values are overestimated by 40% on average and customer scorings are substantially impacted, resulting in suboptimal reward allocation. We also evaluate the potential impact of an advertising campaign to illustrate how our approach can be used to target acquisitions in specific locations, and we study the impact of activities that may increase the value of existing providers through price and / or location changes
Communication on networks and strong reliability
No full textWe consider sender--receiver games, where the sender and the receiver are two distant nodes in a communication network. We show that if the network has two disjoint paths of communication between the sender and the receiver, then we can replicate all equilibrium outcomes not only of the direct communication game (i.e., when the sender and the receiver communicate directly with each other) but also of the mediated game (i.e., when the sender and the receiver communicate with the help of a mediator)
Entrepreneurs: Clueless, Biased, Poor Heuristics, or Bayesian Machines?
No full textEntrepreneurship scholars are interested in understanding and describing how entrepreneurs make decisions under uncertainty, where the probabilities of outcomes are not known but perceived, resulting in ambiguous probabilities. In this context, ambiguity refers to the lack of precise and objective probability assessments and the presence of subjective judgments regarding potential outcomes. In this chapter, we discuss the development of thought on how entrepreneurs perceive and react to uncertainty from Frank Knight (1921) to the present day. Recognizing that entrepreneurs face uncertainty rather than risk and are unlikely to have estimates of all probabilities for all potential outcomes, it becomes difficult to accept Expected Utility Theory (EUT), developed by Savage (1951) and von Neumann and Morgenstern (1953), as a relevant model for entrepreneurial decision-making. We examine a range of decision theories, ranking them in an order starting from EUT and proceeding to the most structure-free models of entrepreneurial choice, allowing for comparisons and contrasts of the main components and underlying concepts as they apply to entrepreneurial decision making
The (In)Visibility of Undisclosed Political Connections
No full textDespite a strong investor and social demand for firms to disclose information on political connections, mandatory disclosure requirements face considerable opposition. Given the challenges in enforcing mandatory disclosures, we investigate whether private information acquisition can be a viable alternative to disclosure. Using a setting of corruption investigations, we find that investors, on average, are not aware that the firms they have invested in have connections with the officials under investigation, suggesting a lack of visibility of the connections. However, a small number of institutional investors exploit their private access to information and sell their shares in response to the investigations. We also show that the high costs of information acquisition and a lack of incentives for analysts to disseminate sensitive information they have obtained contribute to this lack of visibility and result in a significant delay in retail investors’ reaction to material information. Our study contributes to the debate on mandating disclosure of political connections by showing that the lack of mandatory disclosure results in an uneven playing field that undermines transparency and fairness
Decoupling Voting and Cash Flow Rights
No full textThe equity lending and option market both allow investors to decouple voting and cash flow rights of common shares. We provide a theory of this decoupling. While either market enables investors to acquire voting rights without cash flow exposure, empirical studies demonstrate a substantial difference in implied vote prices. Our model explains this surprising difference by uncovering the mechanism by which vote prices in the equity lending market are endogenously lower than those implied by the option market. We show that even though votes are cheaper in the equity lending market, activists endogenously choose to purchase votes in both markets
Two-Sided Platform Governance: Are Founders Manipulating the Crowd in Crowdfunding?
No full textThe crowd is usually wise but can be subject to manipulation by insiders. We use internal administrative records from a leading European crowdfunding platform to study platform governance on two-sided crowdfunding platforms. Founders and regular investors naturally have different incentives with their investments. Consistent with model predictions, founders appear to try to exploit regular investors' sensitivity to the public history of a campaign by making anonymous self-investments. This could distort regular investors' belief formation. Founders tend to avoid and regular investors typically do not find public self-investments credible. To make crowdfunding even more attractive for early-stage financing, platforms could consider increasing the transparency of large self-investments
The Role of Third-Party Verification in Research Reproducibility
No full textResearch reproducibility is defined as obtaining similar results using the same data and code as the original study. This simple, yet fundamental, property remains surprisingly difficult to validate in practice in many scientific fields, including economics. To check research reproducibility, third-party verifiers can complement the work done by journals’ internal teams. Third-party verifiers can also be used by individual researchers seeking a pre-submission reproducibility certification to signal the reproducible nature of their research. Using the example of the cascad certification agency, which I co-founded in 2019, I discuss the functioning, utility, comparative advantages, and challenges of third-party verification services
Paying for Privacy: Pay-or-Tracking Walls
No full textPrestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner, referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to avoid being tracked or (ii) consent to being tracked. These walls have invited concerns that privacy might become a luxury. However, little is known about pay-or-tracking walls, which prevents a meaningful discussion about their appropriateness. This paper conducts several empirical studies and finds that top EU publishers use pay-or-tracking walls. Their implementations involve various approaches, including bundling the pay option with advertising-free access or additional content. The price for not being tracked exceeds the advertising revenue that publishers generate from a user who consents to being tracked. Notably, publishers’ traffic does not decline when implementing a pay-or-tracking wall and most users consent to being tracked; only a few users pay. In short, pay-or-tracking walls seem to provide the means for expanding the practice of tracking. Publishers profit from pay-or-tracking walls and may observe a revenue increase of 16.4% due to tracking more users than under a cookie consent banner