EconStor (ZBW Kiel)
Not a member yet
310344 research outputs found
Sort by
Tourism and growth in the local labor market
No full textManagers ("bosses") are central to the development and allocation of human capital in firms because they train employees and learn about their abilities. While a multi-divisional firm wants to allocate workers to wherever they are most productive, bosses who are rewarded for their units' performance prefer to hold on to good employees, and the prospect of losing good people weakens the incentives to train them. We derive the optimal incentive contract for bosses that enables a firm to change from "silos" with only upward mobility to a "lattice" with cross-divisional mobility. Compared to silos, a lattice achieves a more efficient allocation of people to positions, but also entails agency costs that may exceed the benefits. We suggest empirical predictions about when silos or a lattice are optimal, and relate our model and its results to examples and evidence
Making FDI in extractives work for communities: what role for community benefit agreements?
No full textCommunity benefit agreements (CBAs) have the potential to promote more sustainable resource development by aligning investor-community interests. Governments must decide whether to mandate, support or replace CBAs with alternative policies designed to protect resource-adjacent communities. A proposed model contract clause offers guidance on structuring CBAs-covering funding, governance and enforcement
"Cookie-less" identification for/against privacy?
No full textThe advertising industry's anticipated shift away from third-party cookies led to the proliferation and normalisation of first-party identification architectures online. Marketed as 'privacy-friendly,' the new technologies promise to deliver the efficiencies that advertisers have become accustomed to, while addressing privacy concerns from third-party cookies. Such tension calls for a better understanding of the privacy implications from first-party online identification architectures. We evaluate first-party user identification mechanisms by (1) surveying the literature to create a typology that synthesises existing privacy concerns in third-party cookie-based identification, and (2) applying our typology to evaluate the privacy of prime examples in what we frame as three distinct types of first-party ID architectures - Universal IDs, Onboarding ID, and Walled Garden ID. We analyse technical documentation and code repositories from each architecture type and show how first-party ID solutions still enable cross-site tracking over longer periods of time and encourage sensitive user targeting. First-party ID solutions do create mechanisms to ease opting out from tracking, but the implementation of those mechanisms is questionable. Our findings demonstrate how the advertising industry is trying to maintain its existing structure and replicate the tracking functionalities on which it has grown reliant
Plausible GMM: A quasi-bayesian approach
No full textStructural estimation in economics often makes use of models formulated in terms of moment conditions. While these moment conditions are generally well-motivated, it is often unknown whether the moment restrictions hold exactly. We consider a framework where researchers model their belief about the potential degree of misspecification via a prior distribution and adopt a quasi-Bayesian approach for performing inference on structural parameters. We provide quasi-posterior concentration results, verify that quasi-posteriors can be used to obtain approximately optimal Bayesian decision rules under the maintained prior structure over misspecification, and provide a form of frequentist coverage results. We illustrate the approach through empirical examples where we obtain informative inference for structural objects allowing for substantial relaxations of the requirement that moment conditions hold exactl
From homemakers to breadwinners? How mandatory kindergarten affects maternal labour market outcomes
No full textThe majority of Swiss children attend mandatory and cost-free kindergarten at age four. We examine the effect of this policy on maternal labour market outcomes. Using administrative data from Switzerland, we exploit the birthday cut-off for kindergarten entry in the same or in the following year and apply a non-parametric regression discontinuity design (RDD). We find that mandatory kindergarten has a statistically significant positive effect on the labour market attachment of previously non-employed mothers, increasing their employment probability by 4 percentage points. In contrast, there are no significant effects on other groups or in the total sample of mothers
Bivariate Distribution Regression; Theory, Estimation and an Application to Intergenerational Mobility
No full textWe employ distribution regression to estimate the joint distribution of two outcome variables conditional on covariates. Bivariate Distribution Regression (BDR) is particularly valuable when some dependence between the outcomes persists after accounting for the impact of the covariates. Our analysis relies on Chernozhukov et al. (2018) which shows that any conditional joint distribution has a local Gaussian representation. We describe how BDR can be implemented and present some functionals of interest. As modeling the unexplained dependence is a key feature of BDR, we focus on functionals related to this dependence. We decompose the difference between the joint distributions for different groups into composition, marginal and sorting effects. We provide a similar decomposition for the transition matrices which describe how location in the distribution of one outcome is associated with location in the other. Our theoretical contributions are the derivation of the properties of these estimated functionals and appropriate procedures for inference. Our empirical illustration focuses on intergenerational mobility. Using the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics data, we model the joint distribution of parents' and children's earnings
Does nationality moderate tourists' intention to co-create? Investigating tourist behavior in a developing country
No full textThe intention to co-create plays a pivotal role in sustainable tourism development. This study investigates whether tourist nationality moderates the intention to co-create within the tourism experience. The research sample consists of 400 international tourists visiting Indonesia for tourism purposes, with data collected between October 2023 and February 2024. The findings reveal that tourist nationality significantly moderates the relationships among tourists' experiences, trust, and involvement in co-creation. Specifically, tourist nationality influences the relationship between tourist trust and the intention to co-create. However, it does not moderate the correlation between the tourist experience and the intention to co-create. Additionally, tourist nationality moderates the relationship between tourist involvement and the intention to co-create. This study contributes to the Value Co-Creation Theory and offers practical insights for developing more comprehensive platforms and programs aimed at enhancing traveler engagement. The implications of these findings highlight the significance of considering tourist nationality as a moderating factor that influences tourists' intentions to collaborate within the tourism context. This research provides valuable insights for designing more effective and inclusive tourism development strategies
From .com to .gov: The internet's inevitable nationalist turn
No full textThis essay examines Iran's most extensive internet disruption since 2022, imposed during the June 2025 conflict with Israel, when missile strikes quickly evolved into coordinated cyberattacks on banking, radar, and communications systems. Drawing from direct experience during the blackout, it traces how connectivity collapsed through staged throttling, protocol suppression, and full reliance on the National Information Network. What began as a technical containment strategy also became an improvised shield against foreign intrusion - one shaped as much by sanctions-driven hardware shortages and reliance on insecure gray-market equipment as by military calculus. By situating Iran's shutdown alongside wartime digital restrictions in places like Ukraine, the essay reframes shutdowns as contested acts of defense in a securitised internet. It explores how the shift from an open, decentralised network toward nationalised, politically bordered infrastructures is accelerating under the pressures of war, sanctions, and private platform power. Ultimately, it argues that the "state of exception" once theorised by Schmitt and Agamben is becoming the default operating mode online, eroding universal digital rights. In such moments, ideals like internet freedom survive only if continuously defended and reinvented, even when survival demands compromises unthinkable in peacetime
The impact of risk retention on the pricing of securitizations
No full textLoan screening and monitoring are critical to loan performance, but incentives are diminished for securitized loans. Risk retention is intended to harmonize the interests of originators and investors; however, it is unclear to what extent investors anticipate and respond to originators’ screening and monitoring incentives, particularly with respect to different types of risk retention. The theoretical literature suggests that equity retention is optimal in terms of screening efforts; thus, if investors anticipate these incentives, equity retention should lead to low credit spreads. Employing OLS and instrumental variables regressions, we empirically examine the effect of retention on spreads. Our analysis, based on a unique dataset of securitizations, reveals that the effects highly depend on the considered investment type. Credit spreads decrease by approx. 26 to 39 bps if the originator retains a material fraction of at least 5% of the deal’s nominal value. For tranches with high information sensitivity—where screening and monitoring incentives are most critical—investors, though, impose an additional risk premium of 120 basis points when originators fail to retain a substantial portion of the securitizations. In addition, we find that transactions with vertical slice retention are associated with a notably higher risk premium than those with equity retention, demonstrating the differential impact of retention structures on investor perceptions. Overall, our results underline that the extent of asymmetric information, particularly with respect to different types of investments and risk retention, is an important component in the pricing of securitizations
Defining Current and Expected Financial Constraints Using AI: Reinterpreting the Cash Flow Sensitivity of Cash
No full textWe propose a new approach to identify firm-level financial constraints by applying artificial intelligence to text of 10-K filings by U.S. public firms from 1993 to 2021. Leveraging transformer-based natural language processing, our model captures contextual and semantic nuances often missed by traditional text classification techniques, enabling more accurate detection of financial constraints. A key contribution is to differentiate between constraints that affect firms presently and those anticipated in the future. These two types of constraints are associated with distinctly different financial profiles: while firms expecting future constraints tend to accumulate cash preemptively, currently constrained firms exhibit reduced liquidity and higher leverage. We show that only firms anticipating financial constraints exhibit significant cash flow sensitivity of cash, whereas currently constrained and unconstrained firms do not. This calls for a narrower interpretation of this widely used cash-based constraints measure, as it may conflate distinct firm types – unconstrained and currently constrained – and fail to capture all financially constrained firms. Our findings underscore the critical role of constraint timing in shaping corporate financial behavior