HEC Paris

About: HEC Paris is a education organization based out in Jouy-en-Josas, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Investment (macroeconomics) & Market liquidity. The organization has 584 authors who have published 2756 publications receiving 104467 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales & HEC School of Management Paris.

Stock Market Rumors and Credibility

Abstract: Stock prices occasionally move in response to unverified rumors. I propose a cheap talk model in which a rumormonger's incentives to tell the truth depend on the interaction between her investment horizon and the information acquisition decisions of message-receiving investors. The model's key prediction is that short investment horizons can facilitate credible information sharing between investors, thereby accelerating the information capitalization into market prices. Analyzing a dataset of takeover rumors covered by US newspapers, I find suggestive evidence in support of this prediction.

It Pays to Be Herr Kaiser Germans With Noble-Sounding Surnames More Often Work as Managers Than as Employees

Abstract: In the field study reported here (N = 222,924), we found that Germans with noble-sounding surnames, such as Kaiser ("emperor"), Konig ("king"), and Furst ("prince"), more frequently hold managerial positions than Germans with last names that either refer to common everyday occupations, such as Koch ("cook"), Bauer ("farmer"), and Becker/Backer ("baker"), or do not refer to any social role. This phenomenon occurs despite the fact that noble-sounding surnames never indicated that the person actually held a noble title. Because of basic properties of associative cognition, the status linked to a name may spill over to its bearer and influence his or her occupational outcomes.

More than a Dummy: The Probability of Failure, Survival and Acquisition of Firms in Financial Distress

Abstract: We discuss three methodological issues concerning predicting the outcome of financial distress. We argue that the outcome of financial distress should be modeled using a multinomial specification. We also argue for a random rather than matched sampling technique. Finally, we investigate the influence of industry-specific conditions. We find that the binary bankruptcy model is mis-specified relative to the multinomial model, that predictor data collected as the firm enters distress has reasonable predictive accuracy and that industry specific intercepts have better explanatory power than industry-adjusted regressors. Regressions results are consistent with that acquisitions of financially distressed firms in the 1980's were either speculative to acquire cash or external corporate control mechanisms.

Dynamic Atomic Congestion Games with Seasonal Flows

Abstract: We propose a model of discrete time dynamic congestion games with atomic players and a single source-destination pair. The latencies of edges are composed by free-flow transit times and possible queuing time due to capacity constraints. We give a precise description of the dynamics induced by the individual strategies of players and of the corresponding costs, either when the traffic is controlled by a planner, or when players act selfishly. In parallel networks, optimal and equilibrium behavior eventually coincides, but the selfish behavior of the first players has consequences that cannot be undone and are paid by all future generations. In more general topologies, our main contributions are three-fold. First, we show that equilibria are usually not unique. In particular, we prove that there exists a sequence of networks such that the price of anarchy is equal to n-1, where n is the number of vertices, and the price of stability is equal to 1.Second, we illustrate a new dynamic version of Braess's paradox: the presence of initial queues in a network may decrease the long-run costs in equilibrium. This paradox may arise even in networks for which no Braess's paradox was previously known.Third, we propose an extension to model seasonalities by assuming that departure flows fluctuate periodically over time. We introduce a measure that captures the queues induced by periodicity of inflows. This measure is the increase in costs compared to uniform departures for optimal and equilibrium flows in parallel networks.