Stockholm School of Economics

About: Stockholm School of Economics is a education organization based out in Stockholm, Sweden. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Entrepreneurship. The organization has 1186 authors who have published 4891 publications receiving 285543 citations. The organization is also known as: Stockholm Business School & Handelshögskolan i Stockholm.

Registered Replication Report : Rand, Greene, and Nowak (2012)

Abstract: In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project (i.e., cooperated) when required to decide quickly than when forced to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012), a pattern consistent with the social heuristics hypothesis proposed by Rand and colleagues. The results of studies using time pressure have been mixed, with some replication attempts observing similar patterns (e.g., Rand et al., 2014) and others observing null effects (e.g., Tinghog et al., 2013; Verkoeijen & Bouwmeester, 2014). This Registered Replication Report (RRR) assessed the size and variability of the effect of time pressure on cooperative decisions by combining 21 separate, preregistered replications of the critical conditions from Study 7 of the original article (Rand et al., 2012). The primary planned analysis used data from all participants who were randomly assigned to conditions and who met the protocol inclusion criteria (an intent-to-treat approach that included the 65.9% of participants in the time-pressure condition and 7.5% in the forced-delay condition who did not adhere to the time constraints), and we observed a difference in contributions of −0.37 percentage points compared with an 8.6 percentage point difference calculated from the original data. Analyzing the data as the original article did, including data only for participants who complied with the time constraints, the RRR observed a 10.37 percentage point difference in contributions compared with a 15.31 percentage point difference in the original study. In combination, the results of the intent-to-treat analysis and the compliant-only analysis are consistent with the presence of selection biases and the absence of a causal effect of time pressure on cooperation.

The Institutional Environment

Abstract: Two features of Vietnamese banking stood out from the analysis in the previous chapter. Firstly and most fundamentally, the incomplete decentralization of the state banks in the period, which remained heavily influenced by their socialist heritage. This affected most of their banking activities, from ideas of savings to profitability criteria. The socialist legacy also contributed to the considerable information problems. The non-standardized routines and undeveloped information systems complicated day-to-day banking activities and created room for opportunistic behavior. The second feature was how opaque rules prevailed. The official objectives regarding reform clashed with details of regulation and common practice. Moreover, the interpretation by different agents of the official objectives sometimes varied. All these problems has frustrated coordination of banking activities, which in turn has impeded the coordinating function of banking in the economy. The problems have also cause motivation costs, since the incentives created by the prevailing system may conflict with the objective of commercializing the banks.

Population aging and international capital flows

Abstract: We use the neoclassical growth framework to model international capital flows in a world with exogenous demographic change. We compare model implications and actual current account data and find that the model explains a small but significant fraction of capital flows between OECD countries, in particular after 1985. 1. INTRODUCTION According to the life-cycle theory, consumption as a fraction of income varies with age. Taking this argument one step further, a country’s savings rate depends on the age structure of its population. This direct link between demographics and savings, investment, and capital flows has been addressed in a number of papers. Fair and Dominguez (1991) find mixed evidence for this story using quarterly U.S. data, whereas Higgins and Williamson (1997), Higgins (1998), and Lane and Milesi-Ferretti (2001) find strong support for the story using lower-frequency data for a large number of countries. In this article, we use another approach to examine the same link from demographics to savings, investment, and international capital flows. Rather than directly testing for correlations between a country’s age structure and these macroeconomic variables, we use a standard neoclassical model that is consistent with the life-cycle theory. We calibrate this model with population data and projections for a large number of countries, and examine if the data generated by the model can explain real-world capital flows. In addition to controlling for the domestic age structure, this approach allows us to control for a changing demographic structure in the world economy. In the coming decades, most developed countries will face aging populations and smaller fractions of prime-age workers in the population. Theory and the empirical results found by, for example, Higgins (1998) then predict that current account balances will fall. It is not possible, however, that all countries simultaneously run current

Estimating Structural Bond Pricing Models

Abstract: A difficulty that arises when implementing structural bond pricing models is the estimation of the value and risk of the firm's assets, neither of which is directly observable. We perform a simulation experiment to evaluate a maximum likelihood method applicable to this problem. Contrasting the performance of the maximum likelihood estimators to that of estimators traditionally used in academia and industry, we find strong support for the maximum likelihood approach. In fact, the inefficiency of the traditional estimator may help explain the failure of past attempts to implement structural bond pricing models.