Observing Unobservables: Identifying Information Asymmetries With a Consumer Credit Field Experiment

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of hidden information and hidden action problems in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers to former clients of a major South African lender along three dimensions: (i) an initial “offer interest rate” featured on a direct mail solicitation; (ii) a “contract interest rate” that was revealed only after a borrower agreed to the initial offer rate; and (ii) a dynamic repayment incentive that was also a surprise and extended preferential pricing on future loans to borrowers who remained in good standing. These three randomizations, combined with complete knowledge of the lender's information set, permit identification of specific types of private information problems. Our setup distinguishes hidden information effects from selection on the offer rate (via unobservable risk and anticipated effort), from hidden action effects (via moral hazard in effort) induced by actual contract terms. We find strong evidence of moral hazard and weaker evidence of hidden information problems. A rough estimate suggests that perhaps 13% to 21% of default is due to moral hazard. Asymmetric information thus may help explain the prevalence of credit constraints even in a market that specializes in financing high‐risk borrowers.     

Einfluss von Vorgesetzten, T?tigkeit, Arbeitsbedingungen und variabler Besoldung auf die Motivation von Mitarbeitern im ?ffentlichen Dienst

This paper analyses the effects of four main influence factors on motivation of public personnel. These influence factors are “superior”, “job satisfaction”, “work environment”, and “variable wages”. I analyse the four factors by using a structural equation model with empirical data. My focus lies on the complex interdependencies of influence factors among each other. There is empirical evidence that the influence factor “job satisfaction” plays a decisive role in public service motivation. Moreover, the influence factors “work environment” and “variable wage” have a quite low direct effect on motivation. Surprisingly, the influence factor “superior” has an strong effect on “job satisfaction” and on “variable wages”.     

借款陈述文字中的违约信号——基于P2P网络借贷的实证研究

P2P借贷让借款人可以通过借款陈述文本去获得投资者的信任,所以借款陈述又成为投资者识别借款人违约风险的重要信息来源。但是如何解读复杂的、不规则的、包含各种信息的借款陈述面临较大挑战。针对违约风险的两个来源：还款能力和还款意愿,以及它们的潜在因素,从P2P借贷平台‘人人贷’借款项目中的借款陈述文本中,通过人工识别提取了文字特征信息、反映还款能力和还款意愿的信息以及对资金需求的情感特征信息,并检验这些信息对识别借款人违约风险的显著性。研究发现借款陈述文本的字数越多、存在重复语句,违约风险越大;借款陈述文本中存在还款能力信息,或者同时存在表示还款意愿的保证性语言以及对自己信用状态补充说明的信息,则违约风险越小;借款人在情感上表现出对资金需求的急切性越高,违约风险越大。研究结论为将来运用程序实现智能文本算法识别借款陈述文本中的违约信息提供了研究方向。     

Improving Default Risk Prediction Using Bayesian Model Uncertainty Techniques

Credit risk is the potential exposure of a creditor to an obligor's failure or refusal to repay the debt in principal or interest. The potential of exposure is measured in terms of probability of default. Many models have been developed to estimate credit risk, with rating agencies dating back to the 19th century. They provide their assessment of probability of default and transition probabilities of various firms in their annual reports. Regulatory capital requirements for credit risk outlined by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision have made it essential for banks and financial institutions to develop sophisticated models in an attempt to measure credit risk with higher accuracy. The Bayesian framework proposed in this article uses the techniques developed in physical sciences and engineering for dealing with model uncertainty and expert accuracy to obtain improved estimates of credit risk and associated uncertainties. The approach uses estimates from one or more rating agencies and incorporates their historical accuracy (past performance data) in estimating future default risk and transition probabilities. Several examples demonstrate that the proposed methodology can assess default probability with accuracy exceeding the estimations of all the individual models. Moreover, the methodology accounts for potentially significant departures from “nominal predictions” due to “upsetting events” such as the 2008 global banking crisis.     

虚拟品牌社区中内、外部激励对顾客契合的影响研究

从认知学派削弱论剖析出“侵蚀”视角,基于自我决定理论,构建一个以顾客参与、顾客信任和顾客认同为中介的链式中介模型,探究内、外部激励对顾客契合的影响机制,以及内、外部激励间是否存在“侵蚀”效用。运用层次回归法和Bootstrap法对数据进行分析,研究发现:①内、外部激励之间存在“侵蚀”效用,且对内、外部激励存在“单独拉升-总体抑制”效果;②激励措施不能单独通过顾客参与作用于顾客契合,顾客参与和顾客契合路径还有中介变量待发掘;③“顾客参与—顾客信任”和“顾客参与—顾客认同”链式中介作用显著。     

„Opportunity coaching“: Ein ermutigender Weg in die Coaching-Zukunft

?Opportunity coaching“ — a powerful way into coaching future This article stresses a powerful coaching approach: to work on a client’s resources, on a client’s potential improvement, oriented at a client’s future possibilities, chances and “opportunities”. Starting from a dialectic “as well as” paradigm: seeing strength and weaknesses, past and future, problems and possibilities not being mutual exclusions but parts of an holistic entity, the author elaborates core aspects and approaches of “opportunity coaching” and reports examples out of his coaching experience.     

RELATIONSHIP LENDING DURING A FINANCIAL CRISIS

This paper studies whether relationship lending mitigates the transmission of the Lehman default shock to the supply of credit in Italy. Exploiting the presence of multiple banking relationships, we control for banks' and firms' unobserved characteristics. Results show that the growth of credit itself is higher and its cost lower the shorter the distance between the bank and the firm, the longer the relationship, and the higher the share of credit held by the bank. Credit growth by relationship lenders is 4.6% higher than that by transactional lenders; the increase in the cost of credit is 50 basis points lower. The positive effect of relationship lending on credit supply increased during the crisis, compared to a pre‐crisis period. The beneficial effect of relationship lending is weaker if the relationship lender is more exposed to the financial crisis, especially when lending to weaker borrowers.     

The effect of board size on shareholder value: Evidence from bank mergers and acquisitions

This study examines the effect of board size on the economic impact of bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the US. Using a hand-collected dataset of 508 M&A between 2012 and 2018, we find that board size is negatively related to acquirer excess returns. In an additional analysis, we show that large boards have positive value implications for banks that combine the CEO and chairman roles as well as for large banks. Our findings indicate that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to board size is not necessarily in the interests of shareholders; instead, a more flexible and proactive formulation is needed.     

Three Lenses on Occupations and Professions in Organizations: Becoming,Doing, and Relating

Management and organizational scholarship is overdue for a reappraisal of occupations and professions as well as a critical review of past and current work on the topic. Indeed, the field has largely failed to keep pace with the rising salience of occupational and professional (as opposed to organizational) dynamics in work life. Moreover, not only is there a dearth of studies that explicitly take occupational or professional categories into account, but there is also an absence of a shared analytical framework for understanding what occupations and professions entail. Our goal is therefore two-fold: first, to offer guidance to scholars less familiar with this terrain who encounter occupational or professional dynamics in their own inquiries and, second, to introduce a three-part framework for conceptualizing occupations and professions to help guide future inquiries. We suggest that occupations and professions can be understood through lenses of “becoming”, “doing”, and “relating”. We develop this framework as we review past literature and discuss the implications of each approach for future research and, more broadly, for the field of management and organizational theory.     

基于还款能力和还款意愿的贷款定价模型研究

企业的违约取决于还款能力和还款意愿综合作用的结果。传统的信用风险评估方法将还款能力与还款意愿当成两个独立的对象来处理,分别对二者进行评估后再做出风险决策,这种做法忽视了二者之间的内在联系,从而影响了信用风险决策的科学性与合理性。文章通过比较企业还款的成本与企业违约的机会成本大小来量化还款意愿,建立了一个n期的模型量化了借款人的动态的还款意愿。在此基础上,研究了企业还款意愿、还款能力对信用风险定价的交互影响,进一步建立了综合考虑还款能力和还款意愿两类因素条件下的贷款定价模型。     

THE ESCALATION OF COMMITMENT IN SEQUENTIAL DECISION MAKING: SITUATIONAL AND PERSONAL MODERATORS AND LIMITING CONDITIONS*

Two laboratory studies manipulated variables in order to observe their effect on the escalation of individuals' commitment to earlier investment decisions. The experimental results indicated that escalation of commitment to a failing course of action is not a general phenomenon. Information pertinent to the future prospects of reinvestment and to decision alternatives provided main effects. Neither study showed a main effect for initial success vs. failure. Decision-maker gender consistently influenced decisions in both studies through interactions with success/failure feedback and through the communicated attributions of “powerful others” regarding the causes of previous decision outcomes. Implications for theory and research are discussed.     

基于资本监管要求和还款意愿的贷款定价研究

在借款人有道德风险的情况下,如何合理地确定贷款价格是一个理论界及实务界面临的共同难题。本文分析了企业的还款意愿对商业银行贷款定价的影响,并将还款意愿融入到信用风险定价的结构化模型中,建立了资本监管下商业银行贷款定价模型。研究表明,贷款占用银行的监管资本越多或银行吸收存款的利率越高,贷款价格也越高;企业的还款意愿越弱,则银行给企业的贷款价格越高;反之,企业的还款意愿越强,则银行给企业的贷款价格越低。     

Default and Punishment in General Equilibrium1

We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment by thinking of assets as pools. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection and signalling phenomena in a perfectly competitive, general equilibrium framework. Perfect competition eliminates the need for lenders to compute how the size of their loan or the price they quote might affect default rates. It also makes for a simple equilibrium refinement, which we propose in order to rule out irrational pessimism about deliveries of untraded assets. We show that refined equilibrium always exists in our model, and that default, in conjunction with refinement, opens the door to a theory of endogenous assets. The market chooses the promises, default penalties, and quantity constraints of actively traded assets.     

基于企业行为偏好的企业间信用担保网络与风险传染研究

本文从行为金融学视角,结合复杂网络理论和信用担保关系选择机制构建了内生性企业间信用担保网络以及企业间信用担保网络风险传染模型,仿真分析了企业间信用担保网络结构及其风险传染演化特征。研究得到如下主要结论：(1)随着时间演化,企业间信用担保网络结构呈现“弱去中心化”特征,而且企业间信用担保网络的复杂性与稳定性增强;(2)企业资信水平不仅能够提高“担保圈”风险冲击概率,而且可以降低信用担保系统的不稳定性。随着企业影响力和企业风险认知水平增大,有助于增强冲击后企业信用担保系统的稳定性。企业风险偏好较小时,保证了“担保圈”内有效的流动性供给,但当企业风险偏好不断增强时,加剧了信用担保需求方的经营困境。(3)企业风险偏好对企业影响力、企业资信水平、企业风险认知水平发挥“强化效应”。企业资信水平与企业影响力具有“互为强化效应”。企业风险认知水平的“风险制约能力”强于企业资信水平的“风险强化能力”。企业风险认知水平与企业影响力对违约企业数量的影响发挥互为逆向效应且两者强度相当。     

Leadership in organisations: Meta,macro and micro

The study of leadership suffers from too many definitions, not too few. Much of this confusion springs from the fact that there are two fundamentally different perspectives on leadership. From these arise three common usages of the word. This article suggests that we recognise this diversity and abandon the search for a unique definition.The first perspective views leadership as “influence on individuals” without using power or authority. This “meta” leadership relates individuals to their environment through “visioning” — a complex interaction of perception, articulation, conviction and empathy (PACE).The second perspective views leadership as the “shaking and moving” of an organisation to face the future, cope with change and achieve results. It includes both the creation of a successful organisation, through “macro” leadership, and the accomplishment of specific jobs or tasks, through “micro” leadership.These three types of leadership — meta, macro and micro — are examined from the two perspectives. It is suggested that all three should be exercised by managers at all levels - no matter how junior.     

Emotional contagion in organizational life

Leveraging the wealth of research insights generated over the past 25 years, we develop a model of emotional contagion in organizational life. We begin by defining emotional contagion, reviewing ways to assess this phenomenon, and discussing individual differences that influence susceptibility to emotional contagion. We then explore the key role of emotional contagion in organizational life across a wide range of domains, including (1) team processes and outcomes, (2) leadership, (3) employee work attitudes, (4) decision-making, and (5) customer attitudes. Across each of these domains, we present a body of organizational behavior research that finds evidence of the influence of emotional contagion on a variety of attitudinal, cognitive, and behavioral/performance outcomes as well as identify the key boundary conditions of the emotional contagion phenomenon. To support future scholarship in this domain, we identify several new frontiers of emotional contagion research, including the need to better understand the “tipping point” of positive versus negative emotional contagion, the phenomenon of counter-contagion, and the influence of computer mediated communication and technology within organizations and society on emotional contagion. In closing, we summarize our model of emotional contagion in organizations, which we hope can serve as a catalyst for future research on this important phenomenon and its myriad effects on organizational life.     

Optimal repayment policies for multiple loans

This paper extends the applications of scheduling theory to certain problems in the area of finance. Specifically, a branch and bound algorithm to identify optimal repayment policies for multiple loans (credit purchases) has been developed. Each loan qualifies for a discount if it is paid on or before a certain date and a penalty is imposed if it is paid after its due date. These two dates are different in general. It is assumed that the cash for repayment is generated at a constant rate per day and it can be invested so that it continues to earn money until used for repayment. The objective is to minimize the present value of all future cash outflows.     

Banks’ Risk Endogenous to Strategic Management Choices

Use of variability of profits and other accounting‐based ratios in order to estimate a firm's risk of insolvency is a well‐established concept in management and economics. We argue that these measures fail to approximate the true level of risk accurately because managers consider other strategic choices and goals when making risky decisions. Instead, we propose an econometric model that incorporates current and past strategic choices to estimate risk from the profit function. Specifically, we extend the well‐established multiplicative error model to allow for the endogeneity of the uncertainty component. We demonstrate the power of the model using a large sample of US banks and show that our estimates predict the accelerated bank risk that led to the subprime crisis in 2007. Our measure of risk also predicts the probability of bank default both in the period of the default but also well in advance of this default and before conventional measures of bank risk.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Causal Model

The objective of this research is to test the theory and causal performance linkages implied by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA). The survey instrument used a comprehensive set of 101 questions that were directly tied to specific criteria in the 1995 MBNQA Criteria. Results reported here represent the first published article that tests the MBNQA performance relationships and causal model using comprehensive measurement and structural models. In general, our research concludes that (1) The underlying theory of the MBNQA is supported that “leadership drives the system that causes results”; (2) Leadership is the most important driver of system performance; (3) Leadership has no direct effect on Financial Results but must influence overall performance “through the system”; (4) Information and Analysis is statistically the second most important Baldrige category; (5) the Baldrige category, Process Management, is twice as important when predicting customer satisfaction as when predicting financial results; and (6) a modified “within system” set of five Baldrige causal relationships is a good predictor of organizational performance.