PRESERVATION OF TRADE SECRETS AND MULTINATIONAL WAGE PREMIA

This paper considers the strategic behavior of a multinational firm with superior technology operating in a developing country. Domestic firms do not have access to the superior technology other than by hiring away multinational corporation (MNC) workers. The MNC can retain its workers by paying a wage premia, and we determine how the industry structure and the nature of strategic competition between firms affects the MNC's incentive to pay this premia and thus preserve its informational advantage. We characterize conditions under which MNCs inefficiently divide job tasks in order to raise the cost to domestic firms of acquiring the MNC's trade secrets. ( JEL F23, J31, O33)     

The Diplomacy of the Caucasus War as a History Lesson

The town beautiful is not a whim, a fancy or a luxury. To us it has become an organic and necessary condition of life. Everyone responds to beauty and there is no question but that fine, simple architectural surroundings will help develop our people's artistic taste, raise their level of culture and give them a constant sense of esthetic satisfaction and pleasure.     

UNIVERSITY COMPETITION,GRADING STANDARDS,AND GRADE INFLATION

We develop a model of strategic grade determination by universities distinguished by their distributions of student academic abilities. Universities choose grading standards to maximize the total wages of graduates, taking into account how the grading standards affect firms' productivity assessment and job placement. We identify conditions under which better universities set lower grading standards, exploiting the fact that firms cannot distinguish between “good” and “bad”“A’'s. In contrast, a social planner sets stricter standards at better universities. We show how increases in skilled jobs drive grade inflation, and determine when grading standards fall faster at better schools. (JEL I21)     

The promise and perils of using big data in the study of corporate networks: problems,diagnostics and fixes

Network data on connections between corporate actors and entities – for instance through co‐ownership ties or elite social networks – are increasingly available to researchers interested in probing the many important questions related to the study of modern capitalism. Given the analytical challenges associated with the nature of the subject matter, variable data quality and other problems associated with currently available data on this scale, we discuss the promise and perils of using big corporate network data (BCND). We propose a standard procedure for helping researchers deal with BCND problems. While acknowledging that different research questions require different approaches to data quality, we offer a schematic platform that researchers can follow to make informed and intelligent decisions about BCND issues and address these through a specific work‐flow procedure. For each step in this procedure, we provide a set of best practices for how to identify, resolve and minimize the BCND problems that arise.     

Possible Falsification of Survey Data: An Analysis of a Mail Survey in the Soviet Union

Analysis of data from a mall survey in the Soviet Union, carriedout by the agency responsible for the distribution of AmericaIllustrated, strongly suggests that the data were falsified.Information about Soviet society (including the results of anumber of other surveys of the Soviet population) and probabilitytheory were used to generate a set of expected results for thissurvey. The actual results differed dramatically from the expected—theresponse rate was much too high, the sample was too young andcontained too many workers, and too many people had managedto see almost all of the previous year's issues. These discrepancies,combined with the fact that the results served the interestsof the Soviet officials and that it would have been easy forthem to falsify the data, lead us to suspect that they did so.The conclusion discusses the conditions under which variouskinds of falsification are most likely and general strategiesfor detecting falsification.