Owning versus leasing: do courts matter?

The authors develop a legal contract enforcement theory of the own versus lease decision. The allocation of ownership rights will minimize enforcement costs when the legal system is inefficient. In particular, when legal enforcement of contracts is costly, there will be a shift from arrangements that rely on such enforcement (such as a rental agreement) toward other forms that do not (such as direct ownership). The authors then test this prediction and show that costly enforcement of rental contracts hampers the development of the rental housing market in a cross-section of countries. They argue that this association is not the result of reverse causation from a developed rental market to more investor-protective enforcement and is not driven by alternative institutional channels. The results provide supportive evidence on the importance of legal contract enforcement for market development and the optimal allocation of property rights.

Women and Power: Unwilling, Ineffective, or Held Back?

We develop a model that nests previous explanations for women under-representation in positions of power. Focusing on democratic electoral dynamics, our framework delineates the three types of mechanisms that may be at play: consumer demand, candidate supply, and internal party dynamics beyond electoral markets. We use Spain's Equality Law, requiring a 40 percent female quota in electoral lists, to test the alternative theories. The law was enacted by the social-democratic party after the surprise parliamentary electoral results following the Madrid terrorist bombings, and was therefore completely unexpected by regional political machines. The law only applied to towns with populations above 5000, so we can use a treatment-control, before-and-after discontinuity design to learn about the impact of female politicians in local elections. Our evidence is most consistent with the existence of entrenched male-dominated political machines capturing influential power positions within the parties.female political representation

Owning Versus Leasing: Do Courts Matter?

We develop a legal contract enforcement theory of the own versus lease decision. The allocation of ownership rights will minimize enforcement costs when the legal system is inefficient. In particular, when legal enforcement of contracts is costly, there will be a shift from arrangements that rely on such enforcement (such as a rental agreement) toward other forms that do not (such as direct ownership). We then test this prediction and show that costly enforcement of rental contracts hampers the development of the rental housing market in a cross-section of countries. We argue that this association is not the result of reverse causation from a developed rental market to more investor-protective enforcement and is not driven by alternative institutional channels. The results provide supportive evidence on the importance of legal contract enforcement for market development and the optimal allocation of property rights

Motivating through Managing by Walking Around

In this paper, we analyze the motivational effects of managing by walking around (MBWA), a management style that emphasizes managers’ unstructured visits to the rank and file of the company. We do so by conducting a field experiment in the retail division of a medium-sized bank located in Latin America. We find that branches increase their sales productivity by a significant ten percent in the window following the management visit, an effect that persists for at least a month after the event. Contrary to our expectations, we do not find that the incentive effect of the visit is stronger for those branches located further away from the bank’s headquarters

Early-Career Coordinated Distributed Experiments: Empowerment Through Collaboration

Este artículo contiene 7 páginas, 1 tabla, 3 figuras.Coordinated distributed experiments (CDEs) enable the study of large-scale ecological patterns in geographically dispersed areas, while simultaneously providing broad academic and personal benefits for the participants. However, the effective involvement of early-career researchers (ECRs) presents major challenges. Here, we analyze the benefits and challenges of the first CDE exclusively led and conducted by ECRs (i.e. ECR-CDE), which sets a baseline for similar CDEs, and we provide recommendations for successful CDE execution. ECR-CDEs achieve most of the outcomes identified in conventional CDEs as well as extensive benefits for the young cohort of researchers, including: (i) receiving scientific credit, (ii) peer-training in new concepts and methods, (iii) developing leadership and communication skills, (iv) promoting a peer network among ECRs, and (v) building on individual engagement and independence. We also discuss the challenges of ECR-CDEs, which are mainly derived from the lack of independence and instability of the participants, and we suggest mechanisms to address them, such as resource re-allocation and communication strategies. We conclude that ECR-CDEs can be a relevant tool to empower ECRs across disciplines by fostering their training, networking and personal well-being.The authors were supported by the following founding: NC the support of the Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral program of the Government of Catalonia’s Secretariat for Universities and Research of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge (BP2016- 00215), EE by a predoctoral grant from the Basque Government (2014-2017), AB by a Generalitat de Catalunya—Beatriu de Pinós (BP-00385-2016), AMG-F by a predoctoral research grant (BES-2013-065770) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, MAr by a postdoctoral grant from the Basque Government, MIA by a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral grant (FJCI-2015-26192), PR-L by a Margalida Comas postdoctoral contract (PD/031/2018) funded by the Government of the Balearic Islands and the European Social Fund, AP by a Ramón Areces Foundation Postdoctoral Scholarship, and AL by a Kempe Foundation stipend. DOMIPEX project was founded by the First Call of Collaborative Projects among Young Researchers of the Iberian Association of Limnology (AIL; 2013-2015).Peer reviewe

Layoffs and Quits in Repeated Games.

This paper studies games in which the players are not locked into their relationship for a fixed number of periods. We consider two-player games where player 1 can decide to let the opponent continue in the game or replace it with a new player. We also allow the possibility of player 2 quitting the game. When only layoffs can occur, cooperation takes place in finite horizons due to the threat that termination of the relationship imposes on player 2. However, quits limit that cooperation to those cases where the outside option for player 2 is small (lower than some Nash equilibrium of the stage game)

Firm Provision of General Training and Specific Human Capital Acquisition

The existing literature on training is concerned with understanding the reasons why firms pay for the general skills of their workers, but without explaining which firms train which workers. This paper develops a theory that both explains the willingness of firms to pay for general training, and accounts for the pattern of training provision empirically observed. It is assumed that labor markets are perfectly competitive, but there is imperfect contractibility of human capital. Under these assumptions, when training and specific human capital are complements, the firm would pay for the former in order to induce the acquisition of complementary specific skills by the worker