Research on media coverage of controversial corporate practices typically suggests firms respond instrumentally to mitigate stakeholder reactions. However, we argue that CEOs' moral concerns can sometimes override strategic considerations, because media criticism may expose them to scrutiny from personally valued audiences - for instance, their own children. As moral role models, parent CEOs may become more willing to accept lower compensation to avoid negative scrutiny. To test our theory, we study media reports on CEO overcompensation. We hypothesize that media criticism of pay arrangements increases parent CEOs' willingness to accept lower pay relative to peers when their parental identity is salient. We test this hypothesis in two studies. The first, an observational study using a hand-collected biographic dataset, provides suggestive evidence consistent with our hypothesis: when parenthood is a salient identity, media criticism is marginally associated with lower subsequent CEO pay relative to peers. The second, an experimental survey of executives and directors, offers suggestive evidence that activating respondents' parental identity marginally increases their willingness to forgo compensation and to support a less generous remuneration package.
Interbank money markets have been subject to substantial impairments in the recent decade, such as a decline in unsecured lending and substantial increases in haircuts on posted collateral. This paper seeks to understand the implications of these developments for the broader economy and monetary policy. To that end, we develop a novel general equilibrium model featuring heterogeneous banks, interbank markets for both secured and unsecured credit, and a central bank. The model features a number of occasionally bind-ing constraints. The interactions between these constraints - in particular leverage and liquidity constraints - are key in determining macroeconomic outcomes. We find that both secured and unsecured money market frictions force banks to either divert resources into unproductive but liquid assets or to de-lever, which leads to less lending and output. If the liquidity constraint is very tight, the leverage constraint may turn slack. In this case, there are large declines in lending and output. We show how central bank policies which increase the size of the central bank balance sheet can attenuate this decline.
I ask whether hedgers who speculate should be regulated differently from other speculators in a model where information acquisition is endogenous, and information has real effects. Hedging benefits and feedback effects generate strategic complementarities between market-maker, firm manager, and trader, which causes multiple equilibria. Gains from trade are lower when hedgers acquire information, while speculators may produce less information than socially desirable. A "Volcker rule" separating hedging and speculative activities may help select the higher welfare equilibrium. When too little information is produced, contracts whereby a firm subsidizes losses of designated market-makers (DMM) to make prices more informative increase welfare.
American universities operate as organizational actors with goals and elaborate structures to achieve them, often in interaction with multiple "stakeholders." Fundraising has increasingly become central in these universities. University development offices with fundraising objectives emerged, expanded, and professionalized, becoming core features of American universities. Yet, it is not clear to what extent fundraising has diffused through higher education outside of the United States. Utilizing an original cross-national sample of 437 non-US universities, this paper seeks to ascertain whether university development orientations are more likely to be found in universities that look more like organizational actors and in more marketized societies. We find strong support for the neo-institutional hypothesis that universities with greater organizational elaboration and links to transnational professional associations are more likely to adopt a development or fundraising orientation. We find that universities in the Anglosphere are also more likely to adopt this orientation. However, other indicators of more marketized societies are not associated with university development structures. These findings contribute to scholarship on organizational actorhood and the globalization of higher education by highlighting the importance of university organization in accounting for their embrace of an American-influenced development-oriented university model.
Labor market polarization is among the most important features in recent decades of advanced country labor markets. Yet key spatial aspects of this phenomenon remain under-explored. We develop four key facts that document the universality of polarization across cities, a city-size difference in the shock magnitudes, a skew in the types of middle-paid jobs lost, and the role of polarization in the great urban divergence of skills. Existing theories cannot account for these facts. Hence we develop a parsimonious theoretical account that does so by integrating elements from the literatures on labor market polarization and systems of cities with heterogeneous labor in spatial equilibrium.
