Centre de Recherche en Économie et Management

Unethical behavior within organizations is not rare. We investigate experimentally the role of status-seeking behavior in sabotage and cheating activities aiming at improving one's performance ranking in a flat-wage environment. We find that average effort is higher when individuals are informed about their relative performance. However, ranking feedback also favors disreputable behavior. Some individuals do not hesitate to incur a cost to improve their rank by sabotaging others' work or by increasing artificially their own performance. Introducing sabotage opportunities has a strong detrimental effect on performance. Therefore, ranking incentives should be used with care. Inducing group identity discourages sabotage among peers but increases in-group rivalry. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2013.1747 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.

With a meta‐analysis of 85 studies and 190 experiments, the authors test the relationship between socially responsible investing ( SRI ) and financial performance to determine whether including corporate social responsibility and ethical concerns in portfolio management is more profitable than conventional investment policies. The study also analyses the influence of researcher methodologies with respect to several dimensions of SRI (markets, financial performance measures, investment horizons, SRI thematic approaches, family investments and journal impact) on the effects identified. The results indicate that the consideration of corporate social responsibility in stock market portfolios is neither a weakness nor a strength compared with conventional investments; the heterogeneous results in prior studies largely reflect the SRI dimensions under study (e.g. thematic approach, investment horizon and data comparison method).

Ces travaux constituent une enquête anthropologique sur les ressorts du capitalisme contemporain. Ils portent un regard critique sur les formes du capital, la théorie de la valeur, l'analyse financière ou la théorie des marchés efficients.

The authors test the hypothesis that individual effort on the job depends both on one's own income and on the individual's position in the relevant income distribution. Combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with multi-country ISSP survey data, they analyze the extent to which relative income affects an individual's effort, finding that an individual's rank in the income distribution more strongly determines effort than does others' average income, which suggests that comparisons are more ordinal than cardinal. Their experiment also reveals that comparisons over time affect effort: individuals who received higher income offers or enjoyed higher income rank in the past exerted lower levels of effort for a given current income and rank.

Monetary and Nonmonetary Punishment in the Voluntary Contributions Mechanism by David Masclet, Charles Noussair, Steven Tucker and Marie-Claire Villeval. Published in volume 93, issue 1, pages 366-380 of American Economic Review, March 2003

This research assesses how low-income households in rural Kenya coped with the immediate economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses granular financial data from weekly household interviews covering six weeks before the first case was detected in Kenya to five weeks after during which various containment measures were implemented. Based on household-level fixed-effects regressions, our results suggest that income from work decreased with almost one-third and income from gifts and remittances reduced by more than one-third after the start of the pandemic. Nevertheless, household expenditures on food remained at pre-COVID levels. We do not find evidence that households coped with reduced income through increased borrowing, selling assets or withdrawing savings. Instead, they gave out less gifts and remittances themselves, lent less money to others and postponed loan repayments. Moreover, they significantly reduced expenditures on schooling and transportation, in line with the school closures and travel restrictions. Thus, despite their affected livelihoods, households managed to keep food expenditures at par, but this came at the cost of reduced informal risk-sharing and social support between households.

This paper aims to understand how Internet users may improve their social capital by investing in online social activities. We argue that the Internet can be a convenient and efficient means of maintaining existing social ties and/or of creating new ties. We seek to identify the determinants of online investments in social capital and the nature of the interaction with traditional forms of investment in social capital. Using a Luxembourg household survey, the econometric results reveal a significant positive impact of volunteer activities and trust (two measures of social capital) on online investments to maintain social capital, but more ambiguous results are found between online investments and face-to-face contacts with friends. By contrast, online investments to create new ties are poorly related to the Internet users' existing social capital, but depend on the opportunity cost of time.

International audience

The goal of this conceptual paper is to develop enhanced understandings of mathematics teacher design and design capacity when interacting with digital curriculum resources. We argue that digital resources in particular offer incentives and increasing opportunities for mathematics teachers’ design, both individually and in collectives. Indeed they require increased design expertise because of the changing nature of the resources. Drawing on the literature (1) we suggest ten questions providing a tool to study teacher design processes; and (2) we propose three components for exploring teacher design capacity. Building on two main theoretical areas (i.e. teaching as design; documentational approach to didactics) we propose to deepen understandings of the notions of “teacher design” and “teacher design capacity”. Drawing on two different collective environments and two individual teacher cases working within these environments, we investigate and illustrate teachers’ design processes and design capacity building across a range of contexts and curriculum formations, with the focus on how digital resources can help to develop teacher design capacity. We claim that the evolutions of digital resources in particular require an elaboration and refinement of the concept of teacher design capacity, which we develop and illustrate. Indeed, interacting with digital resources, it is claimed, might be a fruitful vehicle for developing teachers’ design capacity, in particular when working in collectives.

International audience

International audience

Does Islamic finance constitute a promising solution for the current global financial crisis and are Islamic financial innovations enough to reassure investors, stabilize financial systems and provide them with a means of escaping from financial downturns? This article addresses these questions while investigating the dynamics of Islamic and conventional stock prices over the last few years. In particular, we apply Multivariate Vector Autoregressive (VAR) tools to test the interaction between conventional and Islamic financial products, and implement the Granger causality test to specify the dependence orientation of feedback between Islamic and conventional stock prices. Our article differs from previous work on the topic in that it develops portfolio simulations to determine whether Islamic finance can supplant conventional finance by generating investment and diversification opportunities during periods of crisis. In addition, we develop optimal portfolio strategies and investment proportions for conventional and Islamic funds to ensure the best resource allocation. Our main findings are: (i) the impact of the current crisis on the Islamic finance industry is less marked than on conventional finance, (ii) investment in Islamic products generates high returns, (iii) portfolios that include Islamic products reduce systemic risk and generate significant diversification benefits, (iv) the US crisis has led to significant changes in resource allocation through changes in investment choices.

Purpose This paper aims to investigate how consumer and image factors as well as store familiarity influence store brand (SB) purchase behaviour. SBs are now widely offered by European mass retailers. However, consumer behaviour toward SBs is not yet clearly understood in all European markets. Design/methodology/approach The authors analysed data collected from 266 respondents and used structural equation modelling to test the main hypotheses. They then carried out ANOVA and MANOVA analyses to test the effect of store familiarity on SB purchase behaviour. Findings Results indicate that store image perceptions, SB price‐image, value consciousness, and SB attitude have significant and positive influence on SB purchase behaviour. Store familiarity positively influences SB choice, but not SB purchase intention. None of the socio‐demographic variables (age, gender, household income, and family size) included as control variables have an effect on SB choice. Research limitations/implications The study is limited because it did not account for the effect of product categories on SB purchase behaviour. Consequently, results cannot be determined for different product categories. It would also be appropriate to measure SB choice in a more concrete way, such as using scanner data. Practical implications Findings highlight the importance of value consciousness, store image perceptions, and SB price‐image on SB purchase behaviour. They also show greater popularity of SB products among consumers, including those with high household income. Originality/value There is increased value to retailers in studying how consumer and image factors jointly influence SB purchase behaviour, whilst also accounting for store familiarity instead of brand familiarity.

This article investigates the driving forces behind the life cycles and resilience of technological clusters. It concentrates, in particular, on the combination of critical parameters which allows clusters to succeed in disconnecting their cycle from the cycle of the technologies they produce, in order to maintain stability and growth in unstable economic environments. Three propositions on location decision externalities, the life cycle of composite technologies and the structural properties of knowledge networks are developed and introduced in an inclusive study of cluster trajectories. Discussions show that resilient clusters are those that combine network and external audience effects in location decision-making and evolve towards a specific core/periphery and disassortative structure of knowledge interactions along the knowledge and market phases. Understanding these pathways could be at the heart of the renewal of cluster and regional policy in a macro-economic context characterized by high instability and new growing consumer paradigms.

In these times of successive lockdown periods due to the health crisis induced by COVID-19, this paper investigates how the usages of collaborative and communication digital tools (groupware, workflow, instant messaging and web conference) are related to the evolution of teleworkers' subjective well-being (job satisfaction, job stress) and job productivity comparing during and before the first lockdown in spring 2020. Using a sample of 438 employees working for firms located in Luxembourg, this analysis enables, first, to highlight different profiles of teleworkers regarding the evolution of usages of these tools during the lockdown compared to before and the frequency of use during. Second, the analysis highlights that these profiles are linked to the evolution of job satisfaction, job stress and job productivity. Our main results show that (1) the profile that generates an increase in job productivity is the one with a combined mastered daily or weekly use of all of the four studied digital tools but at the expense of job satisfaction. On the contrary, (2) the use of the four digital tools both before and during the lockdown, associated with an increase in the frequency of use, appears to generate too much information flow to deal with and teleworkers may suffer from information overload that increases their stress and reduces their job satisfaction and job productivity. (3) The habit of using the four tools on a daily basis before the lockdown appears to protect teleworkers from most of the adverse effects, except for an increase in their job stress. Our results have theoretical and managerial implications for the future of the digitally transformed home office.

We obtain rich measurements of risk preferences for 2939 subjects across 30 countries, and use the data to paint a picture of the distribution of risk preferences across the globe using structural equation models.Referencedependence and likelihood-dependence are found to be important everywhere.Model parameters in non-Western countries differ systematically from those in Western countries, with poorer countries substantially more risk tolerant than rich countries on average.We qualify previous findings on gender effects and cognitive ability by showing how they mainly impact likelihood-dependence.We further add novel evidence on the correlation between risk preferences and study major.Whereas we confirm previous results on observable characteristics of subjects explaining little of overall preference heterogeneity, a few macroeconomic indicators can explain a considerable part of the between-country heterogeneity.

In this paper, I suggest that the history of the classification system used by the American Economic Association (AEA) to list economic literature and scholars is a relevant proxy to understand the transformation of economics science throughout the twentieth century. Successive classifications were fashioned through heated discussions on the status of theoretical and empirical work, data and measurement, and proper objects of analysis. They also reflected the contradictory demands of users, including economists but also civil servants, journalists, publishers, librarians, and the military, and reflected rapidly changing institutional and technological constraints. Until the late 1940s, disagreements on the general structure of the classification dominated AEA discussions. As the subject matters, methods, and definition of economics rapidly evolved after the war, methodological debates raged on the status of theoretical and empirical work and the degree of unification of the discipline. It was therefore the ordering and content of major categories that was closely discussed during the 1956 revision. The 1966 revision, in contrast, was fueled by institutional and technical transformations rather than intellectual ones. Classifiers essentially reacted to changes in the way economists' work was evaluated, the nature and size of the literature they produced, the publishing industry, and the use of computer facilities. The final 1988–90 revision was an attempt by the Journal of Economic Literature (JEL) editors to translate the mature core fields structure of their science into a set of codes and accommodate the new types of applied work economists identified themselves with. The 1990 classification system was only incrementally transformed in the next twenty years, but that the AEA is currently considering a new revision may signal more profound changes in the structure of economics. (JEL A14)

University–industry knowledge transfer is an important source wealth of creation for all partners; however, the practical management of this activity within universities is often hampered by procedural rigidity either through the absence of decision-making protocols to reconcile conflicting priorities or through the inconsistent implementation of existing policies. This is problematic, since it can impede operational effectiveness, prevent inter-organisational knowledge-creation and hamper organisational learning. This paper addresses this issue by adopting a cross-discipline approach and presenting meta-rules as a solution to aid organisational decision making. It is proposed that meta-rules can help resolve tensions arising from conflicting priorities between academics, knowledge transfer offices and industry and help facilitate strategic alignment of processes and policies within and between organisations. This research contributes to the growing debate on the strategic challenges of managing knowledge transfer and presents meta-rules as a practical solution to facilitate strategic alignment of internal and external stakeholder tensions. Meta-rules has previously only been applied in a computer intelligence context however, this research proves the efficacy of meta rules in a university–industry knowledge transfer context. This research also has practical implications for knowledge transfer office managers who can use meta-rules to help overcome resource limitations, conflicting priorities and goals of diverse internal and external stakeholders.

de un solvente en un polmero vidrioso con una condicin

Résumé La crise économique et financière a remis au goût du jour les politiques budgétaires keynésiennes. Si celles-ci n’ont pas permis d’éviter une récession sévère en 2009, elles ont pu néanmoins stopper l’hémorragie de la dépression. Même si l’incertitude concernant la reprise est grande, l’heure est désormais dans la plupart des pays à la consolidation budgétaire. Plusieurs questions se posent alors. La première est celle de l’efficacité des politiques budgétaires que l’on évalue à partir de la mesure des multiplicateurs. Dans la première partie, nous passons en revue les différentes évaluations des multiplicateurs budgétaires. L’impact sur l’activité des politiques budgétaires diffèrent, d’une part, en fonction des instruments utilisés (dépenses publiques, baisse d’impôts...), des horizons de prévision, de la taille des pays et de leur structure productive et fiscale. Au-delà de la mesure des multiplicateurs keynésiens à court, moyen et long terme en fonction des différents instruments budgétaires, l’apport principal de cet article est d’introduire l’effet du cycle économique dans les chocs budgétaires. En intégrant dans notre modèle macroéconomique ( emod.fr ) une relation entre le taux chômage structurel et le taux de chômage effectif différente selon le cycle économique, l’impact de toute politique économique variera selon la position de l’économie dans le cycle. La dernière question qui découle des précédentes est donc : les politiques de consolidation budgétaire sont-elles adaptées à la situation conjoncturelle actuelle ? La réponse est non car les économies avancées se situent actuellement toutes en bas ce cycle. Dans ce contexte, les multiplicateurs budgétaires sont élevés et les effets récessifs des politiques d’austérité seront forts.