Economics Insights @ CBS

This integrative review presents the Agentic-Communal Model of Advantage and Disadvantage to offer insight into the psychology of inequality. This model examines the relation between individuals' position of advantage or disadvantage in a social hierarchy and their propensity toward agency and communion. We begin by identifying and reviewing four inequalities — Resources, Opportunities, Appraisals, and Deference, or the ROAD of inequality — that are fundamental to social advantage and disadvantage.

Sustaining large-scale public goods requires individuals to make environmentally friendly decisions today to benefit future generations. Recent research suggests that second-order normative beliefs are more powerful predictors of behaviour than first-order personal beliefs. We explored the role that second-order normative beliefs — the belief that community members think that saving energy helps the environment — play in curbing energy use.

This study develops a timely and unbiased measure of expected credit losses. The expected rate of credit losses (ExpectedRCL) is a linear combination of various non-discretionary credit risk-related measures disclosed by banks. ExpectedRCL performs substantially better than net charge-offs, realized credit losses, and fair value of loans in predicting credit losses, and reflects all the explanatory power of the credit loss-related information in these variables.

Research has established that competing head to head against a rival boosts motivation and performance. The present research investigated whether rivalry can affect performance over time and in contests without rivals. We examined the long-term effects of rivalry through archival analyses of postseason performance in multiple high-stakes sports contexts: National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Men's Basketball and the major U.S.