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--- - |2 What is it for two people to think of something under the same mode of presentation (MOP)? This has seemed a difficult question for “atomistic” theories such as the Mental Files approach or the Language of Thought hypothesis. Here I propose a simple answer. I first argue that, by parallel with the synchronic intrapersonal case, the sharing of a MOP should involve epistemic transparency between the token thoughts of the two thinkers. I then explain how shared words help bring about this transparency. Finally, I show how the account can deal with MOPs expressed using demonstratives and indexicals. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Intellectualists about knowledge‐how argue that knowing how to do something is knowing the content of a proposition (i.e., a fact). An important component of this view is the idea that propositional knowledge is translated into behavior when it is presented to the mind in a peculiarly practical way. Until recently, however, intellectualists have not said much about what it means for propositional knowledge to be entertained under thought's practical guise. Carlotta Pavese fills this gap in the intellectualist view by modeling practical modes of thought after Fregean senses. In this paper, I take up her model and the presuppositions it is built upon, arguing that her view of practical thought is not positioned to account for much of what human agents are able to do. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

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--- - |2 Is it possible to deliberate consciously during a 1‐min‐per‐player chess game? I argue that, in contrast to views of the philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, even 1‐min‐per‐player chess games involve conscious thought and deliberation. In making my case, I rely on experimental results from two small‐scale studies I conducted on chess players, chess players' first‐person reports, and theoretical considerations that distinguish automatic skills from consciously controlled skills. This work bolsters Yu‐Hsuan Chang and David Lane's 2016 study suggesting that simultaneous chess exhibitions and speed chess allow time for calculation. It also aims to inspire future, larger‐scale studies investigating the role of declarative thought in 1‐min‐per‐player games. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The nature of attention has been the topic of a lively research programme in psychology for over a century. But there is widespread agreement that none of the theories on offer manage to fully capture the nature of attention. Recently, philosophers have become interested in the debate again after a prolonged period of neglect. This paper contributes to the project of explaining the nature of attention. It starts off by critically examining Christopher Mole's prominent “adverbial” account of attention, which traces the failure of extant psychological theories to their assumption that attending is a kind of process. It then defends an alternative, process‐based view of the metaphysics of attention, on which attention is understood as an activity and not, as psychologists seem to implicitly assume, an accomplishment. The entrenched distinction between accomplishments and activities is shown to shed new light on the metaphysics of attention. It also provides a novel diagnosis of the empirical state of play. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Consider the following sentence: “Mary meditated on the sentence ‘Bill is a good friend’ and concluded that he was a good friend.” It is standardly assumed that in sentences of this sort, containing so‐called “closed” quotations, the expressions occurring between quotation marks are mentioned and do not take their ordinary referents. The quoted NP “Bill” refers, if anything, to the name ‘Bill,’ not to the individual Bill. At the same time, the pronoun “he,” apparently anaphoric on quoted “Bill,” refers to the individual Bill. The case seems thus to invalidate the intuitive principle that pronouns anaphoric on referential expressions inherit their reference from their antecedents. The paper formulates the argument, argues that sentences exhibiting the described pattern do not constitute evidence against the intuitive principle, and proposes an alternative account of the anaphoric relation involved. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The idea that attention is necessary for consciousness (the “Necessity Thesis”) is frequently advocated by philosophers and psychologists alike. Experiments involving inattentional and change blindness are thought to support the Necessity Thesis, but they do so only if subjects failing to notice the target stimulus are also not conscious of it. This article uses commonsense phenomenological observations supplemented with empirical data to argue that some subjects failing to notice the target stimulus nonetheless experience its color. Since subjects not noticing the target are commonly assumed to be not attending to it, these scenarios would be instances of consciousness without attention: instead of inattentional and change blindness supporting the Necessity Thesis, they would present counterexamples to it. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Lies are typically defined as believed falsehoods asserted with the intention of deceiving the hearer. A particularly problematic case for this definition is that of false implicatures. These are prototypically cases where the proposition expressed by the speaker's utterance is true, yet an implicature conveyed by this proposition in context is false. However, implicature is a diverse category and whether a blanket statement such as “false implicatures are lies,” as some have argued can account for all of them is open to investigation. We present an experimental investigation of whether naïve participants define different types of implicatures as lies. Our results show that only a couple of types of implicatures were strongly rated as lies by participants. These results suggest that participants distinguish between different types of communicated meanings on linguistic grounds, contributing both to the literature on lying, as well as to theoretical discussions of how different types of meaning are communicated. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Mercier and Sperber illuminate many aspects of reasoning and rationality, providing refreshing and thoughtful analysis and elegant and well‐researched illustrations. They make a good case that reasoning should be viewed as a type of intuition, rather than a separate cognitive process or system. Yet questions remain. In what sense, if any, is reasoning a “module?” What is the link between rationality within an individual and rationality defined through the interaction between individuals? Formal theories of rationality, from logic, probability theory and game theory, while not the focus of Mercier and Sperber's book, may help clarify this latter question. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The standard view of the function of reason is that it emerged to enable individuals to make better judgements and choices. Once individuals could think better, and once we had suitable communicative tools, individual reasoning acquired a public face; we reasoned together as well as privately, in our own mind. Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber argue that this gets the story the wrong way around: reasoning evolved for public purposes: to persuade, negotiate, assess. Once it was established publically, perhaps it acquired a private function too. With the exception of a few minor complaints, this evolutionary case is well made. However, Mercier and Sperber embed their evolutionary case within a modular view of the mind and suggest a modular view of public reasoning itself. While I find the evolutionary case persuasive, I am sceptical of the cognitive science framework. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 In their reviews, Chater and Oaksford, Dutilh Novaes, and Sterelny are critical of our modularist approach to reason. In this response, we clarify our claim that reason is one of many cognitive modules that produce intuitive inferences each in its domain; the reason module producing intuitions about reasons. We argue that in‐principle objections to the idea of massive modularity based on Fodor's peculiar approach are not effective against other interpretations that have led to insightful uses of the notion in psychology and biology. We explain how the reason module evaluates reasons on the basis of their metacognitive properties. We show how the module fulfils a social function, that of producing reasons to justify oneself and convince others and of evaluating the reasons others produce to convince us. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 In The Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber (M&S) present and defend their interactionist account of reason. In this piece, I discuss briefly the points of agreement between M&S and myself and, more extensively, the points of disagreement, most of which pertain to details of the evolutionary components of their account. I discuss in particular the purported modular nature of reason; their account of myside bias as an optimum/adaptation; and the claim that reason thus construed must be an individual‐level and not a group‐level adaptation. In the final section, I offer brief considerations on an alternative account of reasoning, where the focus is on how sociocultural environments may tune the social production and evaluation of arguments. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The cognitive phenomenology thesis claims that “there is something it is like” to have cognitive states such as believing, desiring, hoping, attending, and so on. In support of this idea, Goldman claimed that the tip‐of‐the‐tongue phenomenon can be considered as a clear‐cut instance of nonsensory cognitive phenomenology. This paper reviews Goldman's proposal and assesses whether the tip‐of‐the‐tongue and other metacognitive feelings actually constitute an instance of cognitive phenomenology. The paper will show that psychological data cast doubt on the idea that the tip‐of‐the‐tongue and other metacognitive feelings are clear‐cut instances of cognitive phenomenology. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 This is a reminiscence and short biographical sketch of the late philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor. It includes a summary of his main proposals about the mind: his “Language of Thought” hypothesis; his rejection of analyticity and conceptual role semantics; his “mad dog nativism”; his proposal of mental modules and—by contrast—his skepticism about a computational theory of central cognition; his anti‐reductionist, but still physicalist, views about psychology; and, lastly, his attacks on selectionism. I conclude with some discussion of his idiosyncratic style and of his aesthetic and other interests. An appendix provides some memorable quotes. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 321-341, September 2018.

--- - |2 I outline three conceptions of seeing that a creature might possess: “the headlamp conception,” which involves an understanding of the causal connections between gazing at an object, certain mental states, and behavior; “the stage lights conception,” which involves an understanding of the selective nature of visual attention; and seeing‐as. I argue that infants and various nonhumans possess the headlamp conception. There is also evidence that chimpanzees and 3‐year‐old children have some grasp of seeing‐as. However, due to a dearth of studies, there is no evidence that infants or nonhumans possess the stage lights conception of seeing. I outline the kinds of experiments that are needed, and what we stand to learn about the evolution and development of perspective taking. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Recent work on the side‐effect effect has shown that subjects' intentionality judgments are influenced by moral evaluations. In six experiments, we tested four different candidates for the cognitive foundation derived from prominent explanatory accounts (prescriptiveness, [un‐]expectedness, blame and a shift in default attitudes) against each other in three steps. First, Study 1 showed that the effect even extends to certain descriptive norms. Second, Studies 2–5 investigated the candidates more directly. Results reveal that intentionality judgments could best be explained by underlying shifts in default attitudes. Third, Study 6 experimentally manipulated this default attitude, leading to the predicted change in intentionality judgments. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 It is often possible to know what a speaker intends to communicate without knowing what they intend to express. In such cases, speakers need not intend to express anything at all. Stanley and Szabó's influential survey of possible analysis of quantifier domain restriction is, therefore, incomplete and the arguments made by Clapp and Buchanan against Truth Conditional Compositionality and propositional speaker‐meaning are flawed. Two theories should not always be viewed as incompatible when they associate the same utterance with different propositions, as there may be many ways to interpret speakers that are compatible with their intentions. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Since at least Hume and Kant, philosophers working on the nature of aesthetic judgment have generally agreed that common sense does not treat aesthetic judgments in the same way as typical expressions of subjective preferences—rather, it endows them with intersubjective validity, the property of being right or wrong regardless of disagreement. Moreover, this apparent intersubjective validity has been taken to constitute one of the main explananda for philosophical accounts of aesthetic judgment. But is it really the case that most people spontaneously treat aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity? In this paper, we report the results of a cross‐cultural study with over 2,000 respondents spanning 19 countries. Despite significant geographical variations, these results suggest that most people do not treat their own aesthetic judgments as having intersubjective validity. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for theories of aesthetic judgment and the purpose of aesthetics in general. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well‐suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The paper evaluates a well‐known argument for a self from episodic memories—that remembering that I did something or thought something involves experiencing the identity of my present self with the past doer or thinker. Shaun Nichols argues that although it phenomenologically appears to be the case that we are identical with the past self, no metaphysical conclusion can be drawn from the phenomenology. I draw on literature from contemporary psychology and Buddhist resources to arrive at a more radical conclusion: that there is no phenomenological sense of identity with a past self; the sense of self in episodic memory depends on narrative construction of the self. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Embodied cognition emphasizes the importance of the body to cognition, but what is the nature of this importance? For some advocates, the body provides a computational resource within the context of a larger cognitive system. For others, the body constrains cognition, such that differently embodied organisms will differ cognitively as well. I examine these distinct conceptions of embodiment, defending the greater interest of the second. I argue as well that judgments of the body's significance in cognition do not, as contestants on both sides of the debate often insist, depend on showing the body to be a constituent in cognition. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Previous experimental studies on epistemic contextualism have, for the most part, not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of its main competing theories, subject‐sensitive invariantism (SSI). In this paper, we present a “third‐person” experimental design that is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over SSI, and we then present our results using this design. Our results not only provide crucial support for contextualism over SSI, but also buck the general trend of failing to detect the kind of contextual effect that the epistemic contextualism relies upon. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 It has been argued that implicit biases are operative in philosophy and lead to significant epistemic costs in the field. Philosophers working on this issue have focused mainly on implicit gender and race biases. They have overlooked ideological bias, which targets political orientations. Psychologists have found ideological bias in their field and have argued that it has negative epistemic effects on scientific research. I relate this debate to the field of philosophy and argue that if, as some studies suggest, the same bias also exists in philosophy then it will lead to hitherto unrecognised epistemic hazards in the field. Furthermore, the bias is epistemically different from the more familiar biases in respects that are important for epistemology, ethics, and metaphilosophy. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Non‐human animal evidence is frequently invoked in debates in cognitive science. Here, I critically assess one use of such evidence in the form of the “argument from animals,” a prominent positive argument for nativism, which roughly states that non‐human cognitive development is largely nativist, and thus human cognitive development is most likely largely nativist too. I offer a number of reasons to reject this argument, and in doing so derive some important broader lessons concerning the appropriate role of non‐human animal evidence in a science of the human mind. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 The debate regarding the nature of joint action has come to a stalemate due to a dependence on intuitional methods. Normativists, such as Margaret Gilbert, argue that action‐relative normative relations are inherent in joint action, while non‐normativists, such as Michael Bratman, claim that there are minimal cases of joint action without normative relations. In this work, we describe the first experimental examinations of these intuitions, and report the results of six studies that weigh in favor of the normativist paradigm. Philosophical ramifications and further extensions of this work are then discussed. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 How do children learn the meanings of propositional attitude verbs? We argue that children use information contained in both syntactic distribution and pragmatic function to zero in on the appropriate meanings. Specifically, we identify a potentially universal link between semantic subclasses of attitude verbs, their syntactic distribution and the kinds of indirect speech acts they can be used to perform. As a result, children can use the syntax as evidence about the meaning, which in turn constrains the kinds of pragmatic enrichments they do and do not make in understanding these verbs in conversation. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 “I”‐thought is often taken to have a special cognitive significance, with “I” symbolising a subjective way of thinking about oneself that is inapt for communication. In this paper I argue that the way one thinks of oneself in “I”‐thought is immaterial to the meaning of “I,” for in general the psychological role associated with a referential expression is separable from its meaning. With respect to “I,” I suggest that its meaning consists in an interpersonal way of fixing its reference in a context, which is accessible to the speaker and the hearer. Consequently, “I” would have a dual cognitive significance. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Many philosophers have claimed that the folk endorse moral universalism. But while some empirical evidence supports the claim that the folk endorse moral universalism, this work has uncovered intra‐domain differences in folk judgments of moral universalism. In light of all this, our question is: why do the folk endorse moral universalism? Our hypothesis is that folk judgments of moral universalism are generated in part by a desire to punish. We present evidence supporting this across three studies. On the basis of this, we argue for a debunking explanation of folk judgments of moral universalism. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Several theories, which attempt to give an account of cumulative culture, emphasize the importance of high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms as central to human learning. These high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms are thought to account for the ratchet effect, that is, the capacity to inherit modified or improved knowledge and skills rather than having to develop one's skills from the ground up via individual learning. In this capacity, imitation and teaching have been thought to occupy a special place in the explanation of cumulative culture because they are both thought to function as high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms. In contrast to this standard view, I will argue that imitation and teaching are not both best construed as primarily high‐fidelity transmission mechanisms. Rather, I will argue that though both can contribute to the high‐fidelity transmission of information, imitation and teaching make two distinct contributions to cumulative culture. I will claim that imitation functions primarily as a high‐fidelity transmission mechanism while teaching is primarily responsible for the innovation and creativity characteristic of cumulative culture. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 355-377, September 2018.

--- - |2 This article focuses on the question of the function of imitation and whether current accounts of imitative function are consistent with our knowledge about imitation's origins. We first review theories of imitative origin concluding that empirical evidence suggests that imitation arises from domain‐general learning mechanisms. Next, we lay out a selective account of function that allows normative functions to be ascribed to learned behaviours. We then describe and review four accounts of the function of imitation before evaluating the relationship between the claim that imitation arises out of domain‐general learning mechanisms and theories of the function of imitation. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 378-396, September 2018.

--- - |2 Most views of agency take acting for reasons (whether explanatory or justifying) to be an important hallmark of the capacity for agency. The problem, however, is that the standard analysis of what it is to act in light of reasons is not sufficiently fine grained to accommodate what we will argue are the myriad types of ways that agents can do so. We suggest that a full account of acting for reasons must also recognize the relationship that agents have with their reasons. We focus on two types of relationships. The first is the traditional case, where agents act in light of reasons that they take to be their own and that they endorse. We describe this as possessing an Endorsement Relationship with one's reasons. A second way of relating to reasons is what we will describe as possessing a Directed Relationship with one's reasons. This includes cases in which agents' actions are the product of reasons but toward which agents do not have an Endorsement Relationship. The Endorsement Relationship is uncontroversial. In this paper, we defend the existence and importance of the Directed Relationship. We show that it is a genuine but overlooked way of relating to, and thereby acting for, reasons. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Number morphology (e.g., singular vs. plural) is a part of the grammar that captures numerical information. Some languages have morphological Number values, which express few (paucal), two (dual), three (trial) and sometimes (possibly) four (quadral). Interestingly, the limit of the attested morphological Number values matches the limit of non‐verbal numerical cognition. The latter is based on two systems, one estimating approximate numerosities and the other computing exact numerosities up to three or four. We compared the literature on non‐verbal number systems with data on Number morphology from 218 languages. Our observations suggest that non‐verbal numerical cognition is reflected as a core part of language. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 We present an investigation of the ways in which speakers' subjective perspectives are likely to affect the meaning of gradable adjectives like tall or heavy. We present the results of a study showing that people tend to use themselves as a yardstick when ascribing these adjectives to human figures of varied measurements: subjects' height and weight requirements for applying tall and heavy are found to be positively correlated with their personal measurements. We draw more general lessons regarding the definition of subjectivity and the ways in which a standard of comparison and a significant deviation from that standard are specified. - Mind & Language, EarlyView.

--- - |2 Imitation research has focused on turn‐taking contexts in which one person acts and one person then copies that action. However, people also imitate when engaging in joint actions, where two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time in order to achieve a shared goal. We discuss how the various constraints imposed by joint action modulate imitation, and the close links between perception and action that form the basis of this phenomenon. We also explore how understanding imitation in the context of joint action yields new insights into cultural phenomena such as teaching and innovation. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 342-354, September 2018.

--- - |2 It is widely supposed that if there is to be a plausible connection between the truth of a de re attitude report about a subject and that subject's possession of a singular thought, then “acquaintance”‐style requirements on singular thought must be rejected. I show that this belief rests on poorly motivated claims about how we talk about the attitudes. I offer a framework for propositional attitude reports, which provides both attractive solutions to recalcitrant puzzle cases and the key to preserving acquaintance constraints. The upshot is that there is an independently motivated response to the principal argument against acquaintance. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 415-437, September 2018.

--- - |2 Do you know you are not being massively deceived by an evil demon? That is a familiar skeptical challenge. Less familiar is this question: How do you have a conception of knowledge on which the evil demon constitutes a prima facie challenge? Recently several philosophers have suggested that our responses to skeptical scenarios can be explained in terms of heuristics and biases. We offer an alternative explanation, based in learning theory. We argue that, given the evidence available to the learner, it would be rational for the learner to infer an infallibilist conception of knowledge. - Mind & Language, Volume 33, Issue 4, Page 397-414, September 2018.

We present a theoretical methodology for the pricing of catastrophe (CAT) derivatives with event‐dependent and non‐convex payoffs given the price of a CAT indexed futures contract. We do not assume a fully diversifiable CAT event risk, nor do we assume knowledge of the martingale probability measure beyond the futures price. We derive tight bounds on the contract value and present trading strategies exploiting the mispricing whenever the bounds are violated. We estimate the bounds of the reinsurance contract with data from hurricane landings in Florida. Our method is also applicable when there is no futures market but the price of a CAT‐indexed bond is available.

U.S. firms recorded an unprecedented number of asset impairments during the recent financial crisis. We investigate the timing of these losses in the context of two competing views on how firms use discretion over asset impairments. The first view posits that firms record impairments to convey private information as part of their commitment to a conditionally conservative reporting strategy. The second view argues that firms use their discretion to report opportunistically by delaying the recording of bad news. Consistent with the first view, we find that firms recorded timelier asset impairments during the financial crisis if they reported more conservatively in the five years preceding the crisis. Further tests show this relation is greater for firms with strong corporate governance, industry‐specialist auditors, and high leverage, indicating the importance of monitoring mechanisms in determining how firms handle the discretion involved in impairment decisions. We also test for the consequences of timely asset impairments during the financial crisis and find that firms reporting conservatively both before and during the crisis were able to acquire more debt financing, and their publicly traded bonds suffered smaller increases in illiquidity. Collectively, our study highlights the role of asset impairments in firms’ accounting choices over time. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

This study examines whether directors’ and officers’ insurers and lenders effectively monitor securities litigation and respond through pricing before case outcomes are known. By “monitoring,” we refer to tracking case progress and obtaining information from the insured (defendant) firm and its counsel prior to case resolution. We find that insurers and lenders increase rates, and that this effect is almost completely isolated to firms with cases that eventually settle. We confirm that this response is reasonable as settled cases are associated with lower future earnings, while there is generally no relation between future earnings and dismissed cases. As direct costs appear low, our results suggest that most costs are indirect in the form of reputational damage. Overall, our results suggest that researchers and policymakers interested in litigation should focus on settled cases, which are the only cases with material long‐term costs.

We used Medicare administrative data (2002–2009) and an instrumental variables design that exploits the natural experiment created by the implementation of Medicare Part D to estimate the effect of prescription drug coverage insurance on the use and costs of inpatient services. We find that gaining prescription drug insurance through Part D caused approximately a 4 percent decrease in hospital admission rate, a 2–5 percent decrease in Medicare inpatient payments per person, and a 10–15 percent decrease in inpatient charges. Among specific types of admissions, gaining insurance was associated with significant decreases in admissions for CHF and COPD.

Manuscript Type Conceptual and empirical. Research Question/Issue Many studies of firm‐level corporate governance rely on aggregate “indices” to measure underlying, unobserved governance. But we are not confident that we know how to build these indices. Often we are unsure both as to what is “good” governance, and how one can proxy for this vague concept using observable measures. We conduct an exploratory analysis of how researchers can address the “construct validity” of firm‐level governance indices, which poses a major challenge to all studies that rely on these indices. Research Findings/Insights We assess the construct validity of governance indices for four major emerging markets (Brazil, India, Korea, and Turkey), developed in prior work. In that work, we built country‐specific indices, using country‐specific governance elements that reflect local norms, institutions, and data availability, and showed that these indices predict firm market value in each country. The use of country‐specific indices puts great stress on the construct validity challenge of assessing how well a governance measure matches the underlying concept. We address here how well these four country‐specific indices, and subindices for aspects of governance such as board structure or disclosure, coherently measure unobserved, underlying actual governance. Theoretical/Academic Implications We provide guidance on how researchers can address the construct validity of corporate governance indices. Practitioner/Policy Implications The uncertain construct validity of most corporate governance indices suggests caution in relying on research using these indices as a basis for firm‐level governance changes, or country‐level legal reforms.

Literature examining WTO+ commitments in services trade agreements (STAs) has not considered the role of services regulation. We bridge this gap using a sample of 15 South/South‐East Asian countries, given the burgeoning trend of Asian economies towards services preferentialism and the largely WTO+ nature of their preferential services commitments. Our empirical findings suggest that Asian trading dyads with regulatory frameworks that are more similar and more trade restrictive tend to undertake higher levels of WTO+ commitments in their STAs. There is also evidence in our results, including by modes of supply, for WTO+ commitments in Asian STAs being driven by goods trade complementarities, alluding to supply chain dynamics in the region. Such results support the hypothesis that the heightened “servicification” of production generates a demand to lower services input costs arising from regulatory incidence and heterogeneity.

Are blind spots of public debt spikes sizable? And how do they affect financial stress indicators? This paper tackles these questions empirically, using information from 179 episodes of public debt spikes between 1945 and 2014. We find that large public debt spikes are neither driven by high primary deficits nor by output declines but instead by stock‐flow adjustments. These blind spots in debt dynamics are sizable in both advanced economies and emerging markets and could amount to more than 20% of gross domestic product in the median episode. These public debt spikes increase financial stress indicators significantly, in particular when a large share of public debt is held by domestic commercial banks. Enhanced transparency and better debt forecasting tools could help address financial market tensions resulting from blind spots in debt dynamics.

This article examines the “chicken‐egg” two‐way relationships between online consumer reviews and sales, and assesses the dual influencer and indicator roles of online consumer reviews in relation to purchase behavior. Considering the time factor, we adopt the methodology of Granger causality test and track 3,390 products on Amazon.com over a 2‐month period. The results reveal that a causality loop exists between online consumer review volume and sales. Specifically, our findings indicate that the volume of negative consumer reviews drive consumers' purchasing decisions, but the volume of positive consumers reviews only marginally affects purchasing decisions. Also, consumers generate more positive reviews than negative reviews after sales. Our results highlight the importance of negative consumer reviews; negative reviews not only lead to sales, but sales, in turn, lead to higher volume of negative reviews. The findings suggest an alternative strategy for practitioners to address negative online consumer reviews and highlight the awareness effect of online consumer review postings that can later convert into purchase behaviors.

This representative study of German search engine users (N = 1,000) focuses on the ability of users to distinguish between organic results and advertisements on Google results pages. We combine questions about Google's business with task‐based studies in which users were asked to distinguish between ads and organic results in screenshots of results pages. We find that only a small percentage of users can reliably distinguish between ads and organic results, and that user knowledge of Google's business model is very limited. We conclude that ads are insufficiently labelled as such, and that many users may click on ads assuming that they are selecting organic results.

Objective The objective of this literature review was to summarise current research regarding how consumers seek health‐related information from social media. Primarily, we hope to reveal characteristics of existing studies investigating the health topics that consumers have discussed in social media, ascertaining the roles social media have played in consumers’ information‐seeking processes and discussing the potential benefits and concerns of accessing consumer health information in social media. Methods The Web of Science Core Collection database was searched for existing literature on consumer health information seeking in social media. The search returned 214 articles, of which 21 met the eligibility criteria following review of full‐text documents. Conclusion Between 2011 and 2016, twenty‐one studies published explored various topics related to consumer information seeking in social media. These ranged from online discussions on specific diseases (e.g. diabetes) to public health concerns (e.g. pesticide residues). Consumers’ information needs vary depending on the health issues of interest. Benefits of health seeking on social media, in addition to filling a need for health information, include the social and emotional support health consumers gain from peer‐to‐peer interactions. These benefits, however, are tempered by concerns of information quality and authority and lead to decreased consumer engagement.

In this paper, we show theoretically and empirically that the US quantitative easing (QE) policy results in lower exchange rate pass‐through into the destination prices of Chinese exporters. In addition, the more the exchange rate in the export destination appreciates than the Chinese yuan, the stronger this effect becomes. Our model combines various marginal effects of QE policy on the destinations of Chinese exporters and variable markups of export firms due to strategic complementarities. The model predicts that the impact of US QE policy on the pass‐through of Chinese exporters depends on its spillover on the exchange rate between China and the export destination of different firms. We provide strong support for the model predictions using Chinese firm‐product‐level data with information on export destinations. The baseline result and the heterogeneity we find in the response of exchange rate pass‐through of Chinese exporters to US QE policy remain robust to alternative measures of samples and controls.

Banking groups exploit double leverage when “debt is issued by the parent company and the proceeds are invested in subsidiaries as equity” (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (2016)). Financial authorities have frequently raised concerns about the issue of double leverage because this type of intra‐firm financing appears to allow for both the arbitrage of capital and the assumption of risk. This article focuses on the relationship between double leverage and risk‐taking within banking groups. First, we discuss this relationship based on an examination of balance sheet figures. Second, we analyse a large sample of United States Bank Holding Companies (BHCs) from 1990–2014. The results show that BHCs are more prone to risk when they increase their double leverage, namely, when the stake of the parent within subsidiaries is larger than the stand‐alone capital of the parent. This paper's primary implication for policymakers is that the regulators of complex financial entities should more efficiently address the issue of double leverage, thereby limiting the potential negative consequences that arise from corporate instability. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved

The world capital asset‐pricing model is the benchmark model in international finance. However, recent research finds that the premium on the world market factor is insignificant. In this paper, we investigate if the world market risk premium is particularly significant on US macroeconomic announcement days. Empirically, we apply the methodology to daily country exchange‐traded funds. Our findings suggest that although the world market risk premium is insignificant on nonannouncement days, it is strongly significant on US macroeconomic announcement days. In addition, we find that US monetary policy announcements are the most important macroeconomic announcements to drive the world market risk premium. Our findings are consistent with the notion of monetary policy uncertainty and the empirical literature that connects policy uncertainty with systematic risk.

This paper presents new evidence on the impact of the preferential treatment of owner‐occupied housing in Europe. We find that tax benefits to homeowners reduce the user cost of housing capital by almost 40 percent compared to the efficient level under neutral taxation. On average, the tax subsidy translates into an excess consumption of housing services equivalent to 7.8 percent of the value of owner‐occupied housing, or about 30 percent of financial asset holdings in household portfolios. The bulk of the subsidies stems from under‐taxation of the return to home equity, while the average contribution of the tax rebate for mortgage interest payments is driven down by relatively low loan‐to‐value ratios in the data. However, at the margin, the tax–induced incentive to use mortgage debt to finance the purchase of the main residence is sizable. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved