An anatomy of male labour market earnings inequality in Serbia, 1996–2003

This study uses a regression-based framework to identify the key factors that determine the level and changes in main job earnings inequality for men. A number of different inequality measures are used in our work. The analysis uses data for Serbia drawn from eight annual labour force surveys, which cover both the early episode of sluggish transition and a more recent concerted phase of economic reform. It thus provides some useful insights on the evolution of labour earnings inequality through an uneven transitional process and identifies factors likely to retain an influence on earnings inequality as the market reform processes take greater hold.     

An empirical study on credit card loan delinquency

Following the Basel II convention, consumer credit default is commonly defined as delinquency beyond a period of 90 days. In this study, rather than considering default as a binary variable, we dissect delinquency states further to investigate default behavior in greater detail. As such, we define three states—no delinquency, delinquency and serious delinquency—and estimate the probabilities of the transitions between states using extensive panel data from Korea, covering a wide range of behavioral information. Our findings have several economic implications. First, the factors that affect delinquency risk can differ from those that affect the transition from delinquency to serious delinquency. Second, the recent increase in the number of seriously delinquent accounts can be attributed to changes in the borrower age distribution. Third, macroeconomic conditions, especially differences in gross domestic product and consumption growth, have led to the recent increase in delinquent accounts. Fourth, the debt-to-income (DTI) ratio has a profound effect on transitions between delinquency states and thus affects both recovery and delinquency. Furthermore, this result is robust to controls for demographic and macroeconomic factors.     

Analysts' Forecasts in Asian-Pacific Markets: The Relationship among Macroeconomic Factors, Accounting Systems, Bias and Accuracy

In this study, we describe determinants of accuracy/bias of analysts' forecasts in 13 economies of the Asian‐Pacific region. Examination of the accuracy of analysts' earnings forecasts allows us to judge how accounting systems and macroeconomic distinctions in this region affect earnings predictability. As many investors rely on analysts' earnings forecasts instead of producing their own, the growth of international investment means forecasts in non‐US markets will become increasingly important to investors worldwide. Using a sample of firms with data available on Global Vantage and I/B/E/S International, we find that the analysts on average have a pessimistic bias in Asian‐Pacific markets. We examine whether macroeconomic factors explain part of the difference in the size of analyst forecast errors, using the global competitiveness rankings of the World Economic Forum (WEF). We expect that those nations which are more open to foreign trade and investment and are ranked more highly by the WEF in its Global Competitiveness Index will also have more accurate analyst forecasts, as increased global competitiveness demands greater integration into the world economy, and such integration should lead to more transparent financial statements and more accurate earnings forecasts. Our findings are consistent with this prediction. We also find that countries with low book‐tax conformity have more accurate earnings forecasts.     

宏观经济政策对房地产上市公司资本结构的影响

上市房地产公司由于其特殊的经济地位和所占据的重要社会地位,导致了它毫无疑问地成为了政府进行宏观调控的焦点。本文在阐述宏观经济要素对资本结构影响理论的基础上,利用多元线性回归模型实证分析了房地产行业的资本结构。实证表明:资产负债率与通货膨胀率呈反向变化,而与实际贷款利率呈同向变化,与GDP增长率和市盈率关系不显著。进而探讨了房地产上市公司资本结构的优化策略。     

Interdependent capital structure choices and the macroeconomy

This study shows that capital structure choices of US corporations are interdependent across time. We follow a two-step estimation approach. First, using a large cross-section of firms we estimate year-by-year average capital structure choices, i.e., the average firm’s percentage of new funding that is secured through debt, its term composition, and the percentage of new equity represented by retained earnings. Second, these time series are included in a Factor Augmented Vector Autoregressive model in which three factors representing real economic activity, expected future funding conditions, and prices, are included. We test for the interdependence between optimal capital structure decisions and for the influence exerted by macroeconomic conditions on these decisions. Results show there is a hierarchical order in which firms make capital structure decisions. They first decide on the share of debt out of total new funding they will hire. Conditional on this they decide on the term of their debt and on their earnings retention policy. Of outmost importance, macroeconomic factors are key for making capital structure decisions.     

Changes in urban inequality in Vietnam: 1992–1998

The urban inequality in Vietnam has declined in the 1990s. Using the regression-based decomposition methods [Fields, G.S., 2003. Accounting for income inequality and its change: a new method, with application to the distribution of earnings in the United States. In: Polachek, S.W. (Ed.), Worker Well Being and Public Policy, Research in Labor Economics, vol. 22. Elsevier, New Jersey, pp. 1–38; Yun, M.S., 2006. Earnings inequality in U.S., 1969–99: comparing inequality using earnings equations. Review of Income and Wealth 52, 127–144.], we identify the contributing factors and distinguish between changes of the inequality due to changing returns to characteristics and distribution of these characteristics. We find that the changing returns to regional factors and to physical assets are behind the decline in urban inequality. However, the decline hides adverse changes from human capital and unemployment. Policies to encourage regional labor market integration, improve the quality of and equal access to education are important to make the equal urban distribution sustainable in the new millennium.     

Earnings inequality,returns to education and immigration into Ireland

We examine what has happened to earnings inequality and the returns to education in Ireland between 1987 and 1997. We find that while both increased between 1987 and 1994, the increases slowed dramatically between 1994 and 1997. We look to immigration as being a contributing factor to this pattern because a large group of skilled workers flowed into the Irish labour market between 1994 and 1997. We develop a model of the Irish labour market and use it to simulate the impact of an increase in skilled labour. The simulation suggests that immigration did indeed reduce earnings inequality. This result is an interesting corollary to work from the US that shows the immigration of unskilled workers' increasing earnings inequality.     

human resource management in East Asian labour markets: some selected issues in strategic,organizational and operational research

The question of payment and its determination has in China exposed tensions between socially embedded values and the functional requirements for modernization. These can be expressed respectively in terms of a traditional model, which predicts that earnings will be higher for people who are older, loyal to their unit and male, and a reform model, which predicts that earnings will be higher for people who have formal qualifications, have relevant training, hold positions of greater responsibility and are performing well and/or belong to a successful enterprise. The postulates of these two models, and the extent to which their relevance has changed with China's economic reform, are examined in the light of data on 144 job-holders in six Beijing state-owned enterprises, collected at two points in time, namely October 1985 and March 1990. The results indicate that in 1985 factors identified by the traditional model, especially age, were the most important predictors of earnings. By 1990 some movement towards the reform model had taken place, although age continued to have an important, albeit weaker, association with level of earnings and the link between pay and performance was still quite limited.     

Estimation with overidentifying inequality moment conditions

This paper derives limit distributions of empirical likelihood estimators for models in which inequality moment conditions provide overidentifying information. We show that the use of this information leads to a reduction of the asymptotic mean-squared estimation error and propose asymptotically uniformly valid tests and confidence sets for the parameters of interest. While inequality moment conditions arise in many important economic models, we use a dynamic macroeconomic model as a data generating process and illustrate our methods with instrumental variable estimators of monetary policy rules. The results obtained in this paper extend to conventional GMM estimators.     

福建省经济运行的实证分析

任何一个国家或地区的经济发展都是由很多因素决定的,从宏观经济理论可知,拉动地区经济增长的因素主要有消费,投资和出口。本文从这三个因素入手,通过Granger-causality因果关系检验的方法,以福建省的数据为例,对区域经济的运行情况进行实证分析,得出出口是拉动福建经济的主要因素的结论。并对今后福建省的经济发展提出了一些简单的政策和建议。     

Unraveling the Relationship Between Presidential Approval and the Economy: A Multidimensional Semiparametric Approach

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of US presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semiparametric additive mixed models and allow for flexible functional forms and thus possible nonlinear effects for the economic determinants. By controlling for the well‐known politically motivated covariables, we find strong evidence for nonlinear and negative effects of unemployment, inflation and government consumption on presidential approval. Additionally, we present new results in favor of nonparametric trivariate interaction effects between the macroeconomic covariables. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

中国经济周期特征与太阳黑子均衡

本文在Benhabib、Farmer（1994）、Farmar、Guo（1994,1995）的不确定性均衡模型框架上,构建了一个考虑了信念偏差所代表的不确定因素和政府支出冲击的太阳黑子RBC模型来解释宏观经济的周期波动;并利用中国改革开放以来的经济数据,对该模型进行了实证检验。我们发现,该模型能够解释80%以上的中国经济波动特征;可以合理预测各宏观经济变量与产出之间的协动关系,合理预测各变量与劳动生产率之间的相关关系;对中国经济的解释力远远高于标准RBC模型,说明这一模型比较适合解释中国经济波动。另外,还发现信念冲击与政府支出冲击均是中国宏观经济波动的重要冲击来源,分别可以解释约30%、60%的经济波动,表明二者均是中国经济波动不可忽略的重要影响因素。我们的发现从不确定均衡和财政政策变动角度对宏观经济波动(比如,消费、就业、投资)的一些现象提供了合理解释。     

Spatial inequality and household poverty in Ghana

The study analyses district-level consumption inequality in Ghana, explores the relative contribution of within- and between-district inequalities to national inequality and examines the relationship between household poverty and inequality. The last three rounds of the Ghana Living Standard Survey are used. We observe that the contribution of within-district inequality to national inequality is higher than inequality between districts. Also, district-level consumption inequality shows a significant effect on household poverty, but with varying signs. We surmise that the variation in signs is as a result of the state of economic activity and factors that affect both poverty and inequality.     

The incentive for working hard: explaining hours worked differences in the US and Germany

This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the distribution of earnings. Since US earnings are more unequally distributed than German earnings, the same extra work pays off more in the US, generating more hours worked. Supporting this inequality–hours hypothesis, we show that in both countries hours worked is positively related to earnings inequality in cross-section occupational contrasts and that hours worked raises future wages and promotion prospects in longitudinal data.     

Elastic attention,risk sharing,and international comovements

In this paper we examine the effects of elastic information-processing capacity (or elastic attention) proposed in Sims (2010) on international consumption and income correlations in a tractable small open economy (SOE) model with exogenous income processes. We find that in the presence of capital mobility in financial markets, elastic attention due to a fixed information-processing cost lowers the international consumption correlations by generating heterogeneous consumption adjustments to income shocks across countries facing different macroeconomic uncertainty. In addition, we show that elastic attention can improve the model’s predictions for the other key moments of the joint dynamics of consumption and income.     

管理股权、会计选择与盈余质量

本文根据异常应计项目框架和修正的Jones模型,以1995—2004年上市公司数据为样本,对上市公司管理股权通过会计选择影响企业的盈余质量进行了分析。实证研究发现,管理股权比例与盈余质量之间呈U型分布,相对集中的管理股权有利于提高盈余质量。     

Forecasting and stress testing credit card default using dynamic models

We present discrete time survival models of borrower default for credit cards that include behavioural data about credit card holders and macroeconomic conditions across the credit card lifetime. We find that dynamic models which include these behavioural and macroeconomic variables provide statistically significant improvements in model fit, which translate into better forecasts of default at both account and portfolio levels when applied to an out-of-sample data set. By simulating extreme economic conditions, we show how these models can be used to stress test credit card portfolios.     

Labor supply,income, and welfare of the farm household

Considering family labor and hired labor as heterogeneous inputs, we present a theoretical framework in which the optimal decisions of a farm household on on-farm family and hired labor, off-farm labor supply, and leisure are determined uniquely and endogenously. Focusing on two alternative settings with and without off-farm employment constraints, we show that imperfect substitutability between family labor and hired labor is not critical to the separation of household production and consumption. The validity of the separation proposition is shown to depend crucially on whether or not the availability of off-farm job opportunities is limited. We further examine how changes in external economic conditions and government policies affect the time allocation decisions of the household, as well as the composition of household income (i.e., on-farm income and off-farm labor earnings).     

The Valuation-relevance of Earnings and Cash Flows: an International Perspective

We investigate which variable, earnings or cash flows, provides greater information for equity valuation within the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and Japan. We regress returns on earnings and cash flow metrics. We generally find earnings developed in three Anglo-Saxon countries—where capital is traditionally raised in public markets and reporting rules are unencumbered by taxation requirements—to have greater explanatory power for stock returns than cash flow metrics. Conversely, in two non-Anglo-Saxon countries—where capital is traditionally raised from private sources—earnings are generally not superior to cash flows for equity valuation, except in Japan, non-consolidated sample. While sensitivity analyses generally support the conclusions of our primary tests, in some of the additional analyses, earnings were superior to cash flows for samples from all countries. As expected, in all countries earnings have incremental information content over cash flows in explaining returns. Collectively, our findings provide two contributions. First, we generalize the findings of prior US research by showing that earnings are more important than cash flows for equity valuation in other Anglo-Saxon countries. Second and more importantly, our findings demonstrate that the superiority of earnings over cash flows is not universal. Rather, it depends on the national reporting regime and attendant institutional factors.     

The Millennium Survey: How Economists View the U.S. Economy in the 21st Century

This essay presents the results of a survey of AEA members on how they expect the U.S. economy to evolve in the next 50 years. More specifically, respondents were asked about changes in a variety of macroeconomic variables and whether such changes would lead to major changes in the economic system or important economic institutions. For the next quarter century, for instance, the respondents foresee the greatest deviation from current trends occurring with regard to growth of per capita GDP, volatility of the financial system, and globalization. They also predict that changes in the economic system will most likely come about from the impact of increasing globalization, increasing inequality of income, and increasing financial instability.