How do school ‘report cards’ affect school choice decisions?

Abstract. We estimate the effect of information about school achievement that is disseminated to the public through websites and school ‘report cards’ on school choice decisions. We find that students are more likely to leave their school when public information reveals poor school‐level performance. Some parents’ school choice decisions respond to information soon after it becomes available. Others, including non‐English‐speaking parents, alter their school choice decisions only in response to information that has been disseminated widely and discussed in the media. Parents in low‐income neighbourhoods are most likely to alter their school choice decisions in response to new information. JEL classification: I21, D83     

Asymmetric effects of exchange rate changes on the demand for money in Africa

In order to account for currency substitution, the exchange rate is included in the demand for money. More recent studies have demonstrated that exchange rate changes could have asymmetric effects on the demand for money or domestic currency. In this paper, we consider the experiences of 18 African countries and show that in most countries, indeed exchange rate changes have short-run asymmetric effects on the demand for money. However, short-run effects translate to long-run asymmetric effects only in a limited number of African countries.     

Job satisfaction and co-worker pay in Canadian firms

One reason to be concerned about income inequality is the idea that people care about not only their own absolute income but also their income relative to various reference groups (co-workers, friends, neighbours, relatives, etc.). We use Canadian linked employer–employee data to estimate the casual effect of co-worker pay on a worker's reported job and pay satisfaction. Since worker satisfaction can affect the worker's productivity, organizational commitment, turnover, creativity and innovation as well as the firm's productivity and profitability, this is an issue that requires more attention and careful examination. In models that control for a rich set of workplace characteristics, we find that co-worker pay has a large positive and significant effect on both pay and job satisfaction. In our preferred models with establishment-level fixed effects, the effect of co-worker pay on pay satisfaction is half as large and the effect on job satisfaction completely disappears, suggesting that part (all) of what previous studies attribute to the effect of co-worker pay on worker pay (job) satisfaction is driven by unobserved heterogeneity across firms or establishments. Our results also suggest that the effect of co-worker pay on worker satisfaction is much stronger for workers who leave their job during the following year. Finally, we find that while co-worker pay has a positive effect on pay satisfaction among Canadian-born whites, it has a negative effect among immigrants and Canadian-born visible minorities.     

Exchange rate sensitivity of US bilateral trade flows

The traditional way of assessing the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance has been to estimate the elasticity of trade volume to relative prices. To this end, most previous studies used aggregate trade data. To avoid aggregation biases potentially hidden in aggregate data, recent studies have relied on bilateral trade data. Since import and export price data is not available on bilateral level, this study proposes an alternative way of assessing the impact of currency depreciation on bilateral trade flows. The models are applied between the US and her 19 industrial trading partners using recent advances in time-series modeling.     

Exchange rate sensitivity of commodity flows between the Philippines and the US

Previous studies that tried to assess the impact of exchange rate changes on the inpayments and outpayments of a country used aggregate trade flows between two countries. They are said to suffer from aggregation bias, and disaggregation by industry is recommended. In this paper, we consider response to exchange rate changes of export earnings (inpayments) of 133 industries that export from the US to the Philippines (Philippines’ importing industries) and outpayments of 65 US industries (Philippines exporting industries) that import from the Philippines using annual data over the period 1973–2012. While in most industries exchange rate changes had significant effects in the short run, the short-run effects did not last into the long run in most industries. Economic activity played more role in the long run than the exchange rate.     

Asymmetry Effects of Exchange Rate Changes on Domestic Production: Evidence from Nonlinear ARDL Approach

Currency depreciation is said to have positive or negative effects on domestic production. Previous studies that tried to address this issue using Australian data have been inconclusive at best but mostly showed no effects. One common feature of all studies is that they have assumed that the effects of exchange rate changes are symmetric. In this paper, we use the concept of partial sum and separate appreciations from depreciations to test whether the effects are symmetric or asymmetric. Application of the nonlinear ARDL approach of Shin et al. (2014) reveals that indeed the effects of changes in the real effective exchange rate of the Australian dollar are asymmetric in the short run as well as in the long run. While in the short run both appreciations and depreciations affect Australian domestic production, only effects of appreciation last into the long run, a unique finding.     

Re-testing Prebisch–Singer hypothesis: new evidence using Fourier quantile unit root test

The Prebisch–Singer hypothesis in economics asserts that over time the relative price of primary goods relative to manufactured goods should experience a downward trend. To test the hypothesis, we must first establish the unit root properties of the relative price term and then regress the stationary series on a trend term. We use the quantile unit root test which allows for both smooth unknown numbers and the form of breaks in the trend function through a Fourier function to show that the relative price of 23 out of 24 primary goods is stationary. However, the Prebisch–Singer hypothesis is supported only in half of the primary commodities.     

Policy Uncertainty and the Demand for Money in Korea: An Asymmetry Analysis

Previous studies included money supply volatility as well as output volatility as measures of uncertainty in estimating the demand for money. However, a more comprehensive measure of uncertainty is now constructed for many countries and is known as policy uncertainty. When we included this new measure in the formulation of the demand for money in Korea and relied upon a nonlinear specification of the money demand which allows us to assess the asymmetric effects of changes in the policy uncertainty measure, we found asymmetric long-run effects of policy uncertainty on the demand for cash in Korea. Our conjecture is that increased uncertainty induces Koreans to hold less cash in favor of safer assets and decreased uncertainty has opposite effects, though at different rate.     

Testing hysteresis effect in U.S. state unemployment: new evidence using a nonlinear quantile unit root test

We revisit hysteresis effect in the unemployment rate of each of the 52 states of the United States using nonlinear quantile unit root test over the period 1976M1–2016M7. Our results indicate that unemployment rate of the U.S. economy as a whole displays hysteresis effect over recessionary periods. Nineteen out of 52 states display hysteresis behaviour over the period 1976–2016. For the remaining 33 states, we find four types of behaviours. Some states display stationarity behaviour almost in all quantiles. Some display hysteresis over recessionary periods and in contrast some display hysteresis over expansion period.