Labor supply and government programs: A cross-country analysis

There are substantial cross-country differences in labor supply late in the life cycle (age 50+). A theory of labor supply and retirement decisions is developed to quantitatively assess the role of social security, disability insurance, and taxation for understanding differences in labor supply late in the life cycle across European countries and the United States. The findings support the view that government policies can go a long way towards accounting for the low labor supply late in the life cycle in the European countries relative to the United States, with social security rules accounting for the bulk of these effects.     

Active currency management of international bond portfolios

This paper focuses on the estimation and implementation of a holistic quantitative yield-curve-based approach to managing multi-currency bond portfolios. The primary task of the presented model is to manage the portfolio risk and return by exploiting inefficiencies in the emergent complexity of both currency and bond markets to generate alpha. Instead of using proxy variables, the expected return and risk parameters are estimated directly using their underlying simplicity and connectivity, period by period at specific moments in time, thus generating time diversification with aggressive risk taking and positioning. As a result, the strategies described in this paper can be classified as both alpha hunters and generators.     

RISING OCCUPATIONAL AND INDUSTRY MOBILITY IN THE UNITED STATES: 1968–97*

We document and analyze the high level and the substantial increase in worker mobility in the United States over the 1968–97 period at various levels of occupational and industry aggregation. This is important in light of the recent findings that human capital of workers is largely occupation‐ or industry‐specific. To control for measurement error in occupation and industry coding, we develop a method that utilizes the PSID Retrospective Occupation‐Industry Supplemental Data Files. We emphasize the importance of our findings for understanding a number of issues such as the changes in wage inequality, aggregate productivity, job stability, and life‐cycle earnings profiles.     

Occupational mobility and the returns to training

The literature on the returns to training has pointed out that, immediately following a training episode, wages of participants in employer-sponsored training increase substantially while wages of participants in government-sponsored training hardly change. We argue that there is a potential selection issue—most of the government-sponsored trainees are occupation switchers while most participants in employer-sponsored training are occupation stayers. An occupational switch involves a substantial destruction of human capital, and once we account for the associated decline in wages, we find a large positive impact of both employer- and government-sponsored training on workers’ human capital.     

OCCUPATIONAL SPECIFICITY OF HUMAN CAPITAL*

We find that returns to occupational tenure are substantial. Everything else being constant, 5 years of occupational tenure are associated with an increase in wages of 12%–20%. Moreover, when occupational experience is taken into account, tenure with an industry or employer has relatively little importance in accounting for the wage one receives. This finding is consistent with human capital being occupation specific.     

Capturing short-term and long-term alpha of global bond portfolios: evidence from EUR-investors’ perspective

The main focus of this paper is the managerial skill or alpha of global bond funds. Analysis of the global bond market shows that both currency and bond-related returns are an integral part of the global fixed-income exposure. The present work deals with regression-based style analysis and other established methods in the bulk of finance journals literature, using both currency and fixed-income factors, and investigates the alpha of the globally invested fixed-income portfolios. There is empirical evidence that, between May 2007 and January 2015, global bond funds delivered significantly positive alpha. There is also an indication that periods of depreciation of the basis currency of the funds (EUR) improves fund performance, and market turmoil and negative events destroy alpha. During the Euro crisis and Fed tapering, the funds generated sustainable positive excess alpha. A division of the sample into two sub-samples gives more insight into the excess return. Additional robustness estimations deliver qualitatively similar results.