UNDERSTANDING MEASURES OF NONMARITAL FERTILITY: THE ROLES OF MARRIAGE AND ACCESS TO HUMAN CAPITAL

This paper proposes an explanation for several decades of rising U.S. nonmarital birth rates and shares, and for cross‐sectional differences in black‐white fertility. Significantly, the explanation does not rely on changes over time or differences across races in individual fertility behavior. It is consistent with the rising nonmarital fertility measures observed in the United States since the mid‐1970s, higher measured fertility for unmarried blacks than whites, and differences across races in the timing of childbearing, despite nearly constant total fertility rates and increasingly similar target family sizes for blacks and whites. The explanation relies on a selection effect associated with changes in the marriage rate and on racial differences in access to human capital investment opportunities. We find strong support for the explanation using U.S. data over the period 1957–2002. Our findings suggest caution in interpreting the results of empirical studies of childbearing that examine marital and nonmarital fertility rates separately, as these studies typically ignore the selection effect of marriage. (JEL J12, J13, I38)     

Disclosure Regulation in the Commercial Banking Industry: Lessons from the National Banking Era

I exploit variation in the adoption of disclosure and supervisory regulation across U.S. states to examine their impact on the development and stability of commercial banks. The empirical results suggest that the adoption of state‐level requirements to report financial statements in local newspapers is associated with greater stability and development of commercial banks. I also examine which political constituencies influence the adoption of disclosure and supervisory regulation. I find that powerful landowners and small private banks are associated with late adoption of these regulations. These findings suggest that incumbent groups oppose disclosure rules because the passage of such rules threatens their private interests.     

Transformed Securities and Alternative Factor Structures

Grinblatt and Titman (1985) reformulate a result of Chamberlain and Rothschild (1983) to show that the approximate factor structure of Chamberlain and Rothschild is asymptotically equivalent to the strict factor structure of Ross (1976) as long as investors can always repackage securities into an equal number of arbitrary portfolios. This paper uses a Procrustes rotation methodology that is compatible with the repackaging interpretation of Grinblatt and Titman to show that the empirical structure of stock prices is consistent with the convergency hypothesis.     

Like Father Like Sons? The Cost of Sovereign Defaults in Reduced Credit to the Private Sector

We investigate the impact of sovereign defaults on the ability of the corporate sector in emerging nations to finance itself abroad. We test the hypothesis that sovereign defaults have a negative spillover onto the private sector through credit rationing. We explore a novel data set covering the majority of corporates in emerging nations that received foreign capital between 1880 and 1913. Results confirm that credit rationing existed, was very large, and persisted long beyond the default settlement. The private sector paid a severe cost for their governments’ debt intolerance, with negative implications for their growth.     

Comparison of sensory evaluation of aromatic rice by consumers in East and South-east Asia

Quality of aromatic rice was compared by sensory evaluation with ordinary bland rice. Hieri, one of the varieties of aromatic rice planted in Japan was accepted by Indonesian people as well as the persons living in Japan, who are from South-east Asia. Basmati, which has a strong aroma, was nor accepted by Japanese people who have not eaten aromatic rice before. They have the same degree of preference for Jasmine rice as Hieri. This research confirmed that the quality of Hieri is good.     

Banks' Liquidity and the Cost of Liquidity to Corporations

We consider the liquidity shock banks experienced following the collapse of the asset‐backed commercial paper (ABCP) market in the fall of 2007 to investigate whether banks' liquidity conditions affect their ability to provide liquidity to corporations. We find that banks that borrowed more from the Federal Home Loan Bank system or the Federal Reserve's discount window following that liquidity shock passed a larger portion of their borrowing costs onto corporations seeking access to liquidity when compared to the precrisis period. This increase is larger among banks with a bigger exposure to the ABCP market, credit lines that pose more liquidity risk to banks, and borrowers that are likely dependent on the credit‐line provider. Our findings show that the crisis that affected the banking system had a negative effect not only on the price of credit to corporations, but also on the price corporations pay to guarantee access to liquidity.     

THE TENURE GAME: BUILDING UP ACADEMIC HABITS*

Why do some academics continue to be productive after receiving tenure? This paper answers this question by using a Stackelberg differential game between departments and scholars. We show that departments can set tenure rules and standards as incentives for scholars to accumulate academic habits. As a result, academic habits have a lasting positive impact on scholar's productivity, leading to higher productivity growth rates and higher productivity levels.     

The Effects of Oil Price Uncertainty on Global Real Economic Activity

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity using a quarterly vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and allows one to incorporate an extraneous indicator of oil price uncertainty such as realized volatility that greatly improves the precision of the estimated uncertainty series. The estimation results show that an oil price uncertainty shock has negative effects on world industrial production all else equal. For example, it is shown that a doubling of oil price volatility is associated with a cumulative decline as high as 0.3 percentage points in world industrial production.