Multiperiod Loans,Occasionally Binding Constraints,and Monetary Policy: A Quantitative Evaluation

We introduce multiperiod mortgage loans, fixed interest rate, a lower bound constraint on newly granted loans, and a possibly slack collateral constraint, in an otherwise standard Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model with housing. Our nonlinear estimation shows that all those features are important to understand the evolution of mortgage debt during the recent U.S. housing market boom and bust. The transmission of monetary policy becomes dependent on the housing cycle, with weaker effects when house prices are high or start falling sharply. Higher average loan duration makes monetary policy less effective, eventually leading to asymmetric responses to positive and negative monetary shocks.     

On the Industry Concentration of Actively Managed Equity Mutual Funds

Mutual fund managers may decide to deviate from a well‐diversified portfolio and concentrate their holdings in industries where they have informational advantages. In this paper, we study the relation between the industry concentration and the performance of actively managed U.S. mutual funds from 1984 to 1999. Our results indicate that, on average, more concentrated funds perform better after controlling for risk and style differences using various performance measures. This finding suggests that investment ability is more evident among managers who hold portfolios concentrated in a few industries.     

Fund Manager Use of Public Information: New Evidence on Managerial Skills

We show theoretically that the responsiveness of a fund manager's portfolio allocations to changes in public information decreases in the manager's skill. We go on to estimate this sensitivity (RPI) as the R² of the regression of changes in a manager's portfolio holdings on changes in public information using a panel of U.S. equity funds. Consistent with RPI containing information related to managerial skills, we find a strong inverse relationship between RPI and various existing measures of performance, and between RPI and fund flows. We also document that both fund‐ and manager‐specific attributes affect RPI.     

Time‐Varying Fund Manager Skill

We propose a new definition of skill as general cognitive ability to pick stocks or time the market. We find evidence for stock picking in booms and market timing in recessions. Moreover, the same fund managers that pick stocks well in expansions also time the market well in recessions. These fund managers significantly outperform other funds and passive benchmarks. Our results suggest a new measure of managerial ability that weighs a fund's market timing more in recessions and stock picking more in booms. The measure displays more persistence than either market timing or stock picking alone and predicts fund performance.     

Bayesian Evaluation of DSGE Models with Financial Frictions

We evaluate two most popular approaches to implementing financial frictions into DSGE models: the Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist ( 1999 ) setup, where frictions affect the price of loans, and the Kiyotaki and Moore ( 1997 ) model, where they concern the quantity of loans. We take both models to the data and check how well they fit it on several margins. Overall, comparing the models favors the Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist framework. However, even this model does not make a clear improvement over the New Keynesian benchmark in terms of marginal likelihood and similarity of impulse responses to those obtained from a VAR.     

Hotelling–Downs Competition with Free Entry When Voters Have an Option to Contest

Osborne shows that for almost all distributions of voters’ preferences, a pure strategy Nash equilibrium does not exist in the classical Hotelling–Downs model of electoral competition with free entry. We show that equilibrium is generically possible if in addition one allows voters an option to announce their candidacy to compete side‐by‐side with office‐seeking players. The model studied in this paper renders Osborne and the celebrated citizen‐candidate model à la Osborne and Slivinski as two extreme cases. We characterize the equilibrium set with two central questions: (i) can there be equilibria where only voters contest? and (ii) are equilibria with contesting office‐seeking players possible? We also show that in our general setting, extremists are typically voter‐candidates so that in every two‐party contest, office‐seeking politicians stay out of competition.     

Putting the New Keynesian DSGE Model to the Real‐Time Forecasting Test

The paper compares the quality of real‐time forecasts from a standard medium‐scale New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model to those from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and DSGE‐VARs. It is shown that the DSGE model is relatively successful in forecasting the U.S. economy. This is especially true for forecasts conditional on SPF nowcasts, in which case the forecasting power of the DSGE turns out to be similar or better than that of the SPF for all the variables and horizons. An important weakness of the benchmark DSGE model is the poor absolute performance of its point forecasts and rather badly calibrated forecast densities.     

Varieties of Multinationals: Adapting Employment Practices in Central Eastern Europe

"Home-country effects" on multinational companies' practices abroad are assessed by comparing twelve German- and U.S.-owned plants within the same sector in the "institutionally permissive" Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia. Differences are detected on functional flexibility, corporate culture and working time, but not on participation. Work organization seems more integral to national productive models than industrial relations. Moreover, considerable intramodel variation reflects product- and labor-market contingencies. The results support the interpretation of national models as internally heterogeneous and dynamic.     

Legal Risk and Insider Trading

Do illegal insiders internalize legal risk? We address this question with hand-collected data from 530 SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) investigations. Using two plausibly exogenous shocks to expected penalties, we show that insiders trade less aggressively and earlier and concentrate on tips of greater value when facing a higher risk. The results match the predictions of a model where an insider internalizes the impact of trades on prices and the likelihood of prosecution and anticipates penalties in proportion to trade profits. Our findings lend support to the effectiveness of U.S. regulations' deterrence and the long-standing hypothesis that insider trading enforcement can hamper price informativeness.     

Global Pricing of Carbon-Transition Risk

The energy transition away from fossil fuels exposes companies to carbon-transition risk. Estimating the market-based premium associated with carbon-transition risk in a cross section of 14,400 firms in 77 countries, we find higher stock returns associated with higher levels and growth rates of carbon emissions in all sectors and most countries. Carbon premia related to emissions growth are greater for firms located in countries with lower economic development, larger energy sectors, and less inclusive political systems. Premia related to emission levels are higher in countries with stricter domestic climate policies. The latter have increased with investor awareness about climate change risk.