Does the presence of professional football cause crime in a city? Evidence from Pontiac,Michigan

Using daily panel data from Detroit, we empirically explore the relationship between the National Football League (NFL) and crime in a city. We exploit the natural experiment of the Detroit Lions’ move from Pontiac, Michigan, to downtown Detroit in 2002. Pontiac is used as the treatment city and non-game day crime, other suburban cities, and other cities outside Detroit MSA are used as the comparison groups. Employing a difference-in-difference approach, we find decreases in assaults and vandalism on home game days in Pontiac relative to the control cities after the Lions’ move. We find weak evidence of a net decrease in larceny and vandalism in Pontiac on home game days following the loss of professional football. No changes in assaults and auto theft are reported. While not conclusive, our results suggest that professional football leads to additional larceny and vandalism incidents but no effects on assaults and auto theft.     

Net Equity and Debt Flows to Emerging Market and Developing Economies in the Post-Crisis Era

We investigate the determinants of net equity and debt flows into 60 emerging and developing countries during 1986–2012, with a special focus on the period following the onset of the global financial crisis (GFC). Our results controlling for endogeneity show that net equity flows to emerging markets were mostly influenced by global risk factors, while net debt flows were affected by country-specific factors. We further distinguish the factors that were more pronounced in determining net portfolio flows to emerging markets since the GFC. The US real interest rate had significant spillover effects on net equity flows after the GFC. An increase in country’s domestic credit attracted net debt inflows before the GFC, while it was associated with net equity outflows after the GFC. We also find that capital controls moderated net debt flows since the GFC.     

Measuring the time‐varying effects of fiscal policy on private saving in the process of financial integration

This paper investigates the effects of fiscal policy, measured as the extent to which private saving is offset by public saving, in the process of international financial integration. Using extensive panel data for 87 countries over the period 1970–2010, we find that the dynamics for the saving offset are highly nonlinear and time‐varying. While the saving offset has gradually declined in line with rapid financial integration in advanced economies, it has remained broadly stable in less financially integrated emerging and developing economies. This implies that the negative wealth effects of fiscal policy in advanced economies have been smaller owing to higher financial integration, which could help governments reduce their debt burdens through the well‐anchored domestic interest rates at the world level.     

Does Nuclear Uncertainty Threaten Financial Markets? The Attention Paid to North Korean Nuclear Threats and Its Impact on South Korea's Financial Markets

We explore how investor attention paid to dangerous nuclear tests influences financial market outcomes. To measure the attention paid to North Korean nuclear threats, we introduce a weekly Google search volume index for keywords on North Korean nuclear events. Using a time‐varying structural vector autoregression model with block exogeneity restrictions, we find that investor attention paid to nuclear threats has heterogeneous effects on South Korea's stock prices across industries and over time: attention on only the first nuclear test was negatively related to the stock price index, which vanished thereafter. Moreover, the investor attention paid to the nuclear risk reduced stock prices, especially in the banking industry, during the entire sample period.     

Risk‐Adjusted Long‐Term Contrarian Profits: Evidence from Non‐S&P 500 High‐Volume Stocks

Can trading volume help unravel the long‐term overreaction puzzle? With portfolios of non‐S&P 500 NYSE stocks, we show that (1) both the high‐ and low‐volume (abnormal volume) contrarian portfolios earn a much higher market‐adjusted excess return than the normal‐volume contrarian portfolio, (2) however, when leverage‐induced risk is factored in, excess returns from contrarian portfolios with normal‐ and low‐volume stocks are insignificant, (3) only excess returns from high‐volume contrarian stocks are significant and cannot be explained by the time‐varying risk and return framework, and (4) such high‐volume, risk‐adjusted excess returns arise mainly from winner (glamour) stocks.     

Capital Allocation for a Sum of Dependent Compound Mixed Poisson Variables: A Recursive Algorithm Approach

The sum of independent compound Poisson random variables is a widely used stochastic model in many economic applications, including non-life insurance, credit and operational risk management, and environmental sciences. In this article we generalize this model by introducing dependence among Poisson frequency variables through a latent random variable in a linear fashion, which can be translated as a common underlying risk factors affecting the frequencies of individual compound Poisson variables. Despite its natural interpretation, this generalization leads to a highly complicated model with no closed-form distribution function. For this dependent compound mixed Poisson sum with an arbitrary severity distribution, we obtain the Laplace transform and further develop a new recursive algorithm to efficiently compute the probability mass function, extending the well-known Panjer recursion. Furthermore, based on this recursion, we derive another recursive scheme to determine the capital allocation associated with the Conditional Tail Expectation, a popular risk management exercise. A numerical example is presented for the illustration of our findings.     

Stock Prices and Inflation: New Evidence from the Pacific-Basin Countries

This paper investigates the statistical relationship between stock prices and inflation in nine countries in the Pacific-Basin. On balance, regression analysis on the nine markets shows negative relationships between stock returns in real terms and inflation in the short run, while co-integration tests on the same markets display a positive relationship between the same variables over the long run. The time path of the response of stock prices plotted against corresponding changes in consumer price indices validates this dichotomy in time-related response patterns of stock prices to inflation; namely, a blip of negative responses at the beginning changes to a positive response over a longer period of time. Stock prices in Asia, like those in the U.S. and Europe, appear to reflect a time-varying memory associated with inflation shocks that make stock portfolios a reasonably good hedge against inflation in the long run.     

The Effects of Risk,Inflation and Dividend Yield on Common Stock Returns: The case of Korea

This study examines whether market equilibrium models of capital asset prices have any empirical validity in the Korean stock market, which is thin and relatively under-developed. In any study of the Korean stock market, the impurity of its ex post stock price and the attendant presumption of suspected non-normality of the stock return distribution cannot be ignored. This study finds that the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) has some explanatory power in the Korean stock market. In particular when data are segmented by time periods, the results tend to validate the general premises of the CAPM for the most recent period, i.e., between 1984 and 1987. [313]     

Bid-ask bounce and speads in the foreign exchange futures market

This paper examines the intraday bid-ask bounce in Deutschemark and Japanese yen futures prices. The intraday Markovian bid-ask bounce process, which leads to a desirable equilibrium condition of reaching a bid or an ask transaction type with equal chances, is identified. A second-order Markov chain transition matrix model is used to derive a generalized estimator of bid-ask spreads in the foreign exchange futures market. It incorporates the conditional probabilities of a subsequent transaction being the same type as the current transaction's () and that of the next transaction being the same as the current type but different from the previous type (). The specification is {-Cov(P _t ,P _t+1 )/[(1–)(–)]}^1/2. The empirical results show that the average implied bid-ask spread is about $10, which is less than one tick's value of $12.50. It is also found that spreads are higher at the beginning and end of the trading day than the rest of the day, reflecting the uncertainty due to information flows and overnight inventory carrying costs, respectively.     

A New Variance Ratio Test of Random Walk in Emerging Markets: A Revisit

Using a nonparametric variance ratio (VR) test, we revisit the empirical validity of the random walk hypothesis in eight emerging markets in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). After correcting for measurement biases caused by thin and infrequent trading prevalent in nascent and small stock markets, we cannot reject the random walk hypothesis for the MENA markets. We conclude that a nonparametric VR test is appropriate for emerging stock markets, and argue that our findings can reconcile previously contradictory results regarding the efficiency of MENA markets.