Schlechter Wein in alten Schläuchen—Eine Replik auf Helmedag

In der Januarausgabe des WIRTSCHAFTSDIENST ver?ffentlichten wir einen Aufsatz von Professor Fritz Helmedag über die „Abh?ngigkeit der Besch?ftigung von Steuern, Budgetdefiziten und L?hnen“. Hierzu eine Replik von Professor Bernd Lucke und eine Erwiderung von Professor Fritz Helmedag.     

Contextualized representations of brand extensions: Are feature lists or frames the basic components of consumer cognition?

According to the common view in consumer behavior, consumers represent brands and product categories mentally as lists of independent product features and engage in feature matching when they evaluate brand-product category compounds such as brand extensions. However, we demonstrate that brand extension concepts are subject to context effects and largely contextually organized — empirical evidence which suggests that they are represented by more flexible mental structures than independent feature lists. As an alternative, brand extensions (e.g., McDonald's Theme Park) may be viewed as conceptual combinations in which the original brand or company name (e.g., McDonald's) acts on the head concept of the extension category (e.g., theme parks) as a modifier. Moreover, we suggest that the contextual and relational structure of brand extensions may be explained more adequately by mental frames than feature list representations.     

The Changing Nature of the Long-Run Federal Budget Problem

Although recent performance and the short-term outlook for the U.S. federal budget deficit have been favorable, the good news is not expected to continue. Low interest rates and slowly growing health costs have helped ease the burden of debt, but they are not expected to continue for very long. A likely combination of growing spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid and higher interest rates would increase the drag on the American economy. This paper analyzes which expenditures do and do not cause a significant increase in the federal debt and describes how a remedy implies difficult choices that require leaders of both political parties “to join hands and jump off the cliff together.”     

Measuring stress in money markets: A dynamic factor approach

We extract an index of interest rate spreads from various money market segments to assess the level of funding stress in real time. We find that during the 2007–2009 financial crisis, money markets switched between low and high stress regimes except for brief periods of extreme stress. Transitions to lower stress regimes are typically associated with the non-standard policy measures by the Federal Reserve.     

Political Leaders' Socioeconomic Background and Public Budget Deficits: Evidence from OECD Countries

This paper empirically analyzes the relationship between political leaders' socioeconomic backgrounds and public budget deficits utilizing panel data on 21 OECD countries from 1980 to 2008. Building on sociological, as well as economic research, we argue that the socioeconomic status of political decision‐makers, i.e., presidents or prime ministers, is an important determinant of fiscal budget decisions. Our theory‐consistent findings show that the tenures of lower‐class leaders – i.e., leaders of low socioeconomic status – are associated with a deficit‐to‐GDP ratio which is 1.6 percentage points higher than that during tenures of upper‐class leaders.     

Global and Country‐Specific Output Growth Uncertainty and Macroeconomic Performance

We identify global and country‐specific measures of output growth uncertainty for a large OECD country sample by means of a dynamic factor model with stochastic volatility. We find evidence for major bouts of global uncertainty in the early 1970s and late 2000s, and a number of periods with elevated levels of either global or national uncertainty, particularly in the early 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. VAR impulse responses of national macroeconomic variables to our estimated measures of uncertainty reveal that global uncertainty is the major driver of macroeconomic performance in most countries, whereas the impact of national uncertainty is small and frequently insignificant. We also find that uncertainty is transmitted primarily through investment and trade flows rather than through consumption demand.     

A note on the returns from minimum variance investing

Disappointed with the performance of market weighted benchmark portfolios yet skeptical about the merits of active portfolio management, investors in recent years turned to alternative index definitions. Minimum variance investing is one of these popular concepts. I show in this paper that the portfolio construction process behind minimum variance investing implicitly picks up risk-based pricing anomalies. In other words the minimum variance tends to hold low beta and low residual risk stocks. Long/short portfolios based on these characteristics have been associated in the empirical literature with risk adjusted outperformance. This paper shows that 83% of the variation of the minimum variance portfolio excess returns (relative to a capitalization weighted alternative) can be attributed to the FAMA/FRENCH factors as well as to the returns on two characteristic anomaly portfolios. All regression coefficients (factor exposures) are highly significant, stable over the estimation period and correspond remarkably well with our economic intuition. The paper also shows that a direct combination of market weighted benchmark portfolio and risk based characteristic portfolios will provide a statistically significant improvement over the indirect pickup via the minimum variance portfolio.