Heterogeneity in the dynamic effects of uncertainty on investment

We examine how aggregate profit uncertainty influences capital investment activities, focusing on heterogeneous responses of firms. We model aggregate profit uncertainty as the conditional standard deviation of a common factor across unforecasted fluctuations in the sales growth of different industries and exploit cross‐sectional variations for its estimation. From an investment forecasting model that coherently analyzes firm‐ or group‐specific effects of uncertainty, we find that the direction and the size of investment adjustment vary considerably across firms, with a significant but small negative average impact. Our results highlight the importance of accounting for heterogeneity in the transmission of uncertainty, allowing us to reconcile different views on the effect of uncertainty in the existing literature.     

National culture and national savings: is there a link?

We study the effect of national culture on economic decisions, focusing on GLOBE cultural dimensions of uncertainty avoidance and future orientation. Specifically, we study the effect of divergence between cultural values and practices (societal aspirations), on the aggregate savings decision. Using the life-cycle model of savings as our basic model, we find that societal aspirations are important in explaining national savings behavior. In particular, we show that societal aspirations relating to future orientation and uncertainty avoidance have a positive effect on the rate of savings. We interpret our findings to indicate that such societal aspirations lead to mistrust in the societal arrangements and institutions, and induce savings as a means of securing the future and reducing uncertainty. To substantiate this interpretation, we utilize the microfinance industry; showing that high societal aspirations are associated with preference for savings through member-owned microfinance institutions (MFIs) over savings through non-member-owned MFIs.     

Inflation uncertainty and capital structure: Evidence from a pooled sample of the Dow-Jones industrial firms

The paper extends the literature on the determinants of capital structure by incorporating inflation uncertainty. By pooling data from the 30 Dow Jones industrial firms for 20 years and by using alternative model assumptions, namely, random effects vs. fixed effects and semilog vs. linear functional form, we find that inflation uncertainty exerts a strong negative effect on a firm's debt-to-equity ratio.     

Is British output growth related to its uncertainty? Evidence using eight centuries of data

We examine the empirical relationship between output variability and output growth for Britain using data for eight centuries covering the 1270 to 2014 period. Drawing on the economic history literature, we split the full sample period into four subperiods and use GARCH models to measure output growth uncertainty and estimate its effect on average growth. Within each sub-sample, we allow output growth to depend on the state of the system, for example 2-regime switching model would switch between high-growth and low-growth regimes. We find that the effect of uncertainty on growth differs depending on the existing growth regime. Low-growth regimes are associated with a negative effect of uncertainty on growth, and medium or high-growth regimes are associated with a positive effect. These findings are consistent across the four states of economic development. Our results indicate why the empirical literature to date has found mixed results when examining the effect of uncertainty on growth.     

Assessing the evidence on neighborhood effects from Moving to Opportunity

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment randomly assigned housing vouchers that could be used in low-poverty neighborhoods. Consistent with the literature, I find that receiving an MTO voucher had no effect on outcomes like earnings, employment, and test scores. However, after studying the assumptions identifying neighborhood effects with MTO data, this paper reaches a very different interpretation of these results than found in the literature. I first specify a model in which the absence of effects from the MTO program implies an absence of neighborhood effects. I present theory and evidence against two key assumptions of this model: that poverty is the only determinant of neighborhood quality and that outcomes only change across one threshold of neighborhood quality. I then show that in a more realistic model of neighborhood effects that relaxes these assumptions, the absence of effects from the MTO program is perfectly compatible with the presence of neighborhood effects. This analysis illustrates why the implicit identification strategies used in the literature on MTO can be misleading.     

CRIME AND EDUCATION IN A MODEL OF INFORMATION TRANSMISSION

We model the decisions of young individuals to stay in school or drop out and engage in criminal activities. We build on the literature on human capital and crime engagement and use the framework of Banerjee (1993) that assumes that the information needed to engage in crime arrives in the form of a rumour and that individuals update their beliefs about the profitability of crime relative to education. These assumptions allow us to study the effect of social interactions on crime. In our model, we investigate informational spillovers from the actions of talented students to less talented students. We show that policies that decrease the cost of education for talented students may increase the vulnerability of less talented students to crime. The effect is exacerbated when students do not fully understand the underlying learning dynamics.     

Did established Early Warning Signals predict the 2008 crises?

Over the past 60 years, a voluminous literature has painstakingly developed crises theories and their associated Early Warning Signals. The hallmark of this literature is the consistency with which selected Early Warning Signals, such as the level of reserves and exchange rate appreciations, are presumed to predict different types of crises across countries and time. The diversity of crises theories that motivate Early Warning Signals presents, however, a challenge to empirical implementations. Given that the true model of Early Warning Signals is unknown, omitted variable bias contaminates estimates and confidence levels when the uncertainty surrounding a particular theory has been ignored. After addressing model uncertainty in Early Warning Signal regressions, using an extended version of Frankel and Saravelos (2012. J. Int. Econ. 87, 216–231) dataset, we do not find a single Early Warning Signal that alerts to all dimensions of the 2008 crisis. Instead, distinct sets of Early Warning Signals identify different dimensions of the crisis: banking, balance of payments, exchange rate pressure, and recession.     

The effects of gun control on crimes: a spatial interactive fixed effects approach

This paper examines the effect of right-to-carry laws on crimes. We relax the assumption that unobserved time effects have homogeneous impacts on states; therefore, states with right-to-carry laws may follow different time trends which might be stronger or weaker than those of other states including states with no right-to-carry laws. The heterogeneous time trends are modeled by a factor structure where time factors represent time-varying unobservables, and factor loadings account for their heterogeneous impacts across states. No assumption is imposed on the shape of the time trend. Crime statistics exhibit spatial dependence, and a state’s adoption of right-to-carry law may have external effects on its neighboring states. Using a dynamic spatial panel model with interactive effects, we find positive spatial spillovers in crime rates. Depending on a crime category, an average \(1\%\) reduction in crime rates in neighboring states can decrease crime rates by 0.069–0.287%, with property crimes exhibiting higher degrees of spatial dependence than violent crimes. We find that although the passage of right-to-carry laws has no significant effects on the overall violent or property crime rates, they lead to short-term increases in robbery and medium-term decreases in murder rates. The results are robust to the number of factors, a different sample ending point, and some alternative spatial weights matrices and model specifications.     

The impact of financial regulation on current account balances

Both global imbalances and financial market deregulation feature prominently among the potential causes of the global financial crisis, but they have been largely discussed separately. In this paper, we take a different angle and investigate the relationship between financial market regulation and current account balances, an area for which limited empirical evidence exists. We use a panel of countries over the period 1980–2010 and employ a novel empirical approach which allows us to simultaneously account for model uncertainty, current account persistence and unobserved heterogeneity. We find robust evidence that financial market regulations affect current account balances and that different aspects of these regulations can have opposing effects on the current account. In particular we find that easing bank entry barriers is negatively associated with the current account balance. In contrast, bank privatization and securities market deregulation tend to raise current account balances. Our results also highlight the importance to control for persistence and unobserved heterogeneity. Once we control for these factors, we find robust evidence for a wide range of current account theories in contrast to previous studies accounting for model uncertainty.     

Robust monetary policy under model uncertainty and inflation persistence

In this paper, we examine the inflation persistence puzzle by applying the robust control approach of Hansen and Sargent (2008). In line with the literature suggesting that inflation persistence may be affected by the monetary policy design and its institutional characteristics, we find that inflation persistence is positively related to the central bank's preference for model robustness. In effect, model uncertainty and robust decision making may be considered as a mechanism generating inflation persistence, for a given non-zero degree of autocorrelation in supply-side shocks. Further, the policy implication is that the central bank's monetary policy under model uncertainty renders, in terms of the sacrifice ratio, the output-cost of inflation stabilization more important.     

Determinants of violent and property crimes in England and Wales: a panel data analysis

We examine various determinants of property and violent crimes by using police force area level (PFA) data on England and Wales over the period of 1992–2008. Our list of potential determinants includes two law enforcement variables namely crime-specific detection rate and prison population, and various socio-economic variables such as unemployment rate, real earnings, proportion of young people and the Gini Coefficient. By adopting a fixed effect dynamic GMM estimation methodology we attempt to address the potential bias that arises from the presence of time-invariant unobserved characteristics of a PFA and the endogeneity of several regressors. There is a significant positive effect of own-lagged crime rate. The own-lagged effect is stronger for property crime, on an average, than violent crime. We find that, on an average, higher detection rate and prison population leads to lower property and violent crimes. This is robust to various specifications. However, socio-economic variables with the exception of real earnings play a limited role in explaining different crime types.     

Does state-level per capita income affect juvenile delinquency? An empirical analysis for Indian states

While average juvenile crime rates across India has dropped in recent decades, juvenile property crime rates (total juvenile crimes divided by state population) has actually gone up from 15% in 2000-01 to about 20% in 2013-14. There is huge variation across states when it comes to juvenile crime rates. The literature on juvenile crime in the Indian context is scant. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by undertaking a comprehensive analysis of juvenile delinquency related to property crimes across Indian states. Results show that state income per capita has a non-linear impact on incidences of juvenile crime across Indian states - rising when the income starts growing for relatively poorer states but increasing at a diminishing rate when state income per capita rises further. When a poor state gets relatively richer, both opportunities to commit crime and returns from property crime increases. However, as the state grows even richer, growth of employment and state facilities including rehabilitation and redistribution, improve. Further, we find that states with the lowest income per capita and highest level of adult crime face the steepest increase in juvenile crime rates for a rise in state income per capita.     

Crime and growth convergence: Evidence from Mexico

Scholars have often argued that crime hinders growth, but the empirical literature assessing such an effect is scarce. By exploiting cross-municipal income and crime data for Mexico, in this study we find evidence indicating that drug-related crime indeed deters growth.     

Does crime deter South Africans from self-employment?

The very high crime rate in South African cities is often argued to be the main reason for the country's small share of business ownership and self-employment. This paper revisits this hypothesis. We estimate the effect of crime on business ownership and performance using a matched dataset of census, survey and police data. In contrast to previous studies, which take into account perceived rather than actual crime and often focus on specific geographic areas, we do not find robust evidence that high crime rates have a negative impact on business ownership. Even though our estimate of the effect of crime is statistically significant and negative, it is economically small. Further, we find no evidence for a negative effect of actual crime on sales, profits and investment of informal businesses. This may imply that the low share of business ownership and self-employment in South Africa must have other reasons. These results may also suggest that crime may not be in general a serious threat for small businesses in low and middle-income countries, however, this needs further empirical research.     

Welfare cost of inflation in a stochastic balanced growth model

There is a large and growing literature on the welfare cost of inflation. However, work in this area tend to find moderate estimates of welfare gains. In this paper we reexamine welfare costs of inflation within a stochastic general equilibrium balanced growth model paying a particular attention to recursive utility, portfolio balance effects, and monetary volatility and monetary policy uncertainty. Our numerical analysis shows that a monetary policy that brings down inflation to the optimum level can have substantial welfare effects. Portfolio adjustment effects seem to be the dominant factor behind the welfare gains.     

Fiscal policy uncertainty and the business cycle: Time series evidence from Italy

Economic uncertainty is an important factor behind macroeconomic fluctuations: in an uncertain environment, firms reduce hiring and investment; financial intermediaries are more reluctant to lend; households increase their propensity to save. In the present paper, we study the effects of the uncertainty which arises from fiscal policy decisions and propose a new measure of fiscal policy uncertainty (FPU). In particular, we estimate a fiscal reaction function, allowing the volatility of the shocks to be time-varying. The time series of this volatility is our proxy for FPU. Looking at Italian data over the period 1981–2014, we find that an unexpected increase in our measure of FPU has a negative impact on the economy. One implication of this result is that the same change in the government budget can have different effects depending on whether it is associated with a reduction or an increase in FPU. Therefore, the neglect of FPU may partly explain why the size (and sign) of fiscal multipliers differs so much across existing empirical studies.     

Short- and long-run heterogeneous investment dynamics

In this paper, we model the dynamics of business investment taking into account asset-specific characteristics potentially affecting the reactivity of aggregate and disaggregate capital accumulation over the business cycle. We estimate Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and traditional investment (non-ICT) determinants within a Vector Error Correction Model testing the assumptions of the flexible accelerator and neoclassical model as well as the role of financial constraints and uncertainty. We evaluate our model on Italian data over the period 1980–2012, and we check our results also with Spanish and UK data. Our findings support the assumption that capital is heterogeneous since short- and long-run determinants are significantly different across the assets. Traditional assets experience stock adjustment costs while ICT investment incurs flow adjustment cost. In the short run, liquidity is a key determinant of investment independently of the asset type. In the long run, uncertainty significantly affects ICT. Finally, the results of the counterfactual exercises support the idea that ICT is a key policy variable to foster economic growth.     

Audit Misperception, Tax Compliance, and Optimal Uncertainty

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the role of taxpayers’ misperceptions in determining compliance behavior. This paper also analyzes the effect of increased randomness on evasion, revenue, and welfare. Whether or not individuals choose to evade taxes depends on the perceived audit probability and on the fraction of honest taxpayers in the population. When individuals know the precise probability of audit, the model becomes in effect a game of coordination, a situation that gives rise to multiple equilibria. This paper incorporates audit misperception by introducing a small amount of uncertainty about the true audit probability. With the introduction of this uncertainty, we verify that there is a unique equilibrium cutoff point, such that each taxpayer evades if and only if his perceived signal falls below this cutoff. It is argued that this unique equilibrium outcome fares better than others in explaining empirical and experimental observations. We also find that, when reducing uncertainty has no cost, the optimal uncertainty is generally indeterminate, even when including zero uncertainty. Finally, we show that, when reducing uncertainty is costly, eliminating all uncertainty can never be optimal. In the limit as this cost vanishes, the optimal uncertainty is unique, meaning that introducing a small amount of enforcement cost resolves the indeterminacy problem.     

Idiosyncratic Uncertainty and Firm Investment

We test the impact of idiosyncratic demand uncertainty on investment using a panel of 82 Dutch listed manufacturing firms in the period 1984–1995. The measure of uncertainty is constructed by estimating a state space model at the firm level to isolate idiosyncratic uncertainty from other unobserved components. Generalised Method of Moments estimators show that demand uncertainty, which is specific to the firm, depresses firm investment. More interestingly, we find that idiosyncratic uncertainty is more important in explaining firm investment than total uncertainty that mixes idiosyncratic uncertainty with other sources of uncertainty.     

The strength of weak ties in crime

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether weak ties play an important role in explaining criminal activities. We first develop a model where individuals learn about crime opportunities by interacting with other peers. These interactions can take the form of either strong or weak ties. We find that increasing the percentage of weak ties induces more transitions from non-crime to crime and thus the crime rate in the economy increases. This is because, when the percentage of weak ties is high, delinquents and non-delinquents are in close contact with each other. We then test these predictions using the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (AddHealth), which contains unique detailed informations on friendship relationships among teenagers. The theoretical predictions of our model are confirmed by the empirical analysis since we find that weak ties, as measured by friends of friends, have a positive impact on criminal activities.