Anti-discrimination rules versus income taxation in the pursuit of horizontal equity

We consider a model of prejudice-driven discrimination, where the advantaged ‘tall’ discriminate against the disadvantaged ‘short’. We employ an egalitarian social welfare function to compare anti-discrimination legal rules with a non-discriminatory (‘height-blind’) income tax.     

Caste discrimination in the Indian urban labour market

This, the pioneering quantitative analysis of caste in the Indian urban labour market, examines the age-old problem of caste in the light of discrimination theory and government policy. Using a survey of workers in Delhi, the gross wage difference between ‘scheduled’ (untouchable) and ‘non-scheduled’ caste is decomposed into its ‘explained’ and ‘discrimination’ components and, from a model of occupation choice, into wage- and job-discrimination. Discrimination is found to exist, and to operate at least in part through the traditional mechanism, viz. assignment to jobs, with the scheduled castes entering poorly-paid ‘dead-end’ jobs. It is assisted by methods of recruitment based on contacts, prevalent in the manual occupation, which also cause past discrimination to carry over to the present. Its practice serves the economic interests of those who exercise a taste for discrimination.     

Portfolio efficiency analysis with SFA: the case of PSI-20 companies

This study aimed to assess the technical efficiency (TE) of individual companies and their respective sectors that are traded on the Portuguese stock market. We accomplished this by combining the internal input variables (e.g., ‘market value and return’) with exogenous variables (e.g., ‘interest income’, ‘depreciation’, ‘cost of goods’, ‘employees’ and ‘net sales’) into a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model. The TE of the PSI-20 (Portuguese Stock Index) was estimated using factors that affect efficiency variability. The main advantage of using the SFA approach is its potential to discriminate between measurement error and systematic inefficiencies in the estimation process. The results demonstrated that TE is higher for enterprises in the industrial, construction and distribution sectors, whereas the commercial banking sector has the lowest TE scores. The ‘employees’ and ‘depreciation’ are the variables which most contribute to stock market inefficiency.     

Money and prices: evidence from the G7 countries

This paper examines the exogeneity of money and prices within a money demand vector error-correction model. The exogeneity of the variables is central to several ‘buffer stock’ models. However, the paper makes two modifications to the traditional approach. The first is to explicitly acknowledge the importance of the supply of money function by including the function alongside its demand counterpart. The second is to estimate the behaviour of the nominal sector and real sector simultaneously. Overall, the results from the G7 countries suggest that the concerns raised by ‘buffer stock’ models are relevant.     

Stock adjustment for multicointegrated series

A typical stock adjustment model is a partial ajustment process to maintain simultaneously the two kinds of equilibrium relationships: a flow-flow relationship and a stock-flow relationship. We show that the stock adjustment model is an error correction model of ‘multicointegrated’ time series, and also an optimal decision rule generated from an intertemporal optimization problem. Economic examples in inventory model, housing construction, and consumption function are discussed.     

Aggregate Productivity in the Post-war British Coal Industry

An econometric model, using OLS regression, of aggregate productivity in the post-war British coal industry is given. Some of the methods used by Weisskopf et al. (1983), in their ‘social model’ of aggregate productivity in the US economy are drawn upon; however all ‘social’ variables included in this coal productivity model are found not to be significant. The results suggest that pit closures have been an important source of aggregate productivity growth throughout the period; this does not imply, however, that ‘unproductive’, or ‘uneconomic’, pits are intrinsically so, rather their status as such may be the result of a ‘political’ process. Average colliery size and the industry's capital stock were also found to be important explanatory variables. Attention was paid to the effects of the national miners' strikes during the period; these effects were found to be structurally insignificant.     

Optimal diversification and risk-taking: a theoretical and empirical analysis

Among the justifications for capital property income received by private households is that it is a ‘return to risk-taking’. However, portfolio diversification provides an obvious means toward the reduction of risk. Moreover, it is widely believed that the wealthier the household, the more diversification it practices: the larger tends to be the proportion of its total portfolio allocated to publicly traded stock, and the larger tends to be the number of individual stock issues included in its portfolio. Using a simple ‘homogeneous securities’ model, explicit functional forms are obtained for both the optimal proportion of the portfolio allocated to stocks, and the optimal number of individual stock issues in the portfolio. Empirical evaluation of these theoretical results, using a dataset derived from the 2004 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), lends substantial support to the model. Applying these empirical results, it is found that as household capital wealth increases, expected capital income increases while simultaneously a reasonable risk indicator (the probability of incurring a negative return on the capital portfolio) decreases owing to the higher level of portfolio diversification. This indication casts significant doubt on the ‘return to risk-taking’ justification for capital property income received by wealthy private households.     

A model of employment discrimination at labor market disequilibrium

This paper develops Thurow's job-competition model for the analysis of employment discrimination. A disequilibrium framework of analysis and a ‘stochastic’ rationing mechanism is adopted.     

The linkages,persistence, asymmetry in the volatility,the price discovery and efficiency,and the effect of the US subprime mortgage financial crisis on the spot and the futures market’s returns: the case of India

This article examines the effects of persistence, asymmetry and the US subprime mortgage crisis on the volatility of the returns and also the price discovery, efficiency and the linkages and causality between the spot and futures volatility by using various classes of the ARCH and GARCH models, and through the Granger’s causality. We have used two indices: one for spot and the other for futures, for the daily data from 12 June 2000 to 30 September 2013 from Nifty stock indices. We have then tested for ARCH effects, and subsequently employed various models of the ARCH and GARCH conditional volatility. The GARCH(1,1) model is found to be significant, and it implies that the returns are not autocorrelated and have ‘short memory’. It supports the hypothesis of the efficiency of the markets. The negative ‘news’ has more significant effect on volatility, corroborating the ‘leverage impact’ in finance on market volatility. We have also tested the volatility spillover effects. The two methods we employed support the spillover effects and the causality is bidirectional. We also have used the dummy variable for the US subprime mortgage financial crisis and found that they are statistically significant. Indian stock market is thus integrated to the world stock markets.     

DOES BEHAVIOUR‐BASED PRICE DISCRIMINATION FOSTER FIRMS’ DIFFERENTIATION?

We study the impact of behaviour‐based price discrimination on the incentive of the firms to differentiate their products. We consider both ‘standard’ and ‘extreme’ behaviour‐based price discrimination: the latter always reduces the incentive to differentiate with respect to uniform pricing, while the former fosters differentiation if the consumers are sufficiently forward‐looking and/or the firms are sufficiently myopic.     

The impact from changes in stock market valuations on investment: new economy versus old economy

This paper investigates whether there is a different impact from changes in ‘new’ and ‘old’ economy stock valuations on private investment for seven OECD economies. A vector autoregressive model is estimated for each individual country, using quarterly data over the period 1990–2000. It is found that the impact from changes in valuations of new economy stocks to investment is roughly the same in North America and in the United Kingdom as in continental Europe. By contrast, the impact from changes in old economy stock valuations on investment is, in general, larger in North America and in the United Kingdom than in continental Europe. Finally, the results suggest that in continental Europe the impact on investment from changes in the valuation of new economy stocks is bigger than for old economy stocks, whereas for North America and the United Kingdom, the impact is more similar.     

Revisiting sacrifice and stigma: Why older churches become more liberal

This paper revisits the concept of ‘Sacrifice and Stigma’ first introduced in the seminal model of Iannaccone, published in 1992. Iannaccone provides an explanation for the rise of strict churches in face of the decline of liberal ones. He argues that costly and stigmatizing requirements, which make a church distinctive and strict, reduce free-riding in the group, conferring it a competitive edge. His model, however, does not address the question of why certain churches, generally older and larger, become more liberal and easygoing. I argue that for established groups, which rely on intergenerational transmission of religious preference, ‘sacrifice and stigma’ are no longer means of screening free-riders but determine the depreciation rate of the stock of religious capital of the group. Modeling the setting as a differential game, I show that in such circumstances, a reduction in the required ‘sacrifice and stigma’ increases the steady-state level of contribution to the church.     

Does the Optimal Size of a Fish Stock Increase with Environmental Uncertainties?

We analyze the effect of environmental uncertainties on optimal fishery management in a bio-economic fishery model. Unlike most of the literature on resource economics, but in line with ecological models, we allow the different biological processes of survival and recruitment to be affected differently by environmental uncertainties. We show that the overall effect of uncertainty on the optimal size of a fish stock is ambiguous, depending on the prudence of the value function. For the case of a risk-neutral fishery manager, the overall effect depends on the relative magnitude of two opposing effects, the ‘convex-cost effect’ and the ‘gambling effect’. We apply the analysis to the Baltic cod and the North Sea herring fisheries, concluding that for risk neutral agents the net effect of environmental uncertainties on the optimal size of these fish stocks is negative, albeit small in absolute value. Under risk aversion, the effect on optimal stock size is positive for sufficiently high coefficients of constant relative risk aversion.     

A Note on Aggregate Investment in Australia*

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relevance of Tobin's ‘q theory’ of investment in explaining aggregate investment in Australia, over the period from December 1966 to December 1986. Using standard capital stock data, the q theory performs poorly. However, the cost of adjustment model implies that the conventional capital stock data need to be revised to allow for these adjustment costs. Once this is done, it is found that the q theory explains a statistically significant (although small) proportion of the movements in aggregate investment The residual behaviour of investment is well explained by an accelerator model     

Financial connectedness revisited: the role of Fama-French risk factors

We study the contributions of Fama-French type risk factors to spillovers across global stock markets by combining the framework proposed by Diebold and Yilmaz(2009) with insights from asset pricing. We demonstrate that incorporating the risk factors absorbs approximately 40% of information from DY’s total spillover measure to blur the boundaries between ‘To’ and ‘From’ countries and alleviates its upward trend. We find that the DY’s spillover index after controlling for the risk factors yet fluctuates in accordance with historically important economic events over time. Last but not least, the stock market characteristics implied by risk factor exposures are revealed to play the crucial role in determining the Net spillover direction among global equity markets.     

Measuring the rate of protection with index numbers

Two approaches to measuring the rate of protection in binary comparisons, involving use of Fisher's Ideal Index, are proposed. One is relevant to measuring ‘discrimination’ in tariffs and the other is relevant to measuring a ‘composition effect’.     

Errors in variables and reverse regression in the measurement of wage discrimination

Several recent articles have proposed ‘reverse regression’ as a solution to errors-in-variables problems in wage discrimination regressions. This note demonstrates that the reverse regression approach is biased against finding evidence of discrimination.     

A lottery-preference-based explanation of realized kurtosis puzzle in Chinese stock market

High kurtosis corresponds to fat tails on both sides and under risk-aversion assumption investors’ dislike of left-tail loss outweighs their preference for right-tail gain. Therefore, high kurtosis characteristic of stock should predict high expected returns. However, the high-frequency-data-based empirical results on Chinese stock market are just the opposite, which we refer to as the ‘realized kurtosis puzzle’. Using the double sorts and firm-level cross-sectional regression methods, we further demonstrate investors’ preference for lottery-like stocks or lottery preference is key to solve the puzzle. Our further empirical research verifies stocks with higher retail investors’ shareholding proportion and unavailable for short show stronger ‘realized kurtosis puzzle’. In addition, the puzzle is particularly significant in high lottery preference periods while less apparent in low lottery preference times.     

Regional productivity variation and the impact of public capital stock: an analysis with spatial interaction,with reference to Spain

In this article, we examine whether variations in the level of public capital across Spain's Provinces affected productivity levels over the period 1996 to 2005. The analysis is motivated by contemporary urban economics theory, involving a production function for the competitive sector of the economy (‘industry’) which includes the level of composite services derived from ‘service’ firms under monopolistic competition. The outcome is potentially increasing returns to scale resulting from pecuniary externalities deriving from internal increasing returns in the monopolistic competition sector. We extend the production function by also making (log) labour efficiency a function of (log) total public capital stock and (log) human capital stock, leading to a simple and empirically tractable reduced form linking productivity level to density of employment, human capital and public capital stock. The model is further extended to include technological externalities or spillovers across provinces. Using panel data methodology, we find significant elasticities for total capital stock and for human capital stock, and a significant impact for employment density. The finding that the effect of public capital is significantly different from zero, indicating that it has a direct effect even after controlling for employment density, is contrary to some of the earlier research findings which leave the question of the impact of public capital unresolved.     

Inflation news and stock returns: market direction and flow-through ability

Previous studies of the short-run response of daily stock prices to announcements of macroeconomic news could be biased when responses in different scenarios cancel each other out. In our analysis of inflation news in the Spanish stock market, we consider market direction arguments and implement our study based on the sector of activity to control for the ‘flow-through’ ability of the firms in each industry. In general, our results are quite consistent with the ‘market direction’ and the ‘flow-through’ hypotheses. Unanticipated inflation news implies abnormal returns depending on the direction of the news, the state of the economy and the flow-through ability of the sector. The impact of positive surprises affects the abnormal returns of many more sectors than does the impact of negative surprises, especially in the low states of economy. These significant effects are mainly observed in industries that are characterised by low flow-through ability.