SLEEPWALKING THROUGH SCHOOL: NEW EVIDENCE ON SLEEP AND ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Policymakers advocating for later school starting times argue that increased sleep duration may generate important schooling benefits. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study examines the relationship between sleep duration and academic performance, while carefully controlling for difficult‐to‐measure characteristics at the family and individual levels. We find that increased sleep time is associated with improvements in classroom concentration as well as increased educational attainment. However, we also find evidence of diminishing returns to increased sleep. We estimate an “academic optimum” number of sleep hours of, on average, 8.5 hours per night. Turning to sleep quality, we find that the onset of insomnia‐like symptoms is associated with diminished contemporaneous academic concentration, but little change in long‐run educational attainment. (JEL I12)     

UNCERTAINTY AND CONSUMPTION: NEW EVIDENCE IN OECD COUNTRIES

This work analyses the empirical evidence about precautionary saving in OECD countries in the period 1955–2000. Unlike the previous literature, we perform the test using a measure of uncertainty allowing for heterogeneity in stochastic processes which generate data for each country and selecting for each economy the autoregressive moving average process which best describes the series. The results obtained support the main conclusion of precautionary saving theory, showing that a greater degree of uncertainty increases saving. A less clear conclusion is obtained with reference to the effect of uncertainty on consumption growth, which does not seem to be strongly supported by the data.     

THE IMPACT OF LOW‐PRIORITY LAWS ON CRIMINAL ACTIVITY: EVIDENCE FROM CALIFORNIA

We examine the impact of low‐priority initiatives on criminal activity. Low‐priority initiatives mandate that minor marijuana possession offenses be the lowest enforcement priority for police. Localities pass these laws because they believe if officers devote fewer resources toward minor marijuana crimes, more resources will be available to deter more serious crimes. Using data from California, we find that jurisdictions that adopted low‐priority laws experienced a reduction in arrests for misdemeanor marijuana offenses. However, we do not find evidence of a consistent effect of enacting a low‐priority initiative on the crime or clearance rate of other felonies. (JEL H1, H4, K4)     

REGULATIONS AND STRATEGY: EVIDENCE ON ADVERTISING

This article evaluates the impact of the introduction of incentive regulation on firms’ advertising spending among the population of local exchange carriers in the United States telecommunications industry between 1988 and 2001. The results show that the hybrid rate of return method and other intermediate incentive schemes have a negative relationship with advertising spending. Conversely, the introduction of pure price caps schemes has had a positive and significant impact on firms’ advertising spending. These results highlight the importance of incentive compatible mechanism design in motivating firms to be market oriented and strive for superior performance.     

SMOKING AND MORTALITY: NEW EVIDENCE FROM A LONG PANEL

Many public health policies are rooted in findings from medical and epidemiological studies that fail to consider behavioral influences. Using nearly 50 years of data from the Framingham Heart Study's male participants, we evaluate the longevity consequences of different lifetime smoking patterns by jointly estimating smoking behavior and health outcomes over the life cycle, by richly including smoking and health histories, and by flexibly incorporating correlated unobserved heterogeneity. Unconditional difference‐in‐mean calculations that treat smoking behaviors as random indicate a 9.3‐year difference in age of death between lifelong smokers and nonsmokers; our findings suggest the bias‐corrected difference is 4.3 years.     

近十年全球主要国家房价波动的特征及驱动因素——基于经济学文献的分析

过去十年全球房价的上涨幅度与持续时间都是历史罕见的,各主要国家实际房价周期表现出高度的同步性。虽然本轮房价膨胀与经济周期相背离,但是多数国家房价的上涨仍然处于合理范围内。全球实际利率的持续走低与流动性过剩可能是全球房价膨胀与同向变化的主要因素。     

PRIVATE INTERHOUSEHOLD TRANSFERS OF MONEY AND TIME: NEW EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE

There is a growing awareness that it is important to understand patterns of family assistance; however, there is still a great deal of information about private transfers that is not known. This study begins to fill this void by presenting results from a new survey and integrating these findings with evidence from recent studies that use other new data sets. It is found that: (i) a large share of households participate in private transfer networks, (ii) a greater amount of financial assistance is provided to lower income family members, (iii) altruism does not fully explain transfer behavior, and (iv) people in their 20s and 30s receive more assistance than people of other ages, even the very old.     

SOME NEW EVIDENCE ON COMPETITION IN PAYDAY LENDING MARKETS

A critical question in the policy debate about payday lending is whether other financial institutions can plausibly provide attractive and lower‐priced substitutes for standard payday loans. I present several new pieces of evidence addressing the question, focusing on whether credit unions, which are often held as the strongest potential competitors to payday lenders, do (or might) viably compete in the payday loan market. National payday loan offerings by credit unions show that very few credit unions currently offer payday loans. Credit union industry reports suggest that those credit unions offering such loans seem unwilling or unable to undercut substantially the prevailing prices set by payday lenders. Those industry reports also reveal that lower‐priced credit union loans generally ration riskier borrowers out of the market by imposing greater restrictions on approval and repayment; risk‐adjusted prices for credit union payday loans may not be lower at all. Survey evidence suggests that most current payday borrowers prefer higher‐priced but less restrictive standard payday loans to lower‐priced but more restrictive alternatives offered by credit unions. The combined demand‐ and supply‐side evidence suggests that one should not expect credit unions (or by extension banks) to offer lower‐priced, higher‐quality alternatives for consumers who currently use payday loans. (JEL G2, L0, L5)     

ON THE DETERMINANTS OF LOCAL TAX RATES: NEW EVIDENCE FROM SPAIN

This article examines the determinants of local tax rates. For the two main local taxes in Spain—the property tax and the motor vehicle tax—we test the existence of tax mimicking, yardstick competition, and political trends in a sample of 2,713 municipalities. Using various spatial models, the results support the hypothesis of tax mimicking, with coefficients above 0.40. We also show the relevance of political variables such as the ideology of incumbents and political fragmentation. The fact that incumbents with weaker political support exhibit stronger mimicking behavior is interpreted as evidence in favor of yardstick competition. Finally, we find that incumbents mimic neighboring municipalities ruled by the same political party, confirming the political trends hypothesis. (JEL C31, H71, H77)     

FISCAL POLICY AND AGGREGATE CONSUMPTION: NEW EVIDENCE FROM THE UNITED STATES

In this paper we estimate the marginal rate of substitution between aggregate per-capita consumption and per-capita government expenditure on goods and services using US quarterly data over the period 1953 to 1993. This estimate is an important input to any attempt to assess the overall effectiveness of fiscal policy since it directly affects the size of the fiscal policy multiplier. Other recent consumption studies which incorporate the effects of government expenditure have failed to establish a stable estimate of the marginal rate of substitution. We argue that this failure results from imposing the unrealistic assumption that this parameter is constant. In contrast, we allow the marginal rate of substitution to depend on both the level and composition of government spending.     

STOCKS AND DEPRECIATION OF HUMAN CAPITAL: NEW EVIDENCE FROM A PRESENT-VALUE PERSPECTIVE

Responding to a perceived growing interest in human wealth estimates, this paper offers a framework for measuring the aggregate stock of human capital and then implements the procedure for the United States male population age 14 to 75. Unlike previous estimates of human wealth that are based upon historical or resource costs, these estimates measure the capital stock as the discounted resent-value of expected lifetime returns. In the estimation, returns are equated with earnings data from the 1970 U.S. Census 15 percent Public Use Sample for out-of-school males, adjusted for employment and survival probabilities, adjusted for an assumed exogenous growth in future earnings, and discounted at 7.5 percent.
We provide cross-sectional estimates of individual stocks of human capital by age and educational attainment, as well as expected lifetime wealth profiles for individuals by level of education. These individual profiles can be used to obtain direct estimates of age-specific depreciation which suggest human capital is subject to significant and prolonged appreciation before nearly straight-line depreciation begins around middle age. This finding is all the more significant since resource-cost estimates of human capital which must assume a depreciation pattern to obtain stocks have always imposed a much faster rate much sooner.
Finally, an aggregate estimate of the stock of human capital for all males is supplied and its sensitivity to the choice of the discount rate, tax laws, and expected exogenous growth is analyzed. This seemingly-conservative stock estimate is then compared to a much lower resource-cost estimate offered recently by John Kendrick. A discount rate over 20 percent would be needed to equate the two measures. In trying to reconcile the two figures, we raise some new questions about the validity of both approaches for human capital accounting.     

NEW EVIDENCE ON REAL WAGE CYCLICALITY WITHIN EMPLOYER–EMPLOYEE MATCHES

In the most thorough study to date on wage cyclicality among job stayers, Devereux's (2001) analysis of men in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) produced two puzzling findings: (1) the real wages of salaried workers are noncyclical, and (2) wage cyclicality among hourly workers differs between two alternative wage measures. We examine these puzzles with additional evidence from other sources. Devereux's finding of noncyclical real wages among salaried job stayers is not replicated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) data. The NLSY data, however, do corroborate his finding of a discrepancy for hourly workers between the cyclicality of the two alternative wage measures. Evidence from the PSID Validation Study contradicts Devereux's conjecture that the discrepancy might be due to a procyclical bias from measurement error in average hourly earnings. Evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics establishment survey supports his hypothesis that overtime work accounts for part (but not all) of the discrepancy. We conclude that job stayers' real average hourly earnings are substantially procyclical and that an important portion of that procyclicality probably is due to compensation beyond base wages.     

NEW EVIDENCE ON THE EXPANSION OF SERVICE EMPLOYMENT IN ADVANCED ECONOMIES

In this article the expansion of service sector employment is examined in detail in seven OECD countries, i.e. France, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States, using a newly developed set of estimates for service employment. A sufficient degree of disaggregation, consistency and harmonization was attained by merging existing national sources on employment. The twenty two distinguished service activities are aggregated into four subsectors i.e. producer, distributive, personal and social services. The new evidence revealed that the characteristics of the expansion of services claimed by a number of studies needs adjustment, and for some services the figures of recent years indicate serious changes in trends. In the sixties the growing service employment share was largely due to the expansion of social services. In the seventies and eighties growth in social services slowed down and the expansion of producer services became more prominant. Further, employment growth in personal services started to accelerate in the seventies after substantial declines in the sixties. These changing trends were most pronounced in the United States, but other countries seem to be following the same pattern with some lag.     

TEACHER LOCATION CHOICE AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF QUALITY: EVIDENCE FROM NEW YORK CITY

This article studies the distribution of teacher quality measures across the New York City school system. Because teachers are paid along a fixed salary schedule and they have the option to transfer schools, this analysis measures the degree to which environmental factors affect teacher location choice. Both school-based and neighborhood-based effects are measured, and both types are significant. Furthermore, this article finds that the location of the school in relation to the suburban borders is an important determinant of teacher location choice. (JEL I29 , J24 , J61 )     

THE EFFECTS OF 1996 FARM LEGISLATION ON FEED AND FOOD GRAINS

The 1996 Federal Agricultural Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act of 1996 has been portrayed as a radical departure from the farm policies of the past 60 years. FAIR brought sweeping institutional changes to the basic price and income support programs, many of which had been in place since the 1930s. Close analysis reveals that many of the reforms of the FAIR Act are less revolutionary innovations and more continuations of reforms that began with the 1985 farm legislation and were extended by the 1990 farm bill. Nor should one believe that the changes will result, as some suggest, in large changes in crop acreages or have large effects on the year-to-year variability offarm revenues for these crops. In both cases, the changes in policies may be substantive, but their effective consequences are modest.     

EFFECT OF OIL PRICES ON STOCK MARKETS: EVIDENCE FROM NEW GENERATION OF STAR MODEL

This paper aims to introduce an evidence of new generations of smooth transition regression model (STAR). It proposes two different forms of STAR model. First: a time varying STAR model (TVSTAR), which identify the estimated coefficients at each point of time. Second: a full specification STAR model (FSSTAR) which provides a consistent estimate even in the existence of some measurement errors, omitted variables and even if the true functional form is unknown. This study will consider the two proposed models and the traditional STAR model to examine the nonlinear relation between oil price and stock market index for two countries (Egypt and Turkey). Our results confirm the existing of a non‐linear relation between oil prices and stock return for both countries. The suggested models gives more accurate information about the time varying effect of oil price changes on stock markets and robust forecasts.