Entrepreneurship,College, and Credit: The Golden Triangle

We develop a model to evaluate the aggregate impact of college finance in an environment with entrepreneurship. The calibrated model captures the stylized fact that entrepreneurs with college are more common and more profitable in the United States. The calibration indicates this is mainly because higher labor earnings allow college‐educated agents to ameliorate credit constraints if and when they eventually become entrepreneurs. Changes in financing constraints on entrepreneurs can thus affect college attendance, and changes in financing constraints on college can affect entrepreneurship rates as well.     

Impact of macro-economic surprises on carry trade activity

Can official news and policy announcements affect foreign exchange speculation? A widespread speculative strategy in foreign exchange markets is carry trade. This paper explores the links between macro-economic news and foreign exchange options to identify macro-economic fundamentals most relevant to the pricing of downside risk – measured by risk reversals options contracts – to carry trade activity. Focusing primarily on the Japanese yen carry trade, we identify a significant impact of macro-economic surprises on dollar/yen risk reversals. The effect is sizeable, with news related to bilateral trade balance of particular concern. Moreover, there is a close link between risk reversals and speculative futures positions in Japanese yen. This allows us to quantify a substantial effect of macro-economic news on carry trade activity, with the cost of hedging as the transmission mechanism.     

A century of purchasing power parity confirmed: The role of nonlinearity

Taylor (2002) claims that Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) has held over the 20th century based on strong evidence of stationary for century-long real exchange rates for 20 countries. Lopez et al. (2005), however, found much weaker evidence of PPP with alternative lag selection methods. We reevaluate Taylor’s claim by implementing a recently developed nonlinear unit root test by Park and Shintani (2005). We find strong evidence of nonlinear mean-reversion in real exchange rates that confirms Taylor’s claim. We also find a possible misspecification problem in using the ESTAR model that may not be detected with Taylor-approximation based tests.     

The high-frequency response of exchange rates and interest rates to macroeconomic announcements

The joint movements of exchange rates and U.S. and foreign term structures over short-time windows around macro announcements are studied using a 14-year span of high-frequency data. In order to evaluate whether the joint effects can be reconciled with conventional theory, the implications of these joint movements for changes in expected future exchange rates and changes in foreign exchange risk premia are deduced. For several real macro announcements, a stronger than expected release appreciates the dollar today, and must either (i) lower the risk premium for holding foreign currency rather than dollars, or (ii) imply net expected dollar depreciation over the ensuing decade.     

The retirement wealth of the baby boom generation

The paper compares the well-being of the baby boom generation (ages 40-55) in 2001 with the same age group in 1983. I find little evidence that their relative position deteriorated over the period. By some indicators, this generation has seen an improvement. In terms of income, the 40-55 age group was at about the same relative position in 2001 as in 1983. In terms of conventional wealth, there was some slippage over the period. In terms of mean augmented wealth (net worth plus pension and Social Security wealth), their relative position improved somewhat but in terms of median augmented wealth there was again some slippage.     

Local persistence and the PPP hypothesis

This paper examines the statistical properties of the bilateral real exchange rates of the U.S. vs. France, Germany, and the U.K. during the Post-Bretton-Woods period, and draws implications on the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) hypothesis. Contrary to traditional studies that consider only unit root and stationary processes to describe the real exchange rate behavior, this paper considers an in-between process, the locally persistent process. The empirical results demonstrate the following two findings: (1) Locally persistent processes describe the real exchange rate movements better than unit root and stationary processes, which implies that PPP reversion occurs and PPP holds in the long-run. (2) The confidence intervals for half-life deviations from PPP under local persistence tend to be narrower than those obtained by assuming the ADF and the local-to-unity models.     

Childcare Assistance: Are Subsidies or Tax Credits Better?

We evaluate price subsidies and tax credits for childcare. We focus on partnered women's labour supply, household income and welfare, demand for childcare and government expenditure. Using Australian data, we estimate a joint, discrete structural model of labour supply and childcare demand. We introduce two methodological innovations – a more flexible quantity constraint that total formal and informal childcare hours are at least as large as the mother's labour supply and the explicit inclusion of maternal childcare in the utility function as a proxy for child development. We find that tax credits are more effective than subsidies in terms of increasing average hours worked and household income. However, tax credits disproportionately benefit wealthier and more educated women. Price subsidies, while less efficient, have positive redistributional effects.     

Mean and volatility dynamics of Indian rupee/US dollar exchange rate series: an empirical investigation

The paper is concerned with time series modelling of foreign exchange rate of an important emerging economy, viz., India, with due consideration to possible sources of misspecification of the conditional mean like serial correlation, parameter instability, omitted time series variables and nonlinear dependences. Since structural change is pervasive in economic time series relationships, the paper first studies this aspect of the exchange rate series in detail and finds the existence of four structural breaks. Accordingly, the entire sample period is divided into five sub-periods of stable parameters each, and then the appropriate mean specification for each of these sub-periods is determined by incorporating functions of recursive residuals. Thereafter, the GARCH and EGARCH models are considered to capture the volatility contained in the data. The estimated models thus obtained suggest that return on Indian exchange rate series is marked by instabilities and that the appropriate volatility model is EGARCH. Further, out-of-sample forecasting performance of the model has been studied by standard forecasting criteria, and then compared with that of an AR model only to find that the findings are quite favorable for the former.      

Payout taxes and the allocation of investment

When corporate payout is taxed, internal equity (retained earnings) is cheaper than external equity (share issues). If there are no perfect substitutes for equity finance, payout taxes may therefore have an effect on the investment of firms. High taxes will favor investment by firms who can finance internally. Using an international panel with many changes in payout taxes, we show that this prediction holds well. Payout taxes have a large impact on the dynamics of corporate investment and growth. Investment is “locked in” in profitable firms when payout is heavily taxed. Thus, apart from any level effects, payout taxes change the allocation of capital.     

The Idealized Electoral College voting mechanism and shareholder power

Increasing concern over corporate governance has led to calls for more shareholder influence over corporate decisions, but allowing shareholders to vote on more issues may not affect the quality of governance. We should expect instead that, under current rules, shareholder voting will implement the preferences of the majority of large shareholders and management. This is because majority rule offers little incentive for small shareholders to vote. I offer a potential remedy in the form of a new voting rule, the Idealized Electoral College (IEC), modeled on the American Electoral College, that significantly increases the expected impact that a given shareholder has on election. The benefit of the mechanism is that it induces greater turnout, but the cost is that it sometimes assigns a winner that is not preferred by a majority of voters. Therefore, for issues on which management and small shareholders are likely to disagree, the IEC is superior to majority rule.     

Taxes and the global allocation of capital

Despite enormous growth in international capital flows, capital-output ratios continue to exhibit substantial heterogeneity across countries. We explore the possibility that taxes, particularly corporate taxes, are a significant source of this heterogeneity. The evidence is mixed. Tax rates computed from tax revenue are inversely correlated with capital-output ratios, as we might expect. However, effective tax rates constructed from official tax rates show little relation to capital—or to revenue-based tax measures. The stark difference between these two tax measures remains an open issue.     

On the sensitivity of the volume and volatility of bilateral trade flows to exchange rate uncertainty

We present an empirical investigation of the hypotheses that exchange rate uncertainty may have an impact on both the volume and variability of trade flows by considering a broad set of industrial countries' bilateral real trade flows over the period 1980–1998. Similar to the findings of earlier theoretical and empirical research, our first set of results shows that the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on trade flows is indeterminate. Our second set of results provides new and novel findings that exchange rate uncertainty has a consistent positive and significant effect on the volatility of bilateral trade flows, helping us better understand macroeconomic volatility.     

Insurance and opportunities: A welfare analysis of labor market risk

Using a model with constant relative risk-aversion preferences, endogenous labor supply and partial insurance against idiosyncratic wage risk, this paper provides an analytical characterization of three welfare effects: (a) the welfare effect of a rise in wage dispersion, (b) the welfare gain from completing markets, and (c) the welfare effect from eliminating risk. The analysis reveals an important trade-off for these welfare calculations. On the one hand, higher wage uncertainty increases the cost associated with missing insurance markets. On the other hand, greater wage dispersion presents opportunities to raise aggregate productivity by concentrating market work among more productive workers. Welfare effects can be expressed in terms of the underlying parameters defining preferences and wage risk or, alternatively, in terms of changes in observable second moments of the joint distribution over individual wages, consumption and hours.     

Exploring the role Delaware plays as a domestic tax haven

We examine whether Delaware is a domestic tax haven. We find that taxes play an economically important role in determining whether U.S. firms locate subsidiaries in Delaware and that a Delaware-based state tax avoidance strategy lowers state effective tax rates by between 0.7 and 1.1 percentage points, on average. The tax savings represent a 15–24% decrease in the state income tax burden and translate to an increase in net income of 1.04–1.47%. However, we find that the tax benefits of Delaware tax strategies are diminishing over time in response to initiatives by state governments to limit multistate tax avoidance.     

Inflation targeting: An indirect approach to assess the direct impact

It is quite difficult to assess the benefits of inflation targeting (IT) since its immediate effect will be on inflation expectations, an unobserved variable. Due to lack of comprehensive data on inflation expectations, most studies so far concentrated on the impact of IT either on observable variables like output, unemployment, and inflation or compared post-IT surveys of IT countries with non-IT countries. In our study, we focus on a yet unanswered question, i.e., how the expectations change with the adoption of IT. We suggest that heterogeneous inflation expectations lead to long memory in actual inflation, and IT, if successful, should decrease this persistence by concentrating the public’s expectations toward the announced target. Empirical results confirm our hypothesis with a reduction in inflation memory after the adoption of IT in almost all eight developed countries in our sample.     

Short-run forecasting of the euro-dollar exchange rate with economic fundamentals

We propose a fundamentals-based econometric model for the weekly changes in the euro-dollar rate with the distinctive feature of mixing economic variables quoted at different frequencies. The model obtains good in-sample fit and, more importantly, encouraging out-of-sample forecasting results at horizons ranging from one-week to one month. Specifically, we obtain statistically significant improvements upon the hard-to-beat random-walk model using traditional statistical measures of forecasting error at all horizons. Moreover, our model obtains a great improvement when we use the direction of change metric, which has more economic relevance than other loss measures. With this measure, our model performs much better at all forecasting horizons than a naive model that predicts the exchange rate as an equal chance to go up or down, with statistically significant improvements.     

The information content of implied volatilities and model-free volatility expectations: Evidence from options written on individual stocks

We measure the volatility information content of stock options for individual firms using option prices for 149 US firms and the S&P 100 index. We use ARCH and regression models to compare volatility forecasts defined by historical stock returns, at-the-money implied volatilities and model-free volatility expectations for every firm. For 1-day-ahead estimation, a historical ARCH model outperforms both of the volatility estimates extracted from option prices for 36% of the firms, but the option forecasts are nearly always more informative for those firms that have the more actively traded options. When the prediction horizon extends until the expiry date of the options, the option forecasts are more informative than the historical volatility for 85% of the firms. However, at-the-money implied volatilities generally outperform the model-free volatility expectations.     

Volatility clustering,leverage effects,and jump dynamics in the US and emerging Asian equity markets

This paper proposes asymmetric GARCH-Jump models that synthesize autoregressive jump intensities and volatility feedback in the jump component. Our results indicate that these models provide a better fit for the dynamics of the equity returns in the US and emerging Asian markets, irrespective whether the volatility feedback is generated through a common GARCH multiplier or a separate measure of volatility in the jump intensity function. We also find that they can capture several distinguishing features of the return dynamics in emerging markets, such as, more volatility persistence, less leverage effects, fatter tails, and greater contribution and variability of the jump component.