Market Access,Labor Mobility,and the Wage Skill Premium: New Evidence from Chinese Cities

Open Economies Review - Labor market reforms in developing economies have causes economic regions to open up, providing greater market access to businesses and leading to urban migration. This...     

Prediction of the Indian summer monsoon using a stacked autoencoder and ensemble regression model

The study of climatic variables that govern the Indian summer monsoon has been widely explored. In this work, we use a non-linear deep learning-based feature reduction scheme for the discovery of skilful predictors for monsoon rainfall with climatic variables from various regions of the globe. We use a stacked autoencoder network along with two advanced machine learning techniques to forecast the Indian summer monsoon. We show that the predictors such as the sea surface temperature and zonal wind can predict the Indian summer monsoon one month ahead, whereas the sea level pressure can predict ten months before the season. Further, we also show that the predictors derived from a combination of climatic variables can outperform the predictors derived from an individual variable. The stacked autoencoder model with combined predictors of sea surface temperature and sea level pressure can predict the monsoon (June-September) two months ahead with a 2.8% error. The accuracy of the identified predictors is found to be superior to the state-of-the-art predictions of the Indian monsoon.     

Chinese competition and product variety of Indian firms

Using detailed firm-product-year data across manufacturing industries in India, and exploiting the exogenous nature of China’s entry into the WTO in 2001, we investigate the link between the impact of import penetration from China on the product variety of Indian manufacturing firms. We find: (i) robust and significant effects of product drop, with the effect coming only from competitive pressure in the domestic market; (ii) robust evidence of product drop or ‘creative destruction’ only for firms belonging to the lower-half of the size distribution; (iii) firms drop their peripheral/marginal products and concentrate on the core ones; and (iv) the result is strongest for firms producing intermediate goods. For an average Indian manufacturing firm, a 10 percentage point increase in India’s Chinese share of imports in the domestic market reduces the product scope of firms by 1.7–4.4%. In contrast, we find positive effects on product scope when firms are importing intermediate goods. We also find evidence of significant productivity effects and within-firm factor reallocation. Our results are consistent to a battery of robustness checks and IV estimation.     

Two-sided matching with interdependent values

We introduce and study two-sided matching with incomplete information and interdependent valuations on one side of the market. An example of such a setting is a matching market between colleges and students in which colleges receive partially informative signals about students. Stability in such markets depends on the amount of information about matchings available to colleges. When colleges observe the entire matching, a stable matching mechanism does not generally exist. When colleges observe only their own matches, a stable mechanism exists if students have identical preferences over colleges, but may not exist if students have different preferences.     

Corners in Auctions

Different pricing rules in multiunit auctions provide different incentives for a bidder to corner the auction and thus require different levels of effort from the seller to deter cornering. We consider three different types of auctions: the pay-your-bid or discriminatory auction commonly used by the US Treasury, the lowest-winning-bid uniform-price auction used in the current Treasury experiment, and the highest-losing-bid uniform-price auction considered by Vickrey almost four decades ago. We show that the pay-your-bid auction provides the greatest incentive to corner the market, that the experimental Treasury auction provides less incentive, and that the highest-losing-bid uniform-price auction provides the least. Arguably, the less the incentive to corner the market, the easier it will be for sellers to deter cornering, and the greater their expected revenue (net of the cost to deter cornering) will be in otherwise expected-revenue-equivalent auctions.     

Q‐FACTORS IN EMPIRICAL ASSET PRICING: A REVIEW AND SYNTHESIS

The latest development in the asset pricing literature is the emergence of empirical asset pricing models comprising q‐factors (profitability and investment factors) in conjunction with other factors. However, as in the case of the older empirical models, there is scepticism regarding the application of these newer factor models consisting of q‐factors because of the debate surrounding the explanatory power of these empirically inspired asset pricing models. This review attempts to synthesize studies pertaining to the four alternative explanations of the asset pricing models comprising the q‐factors (profitability and investment) – the data snooping hypothesis, the risk‐based explanation, the irrational investor behaviour explanation and the interpretation that suggest that the combination of the risk‐free asset and the factors comprising the model span the mean‐variance efficient tangency portfolio that prices the universe of assets.     

Effects of Ownership Structure on Capital Structure of Indian Listed Firms: Role of Business Groups vis-à-vis Stand-Alone Firms

The objective of this study was to explore the relationship between promoter ownership and capital structure of firms’ using a sample of Indian publicly listed firms for the period from 2006 to 2013. We find that the relationship between promoter ownership and leverage is inversely U-shaped in group-affiliated firms, whereas in stand-alone firms there is a U-shaped relationship. We argue that a substantial presence of family owners and the selection of managers from within the family play some role for such relationship in group-affiliated firms. On the other hand, the argument for observed relationship in stand-alone firms follows from alignment hypothesis, entrenchment hypothesis, managerial risk aversion hypothesis, and active monitoring hypothesis.     

Institutional underperformance: Should managers listen to the sell-side before trading?

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This study examines the performance of institutional trades in the context of recent analyst recommendation changes. We report several findings....     

Agency Costs in Dynamic Economic Models

We consider an overlapping generations economy where capital is produced from bank loans under stochastic constant returns to scale, and subject to idiosyncratic shocks whose realisations are costly to verify. Our formulation differs from earlier work in permitting investment projects to be infinitely divisible and private agency costs to be convex. If there are external economies to financial intermediation, then deviations from steady-state output are negatively correlated with the spread between loan and deposit rates. Moreover, the capital stock correspondence is set-valued, a result consistent with poverty traps, growth cycles, and hump-shaped impulse response functions.