Economic freedom at metropolitan statistical area borders

This paper applies a variation on differences-in-differences to the effects of economic freedom in matched bordering metropolitan statistical areas using the Metropolitan Economic Freedom Index. While a great deal of research has explored the relationship between economic freedom and economic performance, less has been done at the local level. We find that economic freedom has a positive effect on several measures of economic performance, but no effect on population.     

Spot asset carry cost rates and futures hedge ratios

Since the 1970s, futures hedge ratios have traditionally been calculated ex-post via economically structure-less statistical analyses. This paper proposes an ex-ante, more efficient, computationally simpler, general “carry cost rate” hedge ratio. The proposed hedge ratio is biased, but its bias is readily mitigatable via a stationary Bias Adjustment Multiplier (BAM). The 2-part intuition for the BAM and its stationarity is as follows. First, the paper reasons that the “traditional” hedge ratio should uncover the carry cost rate and shows that it does, albeit inefficiently. Then, since both the “traditional” and “carry cost rate” hedge ratios are driven by the carry cost rate, it may be that their ratio (for implementation in the same prior periods) is stationary and useful as an ex-ante BAM for the “carry cost rate” hedge ratio; the paper tests these conjectures and finds support for both. Specifically, the paper shows that the “bias-adjusted carry cost rate” hedge ratio, defined as the average product of the ex-post BAMs from prior periods and the current ex-ante “carry cost rate” hedge ratio, has higher hedge-effectiveness than that for either the “traditional” or “naive” benchmark hedge ratios in diverse real and simulated markets.

     

Parasitic universes: Organisational and technological meddling in the social

Debates about technology theorising ‘the social’ solely on dyadic and fixed positional terms fail to grasp important ways that new financial technologies participate in work organisations. As an alternative, we build on the work of Michel Serres to propose that these technologies already inhabit triadic and relational parasitic universes in which they introduce interruptions that do much more than mediate between degrees of technological and social determinism. To understand the forms of agency this affords, we analyse two contrasting studies of workplaces where financial technologies were introduced. In a UK non-profit social care organisation, relations of care were fundamentally disrupted by disorderly, dysfunctional forms of agency, whereas in UK retail banking, management used disorder to strategically obscure their own agency. Technological innovation and ‘future of work’ narratives are shown to feed each other, in service to interests that benefit from the repurposing of technologies, people and organisations.