Unions and Discriminatory Hiring: Evidence from New Zealand

This study examines the effects of unions on employer compliance with antidiscrimination legislation in New Zealand, using a sample of 227 employers. The results do indicate that unions do reduce discriminatory practices. More specifically, higher levels of unionization do increase the level of employer compliance. However, other union characteristics, such as union size and strike propensity, appeared to have no influence on employer practice.     

Moderate Inflation and the Deflation–Depression Link

Recent research has concluded that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation episodes are harmful to economic growth. In this paper, we revisit this relationship by allowing for inflation and growth to have a nonlinear specification dependent on inflation levels. In particular, we allow for the possibility that high inflation is negatively correlated with growth, while a positive relationship exists over the range of negative to moderate inflation. Our results confirm a positive relationship between inflation and growth at moderate inflation levels, and support the contention that the relationship between inflation and growth is nonlinear over the entire sample range.     

巅峰激情&璀璨岁月

富有朝气，让人振奋，充满激情，时尚而不失稳重，并将古典的浪漫元素和新的时尚欲望结合，是2003MARKFAIRWHALE高级休闲男装商务系列的设计要点。我把这次发布定名为“颠峰激情”，是把我所欣赏的活跃在世界艺术殿堂颠峰的名流们，以及他们创造的独特经典文化的魅力表达出来。     

The Effect of Money Shocks on Interest Rates in the Presence of Conditional Heteroskedasticity

Most current empirical work finds no evidence that money shocks lower interest rates. We show that these nonresults are mainly due to a failure to model the conditional heteroskedasticity of interest rates. Autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (ARCH) models find a significant liquidity effect where ordinary least squares (OLS) models do not. The existence of a liquidity effect is found using different models and sample periods when ARCH models are used in estimation, but never when OLS is employed.     

Relative Pricing of Eurodollar Futures and Forward Contracts

Past research explains observed spreads between futures and forward Eurodollar yields as being due to the futures contract's mark-to-market feature. We derive closed form solutions for this yield spread and show that, theoretically, it should be small. Also, differences in liquidity, taxation, and default risk cannot account for the large spreads observed. We also present evidence that the spreads, which are nonnegligible primarily in the first half of the sample period, are likely to be attributable to the mispricing of futures contracts relative to the forward rates and that the mispricing was gradually eliminated over time.     

On The Robustness of Size and Book-to-Market in Cross-Sectional Regressions

We use a robust regression estimator to analyze the risk premia on size and book-to-market. We find that the risk premium on size that was estimated by Fama and French (1992) completely disappears when the 1 percent most extreme observations are trimmed each month. We also show that the negative average of the monthly size coefficients reported by Fama and French can be entirely explained by the 16 months with the most extreme coefficients. We argue that further investigation of these results could lead to an understanding of the economic forces underlying the size effect, and may also yield important insights into how firms grow.     

Slack and Cyclically Sensitive Inflation

We investigate the flattening Phillips relation by making two departures from standard specifications. First, we measure slack using real activity variables that are bandpass filtered or year-over-year changes in activity (these are similar), instead of gaps. Second, we study the components of inflation instead of the standard aggregates. We find that some inflation components have strong and stable correlations with the cyclical component of real activity; these components tend to be relatively well-measured and domestically determined. Other components, typically prices that are poorly measured or internationally determined, have weak and/or unstable correlations with cyclical activity. We construct a new inflation index, cyclically sensitive inflation, that weights the components by their joint cyclical covariation with real activity. The index has strong and stable correlations with cyclical activity and provides a real-time measure of cyclical movements in inflation.     

Is the Corporate Loan Market Globally Integrated? A Pricing Puzzle

We offer evidence that interest rate spreads on syndicated loans to corporate borrowers are economically significantly smaller in Europe than in the United States, other things equal. Differences in borrower, loan, and lender characteristics do not appear to explain this phenomenon. Borrowers overwhelmingly issue in their natural home market and bank portfolios display home bias. This may explain why pricing discrepancies are not competed away, though their causes remain a puzzle. Thus, important determinants of loan origination market outcomes remain to be identified, home bias appears to be material for pricing, and corporate financing costs differ across Europe and the United States.