Does Unionization Increase Faculty Retention?

Although there has been a large amount of research on the unionnonunion salary differential in higher education, little empirical work has been done on the possible nonsalary effects of faculty unions. This paper, using data from the AAUP and other sources, investigates unionization's impact on faculty retention rates. It is found that, holding salary, benefits, and other factors constant, unions increase a school's faculty retention rate for associate and full professors (although not for assistant professors). The impact of unionization, however, is not felt until a number of years after a representation election.     

Linguistic Complexity in Firm Disclosures: Obfuscation or Information?

Prior research generally interprets complex language in firms’ disclosures as indicative of managerial obfuscation. However, complex language can also reflect the provision of complex information; for example, informative technical disclosure. As a consequence, linguistic complexity commingles two latent components—obfuscation and information—that are related to information asymmetry in opposite directions. We develop a novel empirical approach to estimate these two latent components within the context of quarterly earnings conference calls. We validate our estimates of these two latent components by examining their relation to information asymmetry. Consistent with our predictions, we find that our estimate of the information component is negatively associated with information asymmetry while our estimate of the obfuscation component is positively associated with information asymmetry. Our findings suggest that future research on linguistic complexity can construct more powerful tests by separately examining these two latent components of linguistic complexity.     

Greenspan's Conundrum and the Fed's Ability to Affect Long‐Term Yields

In February 2005 Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan noticed that the 10‐year Treasury yields failed to increase despite a 150‐basis‐point increase in the federal funds rate and called it a “conundrum.” This paper investigates the historical relationship between the 10‐year Treasury yield and the federal funds rate and finds that the relationship changed dramatically in the late 1980s, well in advance of Greenspan's observation. The paper evaluates three competing hypotheses for the change. The evidence from a variety of sources supports the conclusion that the most plausible explanation is that the change occurred because the FOMC began using the federal funds rate as a policy instrument.     

THE NEED TO REFORM THE FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE SYSTEM

The biggest financial disaster in modern history struck the savings and loan industry during the 1980s. This paper argues that the unifying cause of this debacle was the way in which the federal deposit insurance system is structured. The fundamental cause was not fraud and deregulation, as is commonly argued. The government not only permitted reportedly insolvent institutions to continue to operate, it permitted many such institutions to grow by offering relatively high rates on their deposits. Unfortunately, the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) of 1989 may not prevent a similar situation from ever recurring. Therefore, one must understand exactly what happened, what the FIRREA does and does not do, and the proposals for reforming the entire structure of the federal deposit insurance system.     

Competition over Time-Inconsistent Consumers

How do firms respond to consumers' time inconsistency? This paper studies the optimal design of nonexclusive contracts under competition. It shows that nonexclusivity creates a stark asymmetry between immediate‐costs goods and immediate‐rewards goods. For immediate‐cost goods nonexclusivity does not affect the equilibrium and, when consumers are sophisticated, the efficient allocation is achieved. When consumers are partially naive, the optimal sales tax may be either positive or negative and depends on parameters that are hard to estimate. In the case of immediate‐rewards goods, however, the equilibrium features marginal‐cost pricing and is always inefficient. Moreover, the optimal tax does not depend on the consumers' degree of naiveté and is a function of parameters that are easy to assess.     

Monetary Policy and the Lost Decade: Lessons from Japan

I investigate how monetary policy can avoid a deflationary slump when policy rates are near zero by studying interest rate policy during Japan's “Lost Decade.” Estimation results suggest that the Bank of Japan's interest rate policy fits a conventional reaction function with an inflation target near 1%. The disapointing economic performance thus seems primarily due to adverse economic shocks rather than extraordinary policy errors. Also, counterfactual policy simulations suggest that simply raising the inflation target would not have substantially improved performance. However, price‐level targeting or combining a higher inflation target with an aggressive output response would have achieved superior stabilization results.     

Mortgage Lending,Default, and the Community Reinvestment Act

The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages banks to lend to low- and moderate-income individuals. This paper estimates the effect of the CRA on mortgage lending, exploiting variation in the set of banks whose lending performance is assessed in a given neighborhood due to redefinitions of Metropolitan Statistical Areas in 2003. Incorporating a typical tract into one additional banks' assessment area increased mortgage lending there by approximately 2%. Lending to low-income borrowers was particularly affected. While income-conditional default risk was little changed, CRA-induced loans were riskier than average, due to their borrowers' lower incomes.     

Consumption,Credit, and the Missing Young

There are more young adults today with either no credit history or insufficient credit history to be scored by one of the major credit bureaus than there were before the Great Recession—a reality that is likely an outcome of the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act of 2009–10. In regressions that include a rich set of controls, we show that measures of young adults missing a credit score in credit bureau data act as a drag on state-level consumption growth. We demonstrate that this effect is driven by young people's loss of access to credit since the legislation went into effect.     

Household Liquidity Constraints and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from a Danish Mortgage Reform

We study the causal effect of liquidity constraints on individual labor market outcomes by exploiting the 1992 mortgage reform in Denmark, which for the first time allowed homeowners to borrow against housing equity for nonhousing purposes. Following the reform, liquidity-constrained homeowners increased debt levels and had higher earnings growth and lower employment rates. The option to borrow against housing equity enabled liquidity-constrained individuals to move to high-wage jobs and invest in valuable human and physical capital. The results imply that relaxing household liquidity constraints during recessions can create better job matches, potentially increasing earnings and output in the longer run.