Asset fire sales (and purchases) in equity markets

This paper examines institutional price pressure in equity markets by studying mutual fund transactions caused by capital flows from 1980 to 2004. Funds experiencing large outflows tend to decrease existing positions, which creates price pressure in the securities held in common by distressed funds. Similarly, the tendency among funds experiencing large inflows to expand existing positions creates positive price pressure in overlapping holdings. Investors who trade against constrained mutual funds earn significant returns for providing liquidity. In addition, future flow-driven transactions are predictable, creating an incentive to front-run the anticipated forced trades by funds experiencing extreme capital flows.     

The mode of corporate diversification: Internal ventures versus acquisitions

This study investigates empirically the underlying motives for selecting the mode of corporate diversification and attempts to match the form of capital investments with a corresponding theoretical rationale for diversification. The empirical results seem to support both the transaction-costs rationale for diversification and the motive that arises from a firm's prior experience with each form of capital investment. However, the empirical findings are inconsistent with the explanation that is based on the owner-manager conflict of interest.     

Priors and Posterior Computation in Linear Endogenous Variable Models with Imperfect Instruments

In this paper we, like several studies in the recent literature, employ a Bayesian approach to estimation and inference in models with endogeneity concerns by imposing weaker prior assumptions than complete excludability. When allowing for instrument imperfection of this type, the model is only partially identified, and as a consequence standard estimates obtained from the Gibbs simulations can be unacceptably imprecise. We thus describe a substantially improved ‘semi‐analytic’ method for calculating parameter marginal posteriors of interest that only require use of the well‐mixing simulations associated with the identifiable model parameters and the form of the conditional prior. Our methods are also applied in an illustrative application involving the impact of body mass index on earnings. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Theory of Why the Ruthless Revolt

We examine whether ruthless members of society are more likely to revolt against an existing government. The decision of whether to participate can be analyzed in the same way as the decision to exercise an option. We consider this decision when there are two groups in society: the ruthless and average citizens. We assume that the ruthless differ from the average citizens because they invest in fighting technology and therefore face a lower cost of participation. The participation decision then captures two important (and conflicting) incentives. The first is that, since participation is costly, there is value in waiting to participate. The second is that there is value in being the first mover and capturing a greater share of the “spoils of war” if the revolution is successful. Our model generates the following implications. First, since participation is costly, there is some positive threshold for the net benefit that must be met before any individual decides to participate. Second, if the ruthless do not have a significant cost advantage, then one cannot predict, a priori, that the ruthless lead the revolt. Third, when the ruthless have a significant cost advantage, they have a lower threshold and always enter the conflict first. Finally, existing regimes can delay revolution among one or both groups by increasing the cost of participation.     

Market Imperfections as the Cause of Accounting Income Smoothing—The Case of Differential Capital Access

We show income smoothing results as a rational equilibrium behavior in a setting where the manager has superior foresight about the firm's prospects but faces inferior capital access relative to the owner. Under a legal structure that makes forecast-based compensation impractical and an accounting framework that requires reported income to be consistent, unbiased and cash-flow convergent, we show that the manager reports a composite of the underlying income and his foresight information. Moreover, the reported income will exhibit a lower inter-temporal variance than the underlying income. The extent of smoothing is shown to increase with the accuracy of foresight information.We argue that other market imperfections could also cause income smoothing if the manager is privately better informed about future prospects. As such, this paper supports the view that income smoothing is not always opportunistic but can be induced by the owner to satisfy his need to be informed about the future performance of the firm.     

Introduction: How to Deal with Uncertainty in Population Forecasting?

Demographers can no more be held responsible for inaccuracy in forecasting population 20 years ahead than geologists, meteorologists, or economists when they fail to announce earthquakes, cold winters, or depressions 20 years ahead. What we can be held responsible for is warning one another and our public what the error of our estimates is likely to be.–Nathan Keyfitz (1981)     

Replication of the results in ‘learning about heterogeneity in returns to schooling’

A recent article (Koop and Tobias, 2004 ) proposes a direct way to characterize the extent of heterogeneity in returns to education. They investigate the adequacy of several competing models and conclude that returns to schooling are heterogeneous and are best modelled as a bivariate normal distribution. The results of this replication paper basically agree with the authors. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Policy Uncertainty,Persistence and Growth*

This paper explores links between policy uncertainty and growth. Using an endogenous growth model in which domestic investment is characterized by irreversibilities and policy fluctuates between a high- and a low-tax regime, it shows that the magnitude of policy fluctuation and the persistence of policy jointly determine the pattern of investment and growth. Cross-section regressions confirm that for 46 developing countries over the 1970-85 period, policy uncertainty is negatively correlated with both investment and growth. Policy persistence also plays an important role.     

Impacts of Weather and Time Horizon Selection on Crop Insurance Ratemaking: A Conditional Distribution Approach

An important issue in the agricultural risk and actuarial literatures is the extent to which sample period selection affects the accuracy of insurance rating. This is typically more problematic in agriculture than in other types of insurance because of the variation in weather through time. A conditional Weibull distribution approach is developed that explicitly models the interaction of weather, technology, and other variables on probabilistic yield outcomes to address this issue. Results from an application with an extensive producer-level yield dataset representing commercial-scale Illinois firms suggest that the impact of weather heterogeneity on risk estimation across reasonable samples is likely not as great as is often claimed. The results also suggest that yield risk is decreasing significantly through time and indicate the presence of trend acceleration. A rating analysis indicates that violations in the risk evolution assumptions of the rating approaches used in the Federal Crop Insurance Program—which implicitly assume increasing yield risk through time when yields trend—result in severely biased rates, with typical overstatements of 200% to 400% for Midwest corn.