Downward-Sloping Demand Curves, the Supply of Shares, and the Collapse of Internet Stock Prices

Over March and April 2000, Internet stocks lost 56%, or $700 billion. This sudden collapse has been attributed to an increasing supply of shares from lockup expirations and equity offerings. I show that Internet stocks collapsed in this period regardless of whether their lockups expired. Furthermore, daily Internet stock portfolio returns were almost unaffected by the number or dollar amount of lockup expirations that day, or by the amount of stock offered in IPOs or SEOs. Most of the Internet stock decline is explained by poor marketwide returns, particularly for growth stocks.     

Correlated Trading and Returns

A German broker's clients place similar speculative trades and therefore tend to be on the same side of the market in a given stock during a given day, week, month, and quarter. Aggregate liquidity effects, short sale constraints, the systematic execution of limit orders (coordinated through price movements) or the correlated trading of other investors who pick off retail limit orders do not fully explain why retail investors trade similarly. Correlated market orders lead returns, presumably due to persistent speculative price pressure. Correlated limit orders also predict subsequent returns, consistent with executed limit orders being compensated for accommodating liquidity demands.     

Credit,reputation, and masculinity in British urban commerce: Edinburgh,c. 1710–70 1

This article draws on cases of public insult from the Edinburgh consistory court to explore constructions of credit and reputation during the eighteenth century. Scotland's unique legal context offers new insights into the honour of men and women, replacing the received view that female honour was almost entirely about sexual honour and complicating our understanding of male honour among the middling sort. In contrast to studies that view the credit of men and women as principally contradictory, this study instead identifies significant points of both overlap and divergence in male and female reputation and discusses honour as a family matter. Unlike in England, levels of defamation litigation in Scotland remained high through the eighteenth century, and both the social composition of defamation litigants and the types of insult they brought to court remained consistent. However, the forms and settings of disputes over honour changed, reflecting the interiorization of conflict as the eighteenth century progressed.     

The Youth Labour Market in Australia*

This paper uses unit record data from the 1985 Australian Longitudinal Survey to review the major features of the youth labour market. It is shown that education plays an important role in determining the incidence of unemployment, wages, hours of work and access to training opportunities. Analyses of labour market dynamics indicates that the probability of leaving unemployment falls off substantially as the duration of the unemployment spell increases. A major conclusion of the paper is that the longer term unemployed appear to be segmented from other labour market participants. An implication of this finding is that there b very little which the longer term unemployed can do at the margin to influence their success other than adopt the most productive method of job search.     

Do Central Bank Forecasts Influence Private Agents? Forecasting Performance versus Signals

Focusing on a set of central banks that publish inflation forecasts in real time, this paper aims to establish whether central bank inflation forecasts influence private inflation forecasts. The response is positive in the five countries studied: Sweden, the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, and Japan. Three hypotheses may explain this central bank influence: central bank forecasts are more accurate than private ones, are based on different information sets, and/or convey signals about future policy decisions and policymakers’ preferences and objectives. We provide evidence that the source of these central banks’ influence is not linked to their forecasting performance.