Long‐term changes in sickness and health: further evidence from the Hampshire Friendly Society1

This article presents new evidence on long‐term trends in sickness rates in England and Wales using data from the Hampshire Friendly Society. In previous work, Edwards, Gorsky, Harris, and Hinde argued that this Society contained a uniquely detailed set of records for the study of individual sickness histories. However, their initial findings were based on the records of a relatively small number of men who joined the Society at different points in time between 1871 and 1912. The current article draws on a much larger body of evidence, based on the records of over 5,500 men who joined between 1824 and 1939. It examines trends in the seasonality of sickness episodes, changes in the relationship between sickness and age, and cause‐specific sickness rates. The results indicate that there was little change in age‐specific morbidity rates over time, but morbidity did increase with age, mainly because older men remained off work for longer, even when they succumbed to the same conditions as men in younger age groups.     

An Analysis of Divestiture Effects Resulting from Deregulation

Capital market data were used to examine the divestiture effects pertaining to deregulation, the dropping of antitrust charges, and the reversing of the co-insurance effect associated with the recent breakup of AT&T. The empirical results of the study indicate that significant economic events took place during the breakup process, which led to transfers of wealth from various parties to the securityholders of AT&T. The results also indicate that the buffering effect of regulation was reduced as AT&T went through the total deregulation process. This is in accordance with Peltzman's prediction.     

Whistleblowers and Outcomes of Financial Misrepresentation Enforcement Actions

Whistleblowers are ostensibly a valuable resource to regulators investigating securities violations, but whether there is a link between whistleblower involvement and the outcomes of enforcement actions is unclear. Using a data set of employee whistleblowing allegations obtained from the U.S. government and the universe of enforcement actions for financial misrepresentation, we find that whistleblower involvement is associated with higher monetary penalties for targeted firms and employees and with longer prison sentences for culpable executives. We also find that regulators more quickly begin enforcement proceedings when whistleblowers are involved. Our findings suggest that whistleblowers are a valuable source of information for regulators who investigate and prosecute financial misrepresentation.     

Change You Can Believe In? Hedge Fund Data Revisions

We analyze the reliability of voluntary disclosures of financial information, focusing on widely‐employed publicly‐available hedge fund databases. Tracking changes to statements of historical performance recorded between 2007 and 2011, we find that historical returns are routinely revised. These revisions are not merely random or corrections of earlier mistakes; they are partly forecastable by fund characteristics. Funds that revise their performance histories significantly and predictably underperform those that have never revised, suggesting that unreliable disclosures constitute a valuable source of information for investors. These results speak to current debates about mandatory disclosures by financial institutions to market regulators.     

Trading Frictions and House Price Dynamics

We model liquidity in housing markets. The model provides a simple characterization for the joint process of prices, sales, and inventory. We compare the implications of the model to certain properties of housing markets. The model can generate the large price changes and the positive correlation between prices and sales that we see in the data. Unlike the data, prices are negatively autocorrelated and high inventory predicts price appreciation. We investigate several amendments to the model. Informational frictions show promise.     

Introduction to a Debate on City-Regions: New Geographies of Governance,Democracy and Social Reproduction

In this introduction to a special Debates and Developments forum on city-regions, we argue that the recent revival of interest in city-regions has been constructed around a rather narrow set of empirical and theoretical issues relating to exchange, interspatial competition and globalization. The ‘new’ city-regionalism results in a reification of the city-region as an autonomous political agent of the global space economy. We outline an alternative approach to investigating and understanding geographies of city-regionalism, highlighting: a politics of governance and state re-territorialization around the city-region; the role of democracy and citizenship in city-region politics; and tensions around social reproduction and sustainability across the city-region.     

Cyclical Changes in Firm Volatility

We characterize trends and cycles in the volatility of U.S. firms using a measure that we argue more cleanly captures firm‐specific volatility in sales and earnings growth than standard measures do. While earlier literature has emphasized a trend increase in the volatility of publicly traded firms, we find that a typical publicly traded firm has become more stable. We find that the negative association between firm‐specific volatility and the business cycle is weaker than earlier research based on dispersion measures suggests. We find that during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, firm‐specific volatility increased moderately but never substantially exceeded its sample mean. Our results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that firm‐specific volatility is an important driver of the business cycle, as it theoretically could be through an effect of default risk on credit spreads.     

Financial Protectionism? First Evidence

We examine large public interventions in the financial sector, such as bank nationalizations and search for “financial protectionism,” a decrease in the quantity and/or an increase in the price of loans that banks from one country make to borrowers resident in another. We use a bank‐level panel data set spanning all U.K.‐resident banks between 1997Q3 and 2010Q1. After nationalization, foreign banks reduced their fraction of British loans by about 11% and increased their effective interest rates by about 70 basis points. In contrast, nationalized British banks did not significantly change either their loan mix or effective interest rates.     

Sigma Convergence versus Beta Convergence: Evidence from U.S. County-Level Data

In this paper, we outline (i) why σ-convergence may not accompany β-convergence, (ii) discuss evidence of β-convergence in the United States, and (iii) use U.S. county-level data containing over 3,000 cross-sectional observations to demonstrate that σ-convergence cannot be detected at the county level across the United States, or within the large majority of the individual U.S. states considered separately. Indeed, in many cases statistically significant σ- divergence is found.