Regional Market Variations: The Northeast Versus The South

The notion of the “rise of the Sunbelt” and the “decline of the Northeast” has raised the spectre of relentless economic disintegration of the northeastern states and the lure of boundless affluence across the southern and southwestern rim. What is myth and what is reality in these emerging perceptions? This paper reviews the trends of the past fifteen years, and speculates on the possibility of unsettled economic weather in the Sunbelt and valid investment potentials in the Northeast. Alternative future scenarios are suggested in the light of the marked acceleration of the thrusts of change of the last five years.     

On the explanation of schooling,occupation and earnings: Some alternative path analyses

Summary Jencks's well-known sociological path analysis connecting parental socio-economic characteristics and some ability measure of the person investigated with his or her schooling, occupation and income is available for the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands in various versions. For the United Kingdom the analysis has now been applied to the new General Household Survey, supplying over 5000 observations. This article compares the various results and offers a few alternative models, using the American and British data. These alternatives do not offer, in the British case, improvements in variance explained. Moreover, most regression coefficients show wide variations between countries. A suggestion for improvement is derived from a recent study using at least three occupation characteristics.We are grateful to the British Office of Population Census and Surveys for making available to us the data from which the UK results reported in this article were obtained.     

Changing marketing opportunities in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union

The changes in the business environment of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union indicate that U.S. firms must adjust their perceptions of socialist markets if they are to compete successfully with Western European and Japanese firms. Consensus among the managers of socialist enterprises agree that U.S. firms fail in these markets because they have made little effort to understand the general business environment and the market dynamics that are characteristic of countries in Eastern Europe and the Soviet union. The purpose of this article is to identify and discuss the key elements of the techniques needed to penetrate socialist markets. Sufficient understanding of these factors should produce a strong competitive position for the U.S. firms that are actively pursuing these marketing opportunities.     

Maturity cycles in implied volatility

The skew effect in market implied volatility can be reproduced by option pricing theory based on stochastic volatility models for the price of the underlying asset. Here we study the performance of the calibration of the S&P 500 implied volatility surface using the asymptotic pricing theory under fast mean-reverting stochastic volatility described in [8]. The time-variation of the fitted skew-slope parameter shows a periodic behaviour that depends on the option maturity dates in the future, which are known in advance. By extending the mathematical analysis to incorporate model parameters which are time-varying, we show this behaviour can be explained in a manner consistent with a large model class for the underlying price dynamics with time-periodic volatility coefficients.Received: December 2003, Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 91B70, 60F05, 60H30JEL Classification: C13, G13Jean-Pierre Fouque: Work partially supported by NSF grant DMS-0071744.Ronnie Sircar: Work supported by NSF grant DMS-0090067. We are grateful to Peter Thurston for research assistance.We thank a referee for his/her comments which improved the paper.     

A balancing act: managing your personal and professional life--Part II

Managing your personal and professional life is a lifelong balancing act due to situations that arise in the course of expected and unexpected normal life events. Identifying and dealing with these issues in your own life will likely make you a stronger leader in the eyes of your employees who often struggle with similar issues. Acknowledging these struggles among your employees can help create community in work teams, which ultimately translates into retention. Advocating for work life policies in your organization will transform personal compassion into organizational culture and, ultimately, into corporate policy.     

Repeated Games with Almost-Public Monitoring

In repeated games with imperfect public monitoring, players can use public signals to coordinate their behavior, and thus support cooperative outcomes, but with private monitoring, such coordination may no longer be possible. Even though grim trigger is a perfect public equilibrium (PPE) in games with public monitoring, it often fails to be an equilibrium in arbitrarily close games with private monitoring. If a PPE has players' behavior conditioned only on finite histories, then it induces an equilibrium in all close-by games with private monitoring. This implies a folk theorem for repeated games with almost-public almost-perfect monitoring. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C73.