Processes for stocks capturing their statistical properties from one day to one year

A realistic ARCH process is set up so as to duplicate, for all practical purposes, the properties of stock time series from 1 day to 1 year. The process includes heteroskedasticity with long memory, leverage, fat-tail innovations, relative return, price granularity, and holidays. Its adequacy to describe empirical data is controlled over a broad panel of statistics, including (robust L-statistics) skew, (robust) kurtosis, shape factor for the volatility distribution, and lagged correlations between combinations of return and volatility. These statistics are computed for returns and volatilities with characteristic time intervals ranging from 1 day to 1 year. This wide cross-check between stock time series and simulations ensures that the most important features of the data are correctly captured by the process up to 1 year. The by-products of the statistical analyses and estimations are (1) a positive skew, (2) a cross-sectional relation between kurtosis and heteroskedasticity, (3) a very similar cross-sectional distribution for the statistics evaluated over the empirical data set or for the process with one set of parameters and (4) the heteroskedasticity is very close to an integrated volatility process.     

How to speed up the quantization tree algorithm with an application to swing options

In this paper, we suggest several improvements to the numerical implementation of the quantization method for stochastic control problems in order to obtain fast and accurate premium estimations. This technique is applied to derivative pricing in energy markets. Several ways of modeling energy derivatives are described and numerical examples including parallel execution on multi-processor devices are presented to illustrate the accuracy of these methods and their execution times.     

The determinants of jobless durations of displaced workers in Canada

A hazard model of jobless durations is estimated using data from the 1986 Canadian Displaced Workers Survey. Hypothesis concerning demographic difference in reeployment transitions are testes and the effect of certain labour market and policy variables is assested. The findings are compared with those published in studies using the United States Displayed Workers Survey,and attempt to exploit certain information which is unavailable in the US data set. The demographic variables play an important ans expected role in determining the distribution of jobless spels. Characterstic pertaining to the former job,such as union status and wage level,also have explanatory power. Contrary to the findings of US studies,the length of tenure of the former job is insignificant,and the less difference in duration is found for workers who lost their jobs due to a plant closure as opposed to those displaced via a partial layoff.     

Cumulative Investment and Spillovers in the Formation of Technological Landscapes

In this paper, the evolution of product differentiation in industries is modeled as the result of a cumulative cost-reduction process subject to spillovers in a differentiated oligopoly. Our results suggest that the long-run outcome is dependent on the intensity of spillovers and the shape of their diffusion function. With weak spillovers, firms dig their niche over time, differentiation remains important and cost-reduction keeps going. By contrast, if spillovers are strong and have a concave diffusion function, firms gradually use more similar technologies. This standardization process involves less and less investment. For spillovers of intermediate strength, complex technological landscapes may arise.     

Regime-Dependent Fiscal Multipliers in the United States

This paper proposes a regime-dependent model to estimate fiscal multipliers in the US. Output, consumption and investment are assumed to respond to tax and spending changes in a nonlinear manner. Fiscal multipliers are time-varying because their size and sign depend upon the state of the economy (upturns and downturns). Keynesian effects appear essentially during downturns, while anti-Keynesian effects are observed during expansions. Transfer payments contributes to a higher private consumption when they are given to consumers in bad times. Reducing taxes boosts consumption in good times. Investment responds positively to lower taxes during downturns, but negatively in the upturn regime. Our results thus suggest that Keynesian effects have been associated to expansionary policies during recessions, while anti-Keynesian effects were observed during expansions illustrating situations of expansionary fiscal consolidation. The effectiveness of fiscal positive impulses increases in downturns relative to upturns. A corollary is therefore that austerity measures during recessions would have detrimental effects on the GDP and its components.     

The economics of production systems: Segmentation and skill-biased change

In this paper, the concept of production systems is introduced. I assume a standard thick-market externality together with the idea that higher quality goods also require higher skills from workers. Firms face a trade-off between low-quality goods with low skill-requirements for which the potentially abundant labour force generates strong thick-market externalities and higher quality goods with higher skill-requirements. In equilibrium, the economy is partitioned into production systems, i.e., clusters of firms producing the same quality. The distribution of skills determines the boundaries of the production systems, which in turn determine the wages. In this framework an increase in the supply of skilled workers can induce first higher wages for all workers and then higher wages for the skilled but lower wages for the unskilled. This is consistent with the late 20th century evolution of the US labour market.     

The differing and mediating roles of trust and relationship commitment in service relationship maintenance and development

Relationship maintenance (customer retention and exclusivity) and development (increased service usage and cross-buying) are top priorities in Customer Relationship Management. This paper examines how service companies can effectively influence customer patronage behaviors by leveraging overall customer satisfaction, trust and relationship commitment. Using a longitudinal design over a two-year period, we merge survey metrics with actual patronage behaviors taken from a bank’s database. We show that relationship commitment just enhances retention and exclusivity while trust directly influences service usage and cross-buying. As a consequence, trust appears to be highly critical for service relationship development and company profits. Furthermore, trust and relationship commitment mediate the entire impact of satisfaction which appears as a necessary but not sufficient condition for relationship maintenance and development. Satisfaction, and more generally service evaluations, must be efficiently converted into trust and relationship commitment before providing business results. Finally, we establish the temporal antecedence and the predictive power of trust and relationship commitment. Relationship commitment in year t predicts the number of service providers in year t + 1 (exclusivity vs. polygamy), while trust in year t predicts the number of bank products (cross-buying) as well as the service usage level in year t + 1. We then discuss managerial implications for customer relationship maintenance and development.     

A model of the federal funds market

Summary This paper develops a stochastic general equilibrium model of the federal funds market that incorporates non-Fisherian effects on interest rates stemming from both supply and demand shocks to reserves. Such a model may reconcile the widespread belief in a liquidity effect of money supply shocks with the difficulty many researchers have had in finding empirical support for such an effect. The model also cautions against interpreting the observed negative correlation between the federal funds rate and innovations to nonborrowed reserves as empirical confirmation of the ability of the Federal Reserve to lower short-term real interest rates.This paper should not be interpreted as reflecting the views of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or its staff. We gratefully acknowledge lengthy discussions and correspondence with V. V. Chari, Marty Eichenbaum, and especially Larry Christiano, that helped to clarify many issues. We were told many institutional details by Jim Clouse and Josh Feinman, and we received many helpful comments from David Altig, Michael Dotsey, and participants at the conference on Recent Research on the Liquidity Effect of Monetary Policy, 1993, Federal Research Bank of Cleveland, the conference on Recent Macroeconomic Research: Lessons for Policymaking, 1993, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the conference on Operating Procedures and the Conduct of Monetary Policy, 1992, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.     

The credibility of self-regulation: Evidence from the accounting profession's peer review program

Following the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, self-regulated peer reviews at accounting firms were replaced by independent inspections conducted by the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board. Critics of self-regulation had argued that the peer review program lacked credibility. This paper tests whether the opinions issued by the peer reviewers provided credible information to clients about audit firm quality. We find audit firms gained clients after receiving clean opinions from their reviewers and lost clients after receiving modified or adverse opinions. This suggests peer review opinions provided credible information about quality differences between audit firms.