ATTITUDES TOWARD RISK AND SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS RELATED TO EDUCATIONAL LOANS

We explore the relationship between willingness to take financial risk and the probability of taking out a loan for educational purposes as well as the influence of risk attitudes on the size of the loan using data drawn from the U.S. Survey of Consumer Finances. The findings suggest a positive relationship between individuals' willingness to take financial risk and the probability of taking out a loan for educational purposes. Similarly, individuals' willingness to take financial risk appears to have an important relationship with the size of the educational loan. The findings suggest that non‐white individuals and females are less likely to finance education through loans which could potentially increase inequalities in education and income if such individuals are deterred from investing in human capital. (JEL I22, I23)     

Optimal Unemployment Insurance and Employment History

In existing unemployment insurance programmes, it is standard to condition eligibility on the previous employment record of unemployed workers. The purpose of this article is to study conditions under which the efficient contract exhibits these properties. In order to do so, we characterize the optimal unemployment insurance contract in asymmetric information environments in which workers experience multiple unemployment spells. We show that if quits cannot be distinguished from layoffs, it is optimal to condition the benefits paid to unemployed workers on their employment history, in particular, the coverage should increase with the length of previous employment spells.     

Valuing Loss Firms: What Can Be Learned From Analysts' Forecasts?

Prior research documents an anomalous negative price–earnings relation when a simple earnings capitalization model is estimated for loss‐making firms. Collins et al. (1999 ) suggest that the model is misspecified due to the omission of book value of equity. However, results from previous studies are confusing. We try to enrich prior literature by focusing on analysts' forecasts. In particular, we assess the role of earnings and book value in valuing loss firms using several measures based on the information provided by analysts. We hypothesize that the role of accounting figures depends on whether the loss firm is supported or not by investors. According to this argument, we construct several measures of investor support based on analysts' forecasts, and then test the value relevance of accounting information depending on the degree of support. Our results confirm the usefulness of the notion of ‘investor support’. For those loss firms that are expected to liquidate, we find that the inclusion of book value of equity in the model removes the negative sign on the earnings coefficient. However, for those loss firms that are expected to reverse current losses, we find that the coefficient on earnings remains negative despite the inclusion of book value.     

Using Survey Data of Inflation Expectations in the Estimation of Learning and Rational Expectations Models

Does survey data contain useful information for estimating macroeconomic models? We address this question by using survey data of inflation expectations to estimate the New Keynesian model by Smets and Wouters ( 2007 ) and compare its performance under rational expectations and adaptive learning. The survey information serves as an additional moment restriction and helps us to determine the learning agents' forecasting model for inflation. Adaptive learning fares similarly to rational expectations in fitting macro data, but clearly outperforms rational expectations in fitting macro and survey data simultaneously. In other words, survey data contain additional information that is not present in the macro data alone.     

Gram–Charlier densities: a multivariate approach

This paper introduces a new family of multivariate distributions based on Gram–Charlier and Edgeworth expansions. This family encompasses many of the univariate semi-non-parametric densities proposed in financial econometrics as marginal of its different formulations. Within this family, we focus on the analysis of the specifications that guarantee positivity to obtain well-defined multivariate semi-non-parametric densities. We compare two different multivariate distributions of the family with the multivariate Edgeworth–Sargan, Normal, Student's t and skewed Student's t in an in- and out-of-sample framework for financial returns data. Our results show that the proposed specifications provide a reasonably good performance, and would therefore be of interest for applications involving the modelling and forecasting of heavy-tailed distributions.     

Adjustment to trade reform in Ecuador

This paper simulates output adjustments and income redistribution in Ecuador with the emerging Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). The Specific Factors (SF) model of production is used to develop comparative statistics elasticities of changing prices on factor prices and output as Ecuador adjusts to free trade. Skilled and unskilled labor stands to lose due to falling prices in the services and agricultural sectors. Returns to capital and output fall in sectors exposed to import competition while they increase in sectors expected to enjoy higher export demand. The magnitude of the adjustment is large.     

Measuring Social Polarization with Ordinal and Categorical Data

We examine the measurement of social polarization with categorical and ordinal data. We partition the society into groups on the basis of salient social characteristics, such as race and ethnicity, and we take into account the extent to which these groups are clustered in certain regions of an attribute's distribution. This is particularly useful in many contexts where cardinal data are not available. The new measures we propose are characterized axiomatically.     

ASSESSING THE ROBUSTNESS OF COMPOSITE INDICES RANKINGS

Ranking objects in terms of different attributes is a crucial practice that is typically sensitive to the choice of attributes' weights. In this paper we present rigorous methods to assess the extent to which the weight‐based rankings are robust to the choice of alternative weights. Empirical illustrations are provided, showing the robustness of country rankings arising from the values of the UNDP Human Development Index, the Gender‐related Development Index, or the Human Poverty Index among others. The ideas and techniques presented in this paper can be used to assess the reliability of multiattribute rankings.