Illegitimacy,paternal financial responsibility,and the 1834 Poor Law Commission Report: the myth of the old poor law and the making of the new

The new poor law's bastardy clauses were amongst the most contested of the 1834 Act, and their unpopularity led to their (partial) reversal by 1844. The issue of paternal financial responsibility for the maintenance of illegitimate children was central to the reforms, and this article uses the Rural and Town Queries to show how parishes could enforce this responsibility effectively. This evidence could have been used as an alternative model of reform; instead, the Poor Law Commissioners misrepresented the operation of the law and recommended the abolition of affiliation. Rooted in the writings of Malthus, their proposals proved ultimately impracticable.     

Benefits from U.S. Monetary Policy Experimentation in the Days of Samuelson and Solow and Lucas

A policy maker knows two models. One implies an exploitable inflation-unemployment trade-off, the other does not. The policy maker's prior probability over the two models is part of his state vector. Bayes' law converts the prior probability into a posterior probability and gives the policy maker an incentive to experiment. For models calibrated to U.S. data through the early 1960s, we compare the outcomes from two Bellman equations. The first tells the policy maker to "experiment and learn." The second tells him to "learn but don't experiment." In this way, we isolate a component of government policy that is due to experimentation and estimate the benefits from intentional experimentation. We interpret the Bellman equation that learns but does not intentionally experiment as an "anticipated utility" model and study how well its outcomes approximate those from the "experiment and learn" Bellman equation. The approximation is good. For our calibrations, the benefits from purposeful experimentation are small because random shocks are big enough to provide ample unintentional experimentation.     

An Investigation of Transactions Data for NYSE Stocks

Using transactions data, the behavior of returns and characteristics of trades at the micro level is examined. A minute-by-minute market return series is formed and tested for normality and autocorrelation. Evidence of differences in return distributions is found among overnight trades, trades during the first 30 minutes following the market opening, trades at the close, and trades during the remainder of the day. The latter distribution is found to be normal. Unusually high returns and standard deviations of returns are found at the beginning and the end of the trading day. When the beginning-and end-of-the-day effects are omitted, autocorrelation in the market return series is reduced substantially. A number of patterns in trading are reported.     

The 52-Week High and Momentum Investing

When coupled with a stock's current price, a readily available piece of information—the 52‐week high price–explains a large portion of the profits from momentum investing. Nearness to the 52‐week high dominates and improves upon the forecasting power of past returns (both individual and industry returns) for future returns. Future returns forecast using the 52‐week high do not reverse in the long run. These results indicate that short‐term momentum and long‐term reversals are largely separate phenomena, which presents a challenge to current theory that models these aspects of security returns as integrated components of the market's response to news.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF STATE‐LEVEL CAPS ON PUNITIVE DAMAGES: THEORY AND EVIDENCE

Under the standard economic model of torts, punitive damages correct for imperfect detection. Incorporating litigation costs into the model provides a justification for punitive damage caps. At the optimum, caps balance deterrence against the cost of litigation. Empirical testing of the model is performed via Cox proportional and parametric hazard analyses, using a panel dataset from 1981 to 2007. The results reveal a positive relationship between legal services employment (a proxy for legal costs) and cap enactment, and a negative relationship between state gross state product (a proxy for damages) and cap enactment. Cap enactment is also influenced by political ideology. (JEL K13, K41, L51)     

Consumption and Income Inequality in Australia

Consumption may be a more appropriate measure of household well-being than income or earnings. Using four ABS Household Expenditures Surveys collected between 1975 and 1993, we compare trends in consumption and income inequality among Australian households. We find that consumption is much more equal than income. While there were significant increases in both income and consumption inequality, consumption inequality rose by much less. One interpretation of the results is that some income inequality in Australia reflects transitory fluctuations which households can smooth,'and that part of the growth in income inequality reflects an increase in these transitory fluctuations.