The Effect of a Program‐Based Housing Move on Employment: HOPE VI in Atlanta

We combine records of Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) clients, Georgia Department of Labor (DOL) employment records, and neighborhood characteristics to analyze the causal effect of an exogenous move out of public housing on the employment of public housing residents. The exogenous move was caused by a HOPE VI or HOPE VI‐like project in Atlanta. We find that such an exogenous move has a positive and statistically significant effect on the probability of employment for those residents who moved relative to other public housing tenants. We also compare the change in employment of those whose exogenous move was to another public housing unit to those who took a housing voucher. We also compare the change in the probability of employment associated with an exogenous move and a voluntary move and find that both types of moves are associated with a greater probability of employment as compared to those who did not move.     

Governors' Party Affiliation and Unions

Employing a regression discontinuity (RD) approach on gubernatorial elections in the United States over the last three decades, this paper investigates the causal effects of governors' party affiliation (Democrat versus Republican) on unionization of workers, and unionized workers' working hours and earnings. Surprisingly, we find no significant impact from the party affiliation of governors on union membership and union workers' labor‐market outcomes.     

Moody’s ratings and regionalization: State government general obligation bonds

For the period 1930, 1931, 1937–1987, the Scheffe’s test provides evidence of regionalization in Moody’s ratings of state government general obligation bonds. Sub-period analysis indicates a reduction in the extent of regionalization over time. Findings suggest this may be due to a change in the criteria used in rating such bonds. However, further study is necessary on this topic. The results also suggest that further study is necessary on the question of why two political-economic variables show no regionalization and the meaning of this finding to bond ratings.     

An empirical comparison of continuous time models of the short term interest rate

This article tests the performance of a wide variety of well-known continuous time models—with particular emphasis on the Black, Derman, and Toy (1990; henceforth BDT) term structure model—in capturing the stochastic behavior of the short term interest rate volatility. Many popular interest rate models are nested within a more flexible time-varying BDT framework that allows us to compare the models and find the proper specification of the dynamics of short rates. The empirical results indicate that the equilibrium models that do not allow the drift and diffusion parameters to vary over time and parameterize the volatility only as a function of interest rate levels overemphasize the sensitivity of volatility to the level of interest rate and fail to model adequately the serial correlation in conditional variances. On the other hand, the GARCH-based arbitrage-free models with time-dependent parameters in the drift and diffusion functions define the volatility only as a function of unexpected information shocks and fail to capture adequately the relationship between interest rate levels and volatility. This study shows that the most successful models in capturing the dynamics of short term interest rates are those that introduce time-dependent parameters to the short rate process and define the conditional volatility as a function of both the interest rate levels and the last period's unexpected news. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 19: 777–797, 1999     

Managerial capital,occupational choice and inequality in a global economy

This study proposes a simple theory of trade with endogenous firm productivity, occupational choice and income inequality. Individuals with different managerial talent choose to become entrepreneurs or workers. Entrepreneurs enhance firm productivity by investing in managerial capital. The model generates three income classes: low‐income workers facing the prospect of unemployment, middle‐income entrepreneurs managing domestic firms and high‐income entrepreneurs managing global firms. Trade liberalization policies raise unemployment and improve welfare. A reduction in per‐unit trade costs raises top incomes and generates labour‐market polarization. A reduction in fixed exporting costs has an ambiguous effect on top incomes and personal income distribution. Policies reducing labour‐market frictions or the costs of managerial‐capital acquisition create more jobs and improve welfare. The income distributional effects of labour‐market policies depend on which policy is implemented.     

A comparative study of alternative extreme‐value volatility estimators

Recent advances in econometric methodology and newly available sources of data are used to examine empirically the performance of the various extreme‐value volatility estimators that have been proposed over the past two decades. Overwhelming support is found for the use of extreme‐value estimators when computing daily volatility measures across all assets: Daily extreme‐value volatility estimators are both less biased and substantially more efficient than the traditional close‐to‐close estimator. In the case of weekly and monthly measures, the results still suggest that extreme‐value estimators are appropriate, but the evidence is more mixed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 25:873–892, 2005     

The role of autoregressive conditional skewness and kurtosis in the estimation of conditional VaR

This paper investigates the role of high-order moments in the estimation of conditional value at risk (VaR). We use the skewed generalized t distribution (SGT) with time-varying parameters to provide an accurate characterization of the tails of the standardized return distribution. We allow the high-order moments of the SGT density to depend on the past information set, and hence relax the conventional assumption in conditional VaR calculation that the distribution of standardized returns is iid. The maximum likelihood estimates show that the time-varying conditional volatility, skewness, tail-thickness, and peakedness parameters of the SGT density are statistically significant. The in-sample and out-of-sample performance results indicate that the conditional SGT-GARCH approach with autoregressive conditional skewness and kurtosis provides very accurate and robust estimates of the actual VaR thresholds.     

Do attitudes toward risk taking affect entrepreneurship? Evidence from second-generation Americans

Journal of Economic Growth - This paper empirically investigates the impact of willingness to take risks on entrepreneurship. We use a quarter century of data on second-generation Americans from...     

A model-independent measure of aggregate idiosyncratic risk

This paper introduces a model-independent measure of aggregate idiosyncratic risk, which does not require estimation of market betas or correlations and is based on the concept of gain from portfolio diversification. The statistical results and graphical analyses provide strong evidence that there are significant level and trend differences between the average idiosyncratic volatility measures of Campbell et al. [Campbell, J.Y., Lettau, M., Malkiel, B.G., and Xu, Y., 2001, Have individual stocks become more volatile? An empirical exploration of idiosyncratic risk, Journal of Finance 56, 1–43.] and the new methodology. Although both approaches indicate a noticeable increase in the firm-level idiosyncratic risk, the volatility measure of CLMX is greater and has a stronger upward trend than the new idiosyncratic volatility measure. For both measures of idiosyncratic risk, the upward trend is found to be stronger for smaller, lower-priced, and younger firms. The analytical and empirical results show that the significant upward trend in the differences of the two idiosyncratic volatility measures is related to the increase in the cross-sectional dispersion of the volatility of individual stocks.     

The role of exchange rates in intertemporal risk–return relations

This paper investigates the significance of an intertemporal relation between expected returns on countries’ stock market portfolios and their risk exposures to the world market portfolio. We find that the intertemporal risk–return relation differs significantly under different currency denominations. The slope coefficient is the largest at around seven when the returns are denominated in Japanese yen, moderate at about five when the returns are denominated in the Canadian or US dollars, and the smallest at around three when the returns are denominated in pound or euro and its predecessors. The ranking of the risk–return coefficients across different currency denominations remains the same when we replace country equity indices with global industry portfolios in estimating the intertemporal relations, when we change the return frequency from monthly to daily, and when we consider different specifications for the conditional covariance process.