Valuation Effects for Asset Sales

This study provides evidence that the outcome for shareholders resulting from asset sales is determined at the time of transaction by the value for the asset sold. Assets sold above market value are followed by positive and significant abnormal returns over the following three months; these returns are magnified in firms where the balance of power in corporate governance favors shareholders. Abnormal returns following undervalued asset sales are insignificant from zero, indicating value-preservation. Value-preservation when the assets are sold below market value becomes less likely as firms approach financial constraints. The reverse is true when assets are sold above market value. This evidence is documented for apartment REITs, which have a large number of comparable transactions available for estimating expected market values.     

The (hidden) costs of political instability: Evidence from Kenya's 2007 election crisis

This paper studies the microeconomic impacts of the political crisis and civil conflict that immediately followed the December 2007 presidential election in Kenya. Income, expenditures, and consumption dramatically declined for a broad segment of the rural population for the duration of the conflict. To make up for the income shortfall, women who supply transactional sex engaged in higher risk sex both during and after the crisis. While this particular crisis was likely too short for these behavioral responses to seriously increase the risk of HIV or other STIs for these women, such responses could have long-term repercussions for health in countries with longer or more frequent crises. Overall, our results suggest that social unrest can be an important channel through which political instability can affect long-term outcomes such as health.     

Growth Regressions and What the Textbooks Don't Tell You

The paper discusses three econometric problems that are rarely given adequate discussion in textbooks: model uncertainty, parameter heterogeneity, and outliers. Leamer's extreme bounds analysis can be adapted to address all three problems simultaneously. Two examples are presented based on an influential cross-country growth paper by Levine and Renelt ( American Economic Review , vol. 82, 1992, pp. 942-63).     

Time Budgets,Life Histories and Social Position

This paper falls into two parts. It has an initial brief theoretical discussion of the use of well structured short- and long-term narrative accounts of individuals' life experiences (respectively time-diary and work/life histories) in establishing the extent of their personal resources, and hence, ultimately, their social position. The second section discusses the development of a new social-positional indicator (currently called the Interim Essex Score or IES), and illustrates its use in an investigation of the consequences of women's career breaks on their subsequent levels of access to economic resources.     

Ethnic Variation in Commuting Propensity and Unemployment Spells: Some U.K. Evidence

This paper uses 1987–88 U.K. survey data from the unemployment inflow to investigate the ability of ethnic variation in commuting willingness to account for longer non-white unemployment spells. The study is motivated by the possibility that ethnic minorities are at greater risk of spatial mismatch unemployment because they are more geographically restrictive in their job-seeking activities. Our findings support this hypothesis and indicate that lower commuting willingness explains about 20% of the differential between the average unemployment spells of ethnic minorities and whites.     

The network structure of big business in Taiwan

This paper takes a network approach to understanding ownership patterns and director interlocks in Taiwan. In particular, this paper analyzes ties among Taiwan’s top 200 publicly listed companies in 1990 and 2000. The speed of change in Taiwan’s economic organization during the period has been striking. Not only have the identities of many of Taiwan’s largest firms changed, there seems to have been a substantial pruning and thinning of director ties over time and also a substantial transformation of the ownership network. What continuity remains appears to be largely a consequence of business group membership, and the strength of those ties appears to be considerable. Overall, this research finds that Taiwan’s financial sector has been quite central to the island’s big business network, that business groups are an extremely important category for understanding patterns of ownership ties, and that most director interlocks in Taiwan appear to cross industry boundaries rather than occur within them.     

A hierarchical agency model of deposit insurance

This paper develops a hierarchical agency model of deposit insurance. The main purpose of the analysis is to propose a micro-founded model of deposit insurance schemes and study their effects on the behavior of depositors and the monitoring problem for a bank. This paper also characterizes a risk-based premium in equilibrium, and conducts a comparative statics analysis of depositors’ optimal actions. The results supply the basic theoretical foundation for designing deposit insurance schemes. Our findings are consistent with the empirical research on depositor behavior.