International transmission of stock price movements: Evidence from the U.S. and five Asian-Pacific markets

Using a vector autoregressive analysis, this paper examines the structure of international transmissions in daily returns for six national stock markets— the U.S., Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Our results generally indicate that (1) the degree of interdependence among national stock markets has increased substantially after the 1987 stock market crash, (2) the U.S. market plays a dominant role of influencing the Pacific-Basin markets, (3) Japan and Singapore together have a significant persistent impact on the other Asian markets, and (4) the markets in Taiwan and Thailand are not efficient in processing international news.     

Levels of Aggregation: A Conceptual Model

Aggregate analysis has been established as a standard method on the study of market response behavior for a long time. Aggregation has advanced our understanding of the linkages among social characteristics and aggregate response behavior. However, aggregate analysis has been hindered by fragmentary and unsystematic procedures to determine the most appropriate level of aggregation. The general objective of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework to determine the level of aggregation of variables in data analysis. In addition, statistical procedures are suggested in this framework to verify and to determine the level of aggregation represented by a variable. The conceptual framework is useful for deciding if the variables are to be analyzed from micro-analysis focus or macro-analysis focus. The statistical procedures enable the researcher to systematically identify and verify the level(s) of aggregation of variables in an existing data set.     

Do Several Winning Coalitions Exist in a State for Senators of the Same Party? Evidence from an Event Study

We argue that U.S. senators from the same state and in the same party form different winning coalitions. We also develop a theory that stipulates that parties encourage these senators to form very distinct constituency coalitions. Parties use committee assignments as a carrot to give these senators an incentive to represent different groups. In our empirical analysis, we find that there are fewer overlapping committee assignments among senators in the same state when they are from the same party. We also consider the case of John Heinz and Arlen Specter, both Pennsylvania Republicans. When John Heinz died in a plane crash, Political Action Committees (PACs) that bought influence from Specter but not Heinz now had the possibility that the new senator replacing Heinz would include them in his resource constituency. The resulting competition by the new Pennsylvania senator and Specter for campaign resources would lower the price these firms had to pay for representation, thus improving their expected future earnings.     

Games Parents and Adolescents Play: Risky Behaviors, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers

This paper examines parental reputation formation in intra-familial interactions. In a repeated two-stage game, children decide whether to drop out of high school or daughters decide whether to have births as teens and parents then decide whether to provide support to their children beyond age 18. Drawing on Milgrom and Roberts (1982) and Kreps and Wilson (1982), we show that, under certain conditions, parents have the incentive to penalize older children for their adolescent risk-taking behaviours in order to dissuade their younger children from such behaviours when reaching adolescence. We find evidence in favour of this parental reputation model.     

Production, hidden action, and the payment system

Using a modified version of Freeman's (1996) payment system model, the optimal intraday rate is examined. The production set is modified to account for a non-degenerate distribution of settlements within a day. In addition to the modified production set, the consumption set is modified. A positive intraday interest rate may be able to implement the planner's allocation.     

Innovation or imitation?: The role of intellectual property rights protections

We study how uncompensated research and development (R&D) spillovers – the leakage of proprietary information through imitation or theft – affect firms’ investment decisions. Using variation in property rights protections across different regions within China we find that (1) uncompensated spillovers are greater in regions with weaker property rights, (2) such spillovers are associated with lower R&D expenditures, and (3) the latter is exacerbated in low property rights regimes. In addition to identifying a specific channel through which legal protections affect incentives for innovation and R&D, our results support arguments in the literature that the enforcement of property rights affects firm investment and growth.     

Chicago's Office Market: Price Indices, Location and Time

Conventional wisdom holds that overbuilding and high vacancy, coupled with curtailed tax benefits, have led to reduced office property values since the late 1980s. Yet assertions that office real estate values fell between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s are not supported everywhere by convincing evidence. This study offers a hedonic analysis of Chicago area office properties that sold from 1986 through 1993. Whereas earlier office market studies generally have been based on rents, this study focuses on variation in actual sale prices (although the prices were not adjusted for financing differences). The transaction-based index estimated here does not support the existence of a nominal office property price level decline beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s. In fact, the results show an upward trend in office property values after 1986, with nominal declines in office market price levels occurring only in the latter portion of the study period.