MEASURING THE ATTRIBUTES OF POVERTY AND ITS PERSISTENCE: A CASE STUDY OF ERITREA

This paper tries to identify the correlates of poverty in urban Eritrea using an estimation technique (the DOGEV model) that also allows for the inclusion of a measure of “persistence” in poverty levels from cross‐sectional estimation. The results suggest that 17 percent of the probability of being moderately poor and 22 percent of the probability of being extremely poor in Eritrea was attributable to this “persistence”—a predisposition toward poverty likely due to latent attributes related to past experience of poverty itself. The results also suggest that, in the post‐war economy of the mid‐1990s, those with vocational training fared best among all education groups. Being a war veteran also had a strong negative association with the poverty—reflecting successful attempts to support that group. The receipt of remittances also reduced the likelihood of poverty; though receipts from outside Eritrea had a much stronger effect than receipts from within Eritrea.     

S&P 500 Cash Stock Price Volatilities

S&P 500 stock return volatilities are compared to the volatilities of a matched set of stocks, after controlling for cross-sectional differences in firm attributes known to affect volatility. No significant difference in volatility is observed between 1975 and 1983—before the start of trade in index futures and index options. Since then, S&P 500 stocks have been relatively more volatile. The difference is statistically, but not economically, significant. The relative increase occurs primarily in daily returns and only to a lesser extent in longer interval returns. Other factors besides the start of derivative trade could be responsible for the small increase in volatility.     

HOW SHOULD BANK REGULATORY AGENCIES BE ORGANIZED?

The U.S. Treasury Department (1991) makes a strong case for consolidating federal bank regulatory authority. However, its proposal to eliminate direct FDIC authority over insured nonmember banks contributes little to this end because deposit insurance requires supervisory oversight. The U.S. Treasury Department (1991) also maintains an independent role for the Federal Reserve. Elimination of neither the insurance agency nor the central bank appears practical. A better approach to regulatory agency consolidation would combine supervision with deposit insurance and central banking in an institutional structure modified somewhat from the present Federal Reserve structure.     

PRUDENCE AND SUCCESS IN POLITICS

The paper considers a repeated election game between an infinitely-lived representative voter and finitely-lived, heterogeneous politicians. The voter's prior belief about the incumbent's competency is updated during the incumbent's first term in office. The voter's problem is to find a rule that simultaneously selects and controls politicians. We show that the simple performance rule, standard in the literature, is justified as a time-consistent rule for a forward-looking voter. The outcome of a large class of perfect equilibria is "strategic caution": incumbent politicians slow down the voter's Bayesian learning by taking only weakly informative actions.     

The Development of Secondary Market Liquidity for NYSE-Listed IPOs

For NYSE‐listed IPOs, limit order submissions and depth relative to volume are unusually low on the first trading day. Initial buy‐side liquidity is higher for IPOs with high‐quality underwriters, large syndicates, low insider sales, and high premarket demand, while sell‐side liquidity is higher for IPOs that represent a large fraction of outstanding shares and have low premarket demand. Our results suggest that uncertainty and offer design affect initial liquidity, though order flow stabilizes quickly. We also find that submission strategies are influenced by expected underwriter stabilization and preopening order flow contains information about both initial prices and subsequent returns.     

Optimal Hedging under Intertemporally Dependent Preferences

This paper examines optimal hedging behavior in a market where preferences for current consumption are partly determined by the consumer's past consumption history. The model considers an individual exposed to price risk, who allocates wealth between consumption and futures contracts over a (continuous-time) finite planning horizon. The speculative component of the hedge ratio is shown to be smaller and the consumption path smoother than in models where preferences are separable over time. Some comparative-static properties of the hedge ratio are also examined.     

Net Settlement and Counterparty Risk: Evidence from the Formation of the New York Stock Exchange Clearing House in 1892

The securities settlement literature indicates that centralized settlement can reduce monitoring incentives and lead to excessive risk‐taking and inefficient risk‐sharing. This paper examines broker‐failure rates and counterparty losses surrounding the transition from bilateral to multilateral settlement facilitated by the NYSE. Study results provide evidence that net settlement reduced failures without diminishing risk constraining incentives. The study constructs a controlled comparison of broker failures through data collected from the NYSE and the Consolidated Stock Exchange, which traded identical securities settled under different systems. The results suggest that multilateral settlement is advantageous when financial markets are highly stressed.