The cost of agricultural production risk

We examine the relative influence of preferences and technology on producers' ex ante willingness to pay for a reduction in production risk. A risk averse producer pays both an Arrow-Pratt risk premium to stabilize income and a ‘production premium’ to stabilize yield. Using soil-nitrate risks as our motivating example, we demonstrate that the production premium accounts for 40-85% of producers' willingness to pay for risk reduction. These results demonstrate the relative importance of technology over risk preferences when estimating the costs of agricultural production risk.     

International trade and finance: Complementaries in the United Kingdom 1870-1913 and the United States 1920-1930

Do international trade and finance flow together? In a variety of theoretical models, trade and finance can be shown to have the potential to be substitutes or complements, so the matter must be resolved empirically. We study trade and financial flows from the United Kingdom from 1870 to 1913 and the United States in the interwar years. These were the two major capital exporters and key financial centers in each era. We find that trade and finance were robustly correlated for each case. We consider simultaneity issues. We also discuss evidence from the British Empire which casts doubt on the idea that trade is a punishment device in the event of a default.     

Cross hedging under multiplicative basis risk

Cross hedging price risk in an incomplete financial market creates basis risk. We propose a new way of modeling basis risk where price risk and basis risk are combined in a multiplicative way. Under this specification, positive prudence is a necessary and sufficient condition for underhedging in an unbiased market. Using the example of cross hedging jet fuel price risk with crude oil futures, we show that the new specification is superior in describing the price series and that optimal cross hedges differ significantly from those derived under the traditional additive cross hedging model.     

THE EFFECT OF TAX PREFERENCES ON HEALTH SPENDING

In this paper, we estimate the effect of the tax preference for health insurance on health care spending using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys from 1996-2005. We use the fact that Social Security taxes are only levied on earnings below a statutory threshold to identify the impact of the tax preference. Because employer-sponsored health insurance premiums are excluded from Social Security payroll taxes, workers who earn just below the Social Security tax threshold receive a larger tax preference for health insurance than workers who earn just above it. We find a significant effect of the tax preference, consistent with previous research.     

The market reaction to corporate governance regulation

This paper investigates the market reaction to recent legislative and regulatory actions pertaining to corporate governance. The managerial power view of governance suggests that executive pay, the existing process of proxy access, and various governance provisions [e.g., staggered boards and Chief Executive Officer (CEO)-chairman duality] are associated with managerial rent extraction. This perspective predicts that broad government actions that reduce executive pay, increase proxy access, and ban such governance provisions are value-enhancing. In contrast, another view of governance suggests that observed governance choices are the result of value-maximizing contracts between shareholders and management. This perspective predicts that broad government actions that regulate such governance choices are value destroying. Consistent with the latter view, we find that the abnormal returns to recent events relating to corporate governance regulations are, on average, decreasing in CEO pay, decreasing in the number of large blockholders, decreasing in the ease by which small institutional investors can access the proxy process, and decreasing in the presence of a staggered board.     

Resources, innovation and growth in the global economy

The relative performance of open economies is analyzed in an endogenous growth model with asymmetric trade. A resource-rich country trades resource-based intermediates for final goods produced by a resource-poor economy. The effects of an increase in the resource endowment depend on the elasticity of substitution between resources and labor in intermediates' production. Under substitution (complementarity), the resource boom generates higher (lower) income, lower (higher) employment in the primary sector and faster (slower) growth in the resource-rich economy. In the resource-poor economy, the shock induces a higher (lower) relative wage and positive (negative) growth effects that are exclusively due to trade.     

Consumption-based CAPM models: International evidence

We examine the performance of several types of the consumption-based CAPM (C-CAPM) models to explore if consumption factors matter for determining excess returns across 17 MSCI country indexes. While the classic world C-CAPM does exhibit some power in explaining cross-sectional variations of expected excess returns, the model seems to require an implausibly large coefficient of risk aversion. The more sophisticated models including the heterogeneous C-CAPM, the world surplus consumption and the habit-formation models provide more reasonable estimates and add substantial explanatory power for the variation in the cross section of excess stock returns. Our results suggest that country-specific consumption risk is not fully diversified thus implying that stock returns are related to idiosyncratic consumption risk.     

Borrowing constraints,the cost of precautionary saving and unemployment insurance

When it is costly for individuals to save or to borrow, unemployment insurance (UI) provides an alternative source of liquidity that smooths consumption over time and leads individuals to spend longer unemployed searching for a suitable job. We show in a tractable life-cycle model how the optimal unemployment replacement ratio and the fall in consumption on job loss depend on the cost of self-insurance and the cost of borrowing. This implies that the value of UI depends on age at job loss, consumption needs (such as the presence of children), discount rates, the return on saving, access to credit and the presence of other social insurance programmes. Optimal replacement rates vary substantially with plausible variation in these factors (from less than 20 percent to almost 60 percent).