Financial crisis and persistence: evidence from sticky expectations consumption growth model

We estimate the degree of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth for the U.S. considering the effects of the Great Recession. The behavior of stickiness estimate in the crisis is somewhat as the U-shaped pattern. Our findings imply that during the crisis consumers’ attentiveness to aggregate information has slightly increased, thereby reducing the persistence of aggregate consumption growth. However, the reduction in persistence is transitory. Since 1980, the U.S. faced five recessions and in most of them the degree of stickiness declined, albeit temporarily.     

Balancing Values of Outstanding Universality with Conservation and Management at Three United Kingdom Cultural World Heritage Sites

An analysis of three of the United Kingdom's cultural World Heritage Sites (WHS) illustrates, inter alia, the vigour and commitment of these sites in their application of the World Heritage Committee's recommendations. The cultural sites discussed in this case study include the Tower of London, Blenheim Palace and Maritime Greenwich. Attention is paid to the interrelationship between UK heritage legislation and UNESCO conventions and guidelines. The category of cultural landscape is analysed against the background of 20th century ideas concerning landscape. The concomitant consideration of the gradual impact of management plan requirements indicates the direction in which WHS will be aligned as the 21st century progresses. The 21st century developments also reinforce observations regarding the uniqueness of every aspect of each site, even when narrowed down to three sites of only one of the signatory nations to the World Heritage Convention.     

Price Stability in Economies with Habit Persistence

This paper shows that the divine‐coincidence does not hold in a sticky price model with external habit if a time‐varying tax rate on labor income is not implemented to fully eliminate the time‐varying distortions associated with external habit and monopoly power in goods market. The required labor income tax rate is inversely related to the risk‐free real interest rate and the markup in the goods market, but it is proportional to the degree of external habit. Under this circumstance, the optimal monetary policy commands a countercyclical interest rate, having a perfect negative correlation with tax rate in the sticky price model with external habit. If a time‐invariant tax is the only fiscal instrument, then the degree of external habit entails a gap between the private marginal rate of substitution between consumption and labor and the social marginal rate of substitution, generating an endogenous trade‐off between the stabilization of welfare‐relevant output gap and inflation. Under this circumstance, price stability is not the optimal policy. The monetary policy authority should optimally try to undo the time‐varying distortions associated with external habit and monopoly power in goods market by deviating from price stability.     

Dividend reinvestment plans: An empirical analysis

This study examines the effect of initiating discount and no discount dividend reinvestment plans on shareholder wealth. The results show a negative response to DRP announcements, which is significantly smaller than that found in studies of new equity offerings. These results are consistent with the Scholes and Wolfson (1989) hypothesis that managers in need of equity capital use DRPs to mitigate the adverse stock price effects of new equity issue announcements. Furthermore, there is a significant difference in the price response of discount and no discount DRPs for industrial firms. This result is supportive of the signaling potential of discount DRPs. Supportive evidence is also found in the analysis of firm characteristics for industrial firms.     

Sticky Valuations,Aggregation Effects,and Property Indices

Previous studies on real estate smoothing have generally focused on the second moment of returns for individual properties. Although this body of research has developed plausible reasons for explaining the observed lower risk associated with real estate, no explanation has, however, been offered to account for the large difference in serial correlation at the individual property level compared with the index level. This article addresses this issue and also offers an explanation for the difference in serial correlation observed with different frequency real estate indices. Employing the framework developed by Holbrook Working (1960), we argue that the high levels of serial correlation typically observed in real estate indices results from a combination of random and sticky appraisals that induce cross-correlations between the component returns. Using the concept of sticky values we question the results of Lai and Wang (1998) in which they argue that the variance of appraisal-based returns should always be greater than true returns. We argue that a pragmatic conclusion regarding volatility should be conditioned on the underlying stochastic processes. We draw a distinction between serial cross-sectional and temporal sticky appraisal processes that influence smoothing at the index and individual property levels. Our results indicate that smoothing does not appear to be a serious issue at the individual property level. However, when different appraisal processes are aggregated into an index the underlying cross-correlation between those processes can induce high levels of smoothing.     

Estimating the term structures of corporate debt

This paper investigates the corporate bond market by estimating monthly interest rate term structures for investment grade credit classes using both S&P's and Moody's ratings. Term structures are modeled by a piecewise constant forward rate curve and estimated on noncallable coupon paying bonds issued by industrial firms. The iterative estimation algorithm minimizes the sum of squared errors between market prices and model prices while identifying and removing outliers from the sample. Although the forward rate model is successful at pricing corporate debt, additional factors are found to be significant at explaining the residual price error that remains after the forward rate model is fit to market prices. Six necessary no-arbitrage conditions are derived for the term structures of risky and risk-free debt. Occasionally, some of these no-arbitrage conditions are violated and a few violations are asymptotically statistically significant. Finally, trading strategies that capture mispricing in the corporate debt market and violations of no-arbitrage bounds are discussed.This paper was adapted from my dissertation, completed at Cornell University. An earlier version of this paper was titled The Term Structures of Corporate Debt. Thanks to participants at the Cornell University finance workshop, Warren Bailey, Peter Carr, Antoine Giannetti, and especially Robert Jarrow for their helpful comments.     

Monetary Impacts and Overshooting of Agricultural Prices in an Open Economy

This article's focus is on the time adjustment paths of the exchange rate and prices in response to unanticipated monetary shocks. First, we expand the theoretical specification of the overshooting hypothesis by generalizing Dornbusch's model to include a third sector (i.e., agricultural prices). Second, we employ Johansen's cointegration test along with a vector error correction model to investigate whether agricultural prices overshoot in an open economy. The empirical results indicate that agricultural prices adjust faster than industrial prices to innovations in the money supply, affecting relative prices in the short run, but strict long-run money neutrality does not hold.     

Improving emergency plans management with SAGA

Emergency plans are the tangible result of the preparedness activities of the emergency management lifecycle. In many countries, public service organizations have the legal obligation to develop and maintain emergency plans covering all possible hazards relative to their areas of operation. However, little support is provided to planners in the development and use of plans. Often, advances in software technology have not been exploited, and plans remain as text documents whose accessibility is very limited. In this paper, we advocate for the definition and implementation of plan management processes as the first step to better produce and manage emergency plans. The main contribution of our work is to raise the need for IT-enabled planning environments, either at the national or organization-specific levels, which can lead to more uniform plans that are easier to evaluate and share, with support to stakeholders other than responders, among other advantages. To illustrate our proposal, we introduce SAGA, a framework that supports the full lifecycle of emergency plan management. SAGA provides all the actors involved in plan management with a number of tools to support all the stages of the plan lifecycle. We outline the architecture of the system, and show with a case study how planning processes can benefit from a system like SAGA.     

Quantification and characteristics of household inflation expectations in Switzerland

Inflation expectations are a key variable in conducting monetary policy. However, these expectations are generally unobservable and only certain proxy variables exist, such as surveys on inflation expectations. This article offers guidance on the appropriate quantification of household inflation expectations in the Swiss Consumer Survey, where answers are qualitative in nature. We apply and evaluate different variants of the probability approach and the regression approach; we demonstrate that models that include answers on perceived inflation and allow for time-varying response thresholds yield the best results; and we show why the originally proposed approach of Fluri and Spörndli (1987) has resulted in heavily biased inflation expectations since the mid-1990s. Furthermore, we discuss some of the key features of Swiss household inflation expectations, i.e. the fact that there has been a shift in expectation formation since 2000 (expectations are better anchored and less adaptive, and there is lower disagreement of expectations). We suggest that this may be linked to the Swiss National Bank’s adjustment of its monetary policy framework around this time. In addition, we outline how expectation formation in Switzerland is in line with the sticky information model, where information disseminates slowly from professional forecasters to households.