Wage premium in the state sector and state‐owned enterprises: Econometric evidence from a transition country in times of austerity

This paper investigates the differences in the wage premium and compliance with the wage cut introduced in Serbia at the end of 2014, between two subsectors of the public sector: the state sector and state‐owned enterprises. Results show that before the austerity measures were introduced, the conditional wage premium was, on average, higher in state‐owned enterprises than in the state sector, with significant differences from the median to the top of the wage distribution. After the austerity measures were introduced, the wage differences between the subsectors deepened, due to lower compliance of state‐owned enterprises with the wage cut.     

Posterior Inference in Bayesian Quantile Regression with Asymmetric Laplace Likelihood

The paper discusses the asymptotic validity of posterior inference of pseudo‐Bayesian quantile regression methods with complete or censored data when an asymmetric Laplace likelihood is used. The asymmetric Laplace likelihood has a special place in the Bayesian quantile regression framework because the usual quantile regression estimator can be derived as the maximum likelihood estimator under such a model, and this working likelihood enables highly efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms for posterior sampling. However, it seems to be under‐recognised that the stationary distribution for the resulting posterior does not provide valid posterior inference directly. We demonstrate that a simple adjustment to the covariance matrix of the posterior chain leads to asymptotically valid posterior inference. Our simulation results confirm that the posterior inference, when appropriately adjusted, is an attractive alternative to other asymptotic approximations in quantile regression, especially in the presence of censored data.     

Educational inequalities between children of marriage migrants and those of local-born parents – quantile regression results from Taiwan

ABSTRACT

This article studies educational inequalities between children of marriage migrants and those of local-born parents using student test scores from Taiwan. We first find an average raw score gap of 9.5% for children of foreign parents. We then employ quantile regression methodology and find that, after introducing our extensive list of covariates, score gaps vanish for children with a mother from mainland China in all quantiles and for children with a Southeast Asian mother in the highest quantiles. In contrast, we identify large residual score gaps for children with a parent from a culturally more distant country in all quantiles. Different from previous studies which found the largest impact for language usage and parent education, we find that the physical home environment has the highest explanatory power in our analysis.     

Are Google searches making the Bitcoin market run amok? A tail event analysis

This paper aims at detecting extreme value spillover between the large co-movements of Bitcoin returns and the rate of change in investor attention (for which Google search is used as a proxy). For this purpose, we use the concept of the Granger causality in tail event. Thus, we test whether positive, or negative, extreme values of rate of change in Google searches have a significant predictive power for negative, or positive, large values of Bitcoin returns, and vice versa . Our results shed light on a unidirectional causality effect from the returns to investor attention in the first place, before becoming bidirectional when the time delay increases.     

OPEC news and predictability of oil futures returns and volatility: Evidence from a nonparametric causality-in-quantiles approach

This paper provides a novel perspective to the predictive ability of OPEC meeting dates and production announcements for (Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate) oil futures market returns and GARCH-based volatility using a nonparametric quantile-based methodology. We show a nonlinear relationship between oil futures returns and OPEC-based predictors; hence, linear Granger causality tests are misspecified and the linear model results of non-predictability are unreliable. When the quantile-causality test is implemented, we observe that the impact of OPEC variables is restricted to Brent Crude futures only (with no effect observed for the WTI market). Specifically, OPEC production announcements, and meeting dates predict only lower quantiles of the conditional distribution of Brent futures market returns. While, predictability of volatility covers the majority of the quantile distribution, barring extreme ends.     

Economic policy uncertainty and corporate investment: Evidence from the U.S. hospitality industry

The study of how uncertainty affects hospitality firms’ decisions is gaining attention in recent years. We examine the effect of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) on the investment policy of a sample of 305 hospitality companies in the U.S. for the period 2001–2018. Applying generalized methods of moments (GMM) technique, we find that investment policies in hospitality companies are negatively affected by EPU. Panel quantile estimations reveal that the effect of EPU on corporate investment is only relevant for companies in the lower quantile of capital expenditures ratio. Our paper also provides policy implications to related parties.     

SCHUR CONVEX FUNCTIONALS: FATOU PROPERTY AND REPRESENTATION

The Fatou property for every Schur convex lower semicontinuous (l.s.c.) functional on a general probability space is established. As a result, the existing quantile representations for Schur convex l.s.c. positively homogeneous convex functionals, established on for either p= 1 or p=∞ and with the requirement of the Fatou property, are generalized for , with no requirement of the Fatou property. In particular, the existing quantile representations for law invariant coherent risk measures and law invariant deviation measures on an atomless probability space are extended for a general probability space.     

Anticipating critical transitions of the housing market: new evidence from China

We introduce a novel quantitative methodology to detect real estate bubbles and forecast their critical end time, which we apply to the housing markets of China's metropolises. Building on the Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity (LPPLS) model of self-reinforcing feedback loops, we use the quantile regression calibration approach recently introduced by two of us to build confidence intervals and explore possible distinct scenarios. We propose to consolidate the quantile regressions into the arithmetic average of the quantile-based LPPLS Confidence indicator, which accounts for the robustness of the calibration with respect to bootstrapped residuals. We make three main contributions to the literature of real estate bubbles. First, we verify the validity of the arithmetic average of the quantile-based LPPLS Confidence indicator by studying the critical times of historical housing price bubbles in the U.S., Hong Kong, U.K. and Canada. Second, the LPPLS detection methods are applied to provide early warning signals of the housing markets in some metropolises in China. Third, we determine the possible turning points of the markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Chengdu and anticipate critical transitions of China's housing markets via our multi-scales and multi-quantiles analyses. Finally, given these projections performed in February 2017, the price trajectories from March 2017 to January 2018 that became available from the time of submission to the time of revision of the present article offer quite unique genuine out-of-sample tests of the performances of our indicators.     

Per-unit versus ad-valorem discrimination with an application to MLB

We contrast two structural forms of discrimination: per-unit and ad-valorem. We provide a simple modification to Becker’s canonical discrimination model allowing for heterogeneous worker quality and both per-unit and ad-valorem discrimination. Per-unit discrimination costs reduce the relative cost of minorities with higher marginal products. This simple insight, which builds upon the Alchian–Allen hypothesis, yields sharp testable implications. We argue that several features of the MLB labour market are consistent with per-unit discrimination.