Endogenous Group Formation

While the rules governing the formation of groups engaging in collective action may have significant impact on group size and behavior of members, most experiments on public goods have been conducted with the subjects in exogenously fixed groups or of fixed sizes. We study endogenous formation of groups in a public‐goods provision game by allowing subjects to change groups under three sets of rules: free entry/exit, restricted entry with free exit, and free entry with restricted exit. We find that the rules governing entry and exit do have a significant impact on individual behavior and group‐level outcomes.     

Real Exchange Rate and External Balance: How Important Are Price Deflators?

This paper contrasts real effective exchange rate (REER) measures based on different deflators (consumer price index, GDP deflator, and unit labor cost) and discusses potential implications for the link—or lack thereof—between the REER and the external balance. We begin by comparing the evolution of different measures of REER to confirm that the choice of deflator plays a significant role in REER movements. A subsequent empirical investigation based on 35 developed and emerging market economies over 1995–2017 yields comprehensive and robust evidence that only the REER deflated by unit labor cost exhibits contemporaneous patterns consistent with the expenditure-switching mechanism. Finally, we show that a standard open-economy model with nominal rigidities and trade in intermediate goods is able to generate these aforementioned patterns.     

The Effect of Temporal Risk Aversion on Optimal Consumption,the Equity Premium,and the Equilibrium Interest Rate

This paper demonstrates that temporal risk aversion makes smoothing consumption over time less attractive, while the usual risk aversion makes it more attractive. As temporal risk aversion increases, the equilibrium interest rate decreases and the equity premium increases. This paper also shows a striking and novel result that an increase in time impatience can lead to either a decrease or an increase in the interest rate, depending on the nature of the nonseparability.     

The impact of jump risks on nominal interest rates and foreign exchange rates

This article investigates the relationship between the nominal interest rate and inflation and also the forward exchange rate under a general specification of the underlying processes govering the foreign exchange rate. There are three distinct risks that affect the relation between the real rate of interest and the nominal rate namely, consumption risk, diffusion risk, and the existence of jump risks of inflation. Jump risks lower the nominal interest rate because of jump hedging of a nominal bond. The forward exchange rate depends on the expected depreciation of the domestic currency as well as these three risks. As the domestic jump risks increase, the domestic nominal interest rate decreases and the forward exchange rate decreases.     

Exchange Rates and FOMC Days

Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting days provide a natural laboratory for exploring the effects of policy uncertainty and learning on exchange rate determination. A reasonable hypothesis is that the meeting outcomes are price-relevant public information associated with a switch to an "informed-trading state." Evidence is provided by intradaily exchange rates for 10 FOMC meetings. A particularly interesting finding is that the informed-trading regime tends to emerge during the time that the FOMC meets. An extensive search of public news indicates that the informed trading cannot be explained as the response to public information.     

Jump-Diffusion Processes and the Term Structure of Interest Rates

The authors investigate the term structure of interest rates when the underlying state variables and production technologies follow the jump-diffusion processes. Even in some cases where the traditional expectations theory about the term structure is consistent with general equilibrium under diffusion processes, the traditional theory is not consistent under jump-diffusion processes. It is shown that bond prices are strictly higher under jump risks than otherwise and that consumers with logarithmic utility functions will develop hedge portfolios in the presence of jump diffusion.     

IS EAST ASIA FIT FOR AN OPTIMUM CURRENCY AREA? AN ASSESSMENT OF THE ECONOMIC FEASIBILITY OF A HIGHER DEGREE OF MONETARY COOPERATION IN EAST ASIA

This paper attempts to make a contribution to the recent search for a suitable assessment of the economic feasibility of a higher degree of monetary cooperation in East Asia. By using a structural vector autoregression approach as well as a generalized purchasing power parity approach, we find that a larger group of appropriately selected East Asian economies does satisfy the macroeconomic conditions for forming an Optimum Currency Area (OCA). The East Asian group consists of four ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand) and four Northeast Asian economies (Hong Kong SAR, Japan, Republic of Korea, and Taiwan). This finding presents a striking contrast to the existing research results whose policy recommendation has generally been that countries in East Asia should start with a smaller subgroup currency area. It is time that many East Asian economies as a region made a serious effort to pursue a higher degree of monetary cooperation among themselves for forming an OCA.     

Human Resource Management’s Effects on Firm‐Level Relative Efficiency

Using stochastic frontier production functions methodology with data from 1579 private‐sector establishments, we demonstrate that HR practices are significantly associated with differences in relative firm‐level efficiency. Supplemental analysis implies that this efficiency analysis is substantively different than the common approach to evaluating HRM’s relationships with firm‐level labor productivity. The results suggest that HR practices’ contributions to relative firm‐level efficiency are an important but heretofore overlooked factor in the relationship between HRM and firm performance.     

BEAUTY AND PRODUCTIVITY: THE CASE OF THE LADIES PROFESSIONAL GOLF ASSOCIATION

There is evidence that attractive looking workers earn more than average looking workers, even after controlling for a variety of individual characteristics. The presence of such beauty premiums may influence the labor supply decisions of attractive workers. For example, if one unit of a product by an attractive worker is more rewarded than that by her less attractive coworker, the attractive worker may put more effort into improving her productivity. We examine this possibility by analyzing panel data for individual female golfers participating in the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) tour. We found that attractive golfers recorded lower than average scores and earn more prize money than average looking players, even when controlling for player experience and other variables related to their natural talents. This finding is consistent with the notion that physical appearance is associated with individual workers' accumulation of human capital or skills. If the human capital of attractive workers is at least partly an outcome of favoritism toward beauty, then the premium estimates obtained by previous studies may have been downwardly biased. (JEL J3, J7, L8)     

Ambiguity Without a State Space

Many decisions involve both imprecise probabilities and intractable states of the world. Objective expected utility assumes unambiguous probabilities; subjective expected utility assumes a completely specified state space. This paper analyses a third domain of preference: sets of consequential lotteries. Using this domain, we develop a theory of objective ambiguity without explicit reference to any state space. We characterize a representation that integrates a non-linear transformation of first-order expected utility with respect to a second-order measure. The concavity of the transformation and the weighting of the measure capture ambiguity aversion. We propose a definition for comparative ambiguity aversion.