THE SWEDISH MARKET PRICE APPROACH TO MONETARY POLICY OF THE 1930s

Recently, some analysts have prescribed the combined use of certain market prices as a useful strategy for monetary policy. In light of problems with conventional (time-series) empirical tests of the approach, one may consider an alternative "test" of this strategy: examining historical episodes when the strategy was employed. The Swedish experience during the early 1930s provides one such example. This experience, fathered by Knut Wicksell, is an example of a fiat money-flexible exchange rate regime in which (i) a short-term interest rate was used as a policy instrument, (ii) market prices were used as policy guides or intermediate indicators, and (Hi) price stability was the explicitly voiced goal of monetary policy. Monetary or reserve aggregates were neither proposed nor employed as policy guides or targets in pursuing this price stabilization objective. This Swedish experience is important since it provides a rare example of a market price approach to monetary policy. This paper demonstrates that the approach worked remarkably well.     

The Cross‐Section of Managerial Ability,Incentives, and Risk Preferences

I estimate a dynamic investment model for mutual managers to study the cross‐sectional distribution of ability, incentives, and risk preferences. The manager's compensation depends on the size of the fund, which fluctuates due to fund returns and due to fund flows that respond to the fund's relative performance. The model provides an economic interpretation of time‐varying coefficients in performance regressions in terms of the structural parameters. I document that the estimates of fund alphas are precise and virtually unbiased. I find substantial heterogeneity in ability, risk preferences, and pay‐for‐performance sensitivities that relates to observable fund characteristics.     

Multinational Banks and the Global Financial Crisis: Weathering the Perfect Storm?

We use data on the 48 largest multinational banking groups to compare the lending of their 199 foreign subsidiaries during the Great Recession with lending by a benchmark of 202 domestic banks. Contrary to earlier and more contained crises, parent banks were not a significant source of strength to their subsidiaries during 2008–09. When controlling for other bank characteristics, multinational bank subsidiaries had to slow down credit growth almost three times as fast as domestic banks. This was in particular the case for subsidiaries of banking groups that relied more on wholesale funding.     

ECONOMIC INCENTIVES AND HOSPITALIZATION IN GERMANY

The dramatically rising health expenditures have become a matter of prime concern. Using a rich panel dataset this paper contributes to this debate by investigating factors determining the demand for hospitalization in Germany. While most previous studies have found a significant impact of social insurance on the demand for hospital trips, the empirical results presented here cast doubts on the role of those economic incentives. There are also important differences in the hospitalization behaviour of men and women, and between the full sample and those with chronic conditions, which have been neglected by the literature. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Closing Time for Democracy?

The rejection of the Shops Bill in the House of Commons reveals the extent to which'representative'democracy can subvert the wishes of the majority to those of self-interested pressure groups. Lord Harris of High Cross, who was active in passing the Bill through the House of Lords, details the abuse of parliamentary democracy by Tory and Labour MPs alike, which responds to the noise made by opponents of reform rather than to the numbers who stand to gain.     

Health and Mortality Delta: Assessing the Welfare Cost of Household Insurance Choice

We develop a pair of risk measures, health and mortality delta, for the universe of life and health insurance products. A life‐cycle model of insurance choice simplifies to replicating the optimal health and mortality delta through a portfolio of insurance products. We estimate the model to explain the observed variation in health and mortality delta implied by the ownership of life insurance, annuities including private pensions, and long‐term care insurance in the Health and Retirement Study. For the median household aged 51 to 57, the lifetime welfare cost of market incompleteness and suboptimal choice is 3.2% of total wealth.     

Optimal Decentralized Investment Management

We study an institutional investment problem in which a centralized decision maker, the Chief Investment Officer (CIO), for example, employs multiple asset managers to implement investment strategies in separate asset classes. The CIO allocates capital to the managers who, in turn, allocate these funds to the assets in their asset class. This two-step investment process causes several misalignments of objectives between the CIO and his managers and can lead to large utility costs for the CIO. We focus on (1) loss of diversification, (2) unobservable managerial appetite for risk, and (3) different investment horizons. We derive an optimal unconditional linear performance benchmark and show that this benchmark can be used to better align incentives within the firm. We find that the CIO's uncertainty about the managers' risk appetites increases both the costs of decentralized investment management and the value of an optimally designed benchmark.     

A REVIEW OF THE BOARD OF TRADE AND INDUSTRIES REPORT ON THE PRINTING INDUSTRY

P robably no more penetrating indictment of an industry has come out of an investigation by the Board of Trade and Industries than that made in Report No. 353 on the printing industry. And perhaps no other report has been received with such silence by the press and by the Government.     

A Test of the Reliability of Current Cost Disclosures

Using data from corporate acquisitions recorded under the purchase method, this research tests the reliability (representational faithfulness) of current cost disclosures. The fair value of property, plant, and equipment recorded by the acquiring company following the acquisition is found to be significantly related to the current cost disclosures made by the acquired company prior to the acquisition. When the data are segmented according to reporting regime, the significant relationship pertains to the SFAS 33 disclosures but not to ASR 190 disclosures of current cost. The study also finds that the results pertain primarily to current cost disclosures made shortly before the acquisition date. Overall, the results support current initiatives for increased departure from historical-cost approaches to accounting, especially if these measures are made along the lines of SFAS 33 techniques rather than ASR 190 techniques.