Book Reviews

Official Reserves and Currency Management in Asia: Myth, Reality and the Future: Geneva Reports on the World Economy 7 by HANS GENBERG, ROBERT McCAULEY, YUNG CHUL PARK and AVINASH PERSAUD (London: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2005), pp. 128, £25.00 paperback, ISBN 1 898128 90 1. Growth, Inequality and Poverty: Prospects for Pro‐Poor Economic Development by ANTHONY SHORROCKS and ROLPH VAN DER HOEVEN (eds.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 283, paperback, ISBN 0 19 928824 2. Competition and Growth: Reconciling Theory and Evidence by PHILIPPE AGHION and RACHEL GRIFFITH (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 104, £18.50 hardback, ISBN 0 262 01218 9. The World Trade Organization. A Very Short Introduction by AMRITA NARLIKAR (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 175, £6.99, paperback, ISBN 0 19 280608 4.     

Las diferencias salariales entre países en la Unión Europea

Se investigan los determinantes de las brechas salariales entre países de la Unión Europea a lo largo de la distribución salarial según la propuesta metodológica de Firpo, Fortin y Lemieux (2009) y de Fortin, Lemieux y Firpo (2011). Los efectos de estructura salarial y de composición inciden en las diferencias salariales, aunque el primero de una manera más marcada. Este efecto se deriva de las diferencias entre factores desconocidos, mientras que el efecto de composición se explica principalmente por las diferencias en materia de educación, proporción de trabajadores con responsabilidades de supervisión, estructura ocupacional y, en menor medida, estructura de la actividad económica.     

Portfolio Manager Compensation in the U.S. Mutual Fund Industry

We study compensation contracts of individual portfolio managers using hand‐collected data of over 4,500 U.S. mutual funds. Variations in the compensation structures are broadly consistent with an optimal contracting equilibrium. The likelihood of explicit performance‐based incentives is positively correlated with the intensity of agency conflicts, as proxied by the advisor's clientele dispersion, its affiliations in the financial industry, and its ownership structure. Investor sophistication and the threat of dismissal in outsourced funds serve as substitutes for explicit performance‐based incentives. Finally, we find little evidence of differences in future performance associated with any particular compensation arrangement.     

Does Corporate Transparency Contribute to Efficient Resource Allocation?

This paper examines whether a country's corporate transparency environment, which includes the quality of accounting information, contributes to efficient resource allocation. Based on a cross-country study of 37 manufacturing industries in 37 countries, we provide three pieces of related evidence. First, we find the contemporaneous correlations in industry growth rates across country pairs are higher when there is a greater level of corporate transparency in the country pairs, after controlling for country-level economic and financial development. Second, we find the influence of transparency on these correlations is stronger when country pairs are at similar levels of economic development (GDP). Finally, when we control for the level of transparency explained by a country's institutions in place, we find that residual transparency (unexplained by country-level factors) is associated with industry-specific growth rates. Taken together, the results are consistent with corporate transparency facilitating the allocation of resources across industry sectors.     

Diagnostic Expectations and Credit Cycles

We present a model of credit cycles arising from diagnostic expectations—a belief formation mechanism based on Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic. Diagnostic expectations overweight future outcomes that become more likely in light of incoming data. The expectations formation rule is forward looking and depends on the underlying stochastic process, and thus is immune to the Lucas critique. Diagnostic expectations reconcile extrapolation and neglect of risk in a unified framework. In our model, credit spreads are excessively volatile, overreact to news, and are subject to predictable reversals. These dynamics can account for several features of credit cycles and macroeconomic volatility.     

Dynamic Portfolio Selection by Augmenting the Asset Space

We present a novel approach to dynamic portfolio selection that is as easy to implement as the static Markowitz paradigm. We expand the set of assets to include mechanically managed portfolios and optimize statically in this extended asset space. We consider “conditional” portfolios, which invest in each asset an amount proportional to conditioning variables, and “timing” portfolios, which invest in each asset for a single period and in the risk‐free asset for all other periods. The static choice of these managed portfolios represents a dynamic strategy that closely approximates the optimal dynamic strategy for horizons up to 5 years.     

Why does the velocity of money move pro‐cyclically?

The velocity of money usually rises in expansions and falls in recessions This paper explains this pro‐cyclical movement of velocity using two ideas: (i) during business cycles the movement of investment and consumption of durable goods has a larger amplitude than consumption of non‐durable goods and services; (ii) the velocity associated with expenditure on investment and durable goods is much higher than the velocity associated with consumption of non‐durable goods and services, because the former expenditures are synchronized with the attainment of money by economic agents whereas the latter are not. In this setting, the rise in the weight of expenditure in durable goods relative to the weight of non‐durable goods and services, which occurs during expansions, generates an increase in the average velocity of circulation. The opposite happens during recessions and thus velocity moves pro‐cyclically.     

Favoritism in Mutual Fund Families? Evidence on Strategic Cross‐Fund Subsidization

We investigate whether mutual fund families strategically transfer performance across member funds to favor those more likely to increase overall family profits. We find that “high family value” funds (i.e., high fees or high past performers) overperform at the expense of “low value” funds. Such a performance gap is above the one existing between similar funds not affiliated with the same family. Better allocations of underpriced initial public offering deals and opposite trades across member funds partly explain why high value funds overperform. Our findings highlight how the family organization prevalent in the mutual fund industry generates distortions in delegated asset management.