Adult and Teenage Use of Consumer,Business, and Entertainment Technology: Potholes on the Information Superhighway?

Adults and teenagers were surveyed to determine their use and ownership of 32 consumer, business, and entertainment technology devices. Demographics, technology experience, and “technophobia” were examined as potential discriminators between Confident Users, Hesitant Users, and Nonusers of each technological device. Results indicated that older, technophobic adults with little computer training and lower income, black and Hispanic, technophobic teenagers did not use most technological devices.     

The Weekend Effect: Trading Patterns of Individual and Institutional Investors

In this paper, we document regularities in trading patterns of individual and institutional investors related to the day of the week. We find a relative increase in trading activity by individuals on Mondays. In addition, there is a tendency for individuals to increase the number of sell transactions relative to buy transactions, which might explain at least part of the weekend effect.     

Corporate Control,Portfolio Choice,and the Decline of Banking

In the 1980s, U.S. banks became systematically less profitable and riskier as nonbank competition eroded the profitability of banks' traditional activities. Bank failures rose exponentially during this decade. The leading explanation for the persistence of these trends centers on fixed-rate deposit insurance: the insurance gives bank equityholders an incentive to take on risk when the value of bank charters falls. We propose and test an alternative explanation based on corporate control considerations. We show that managerial entrenchment played a more important role than did the moral hazard associated with deposit insurance in explaining the recent behavior of the banking industry.     

Can Socialist Spaniards Ride Market Forces?

Spain's Socialist government looks set to inflict the kind of damage on its economy in its first few months of office that has taken President Mitterrand two years in France. Increasing liberalism following the removal of the Franco regime has been swept away by a welter of controls and state diktats, and the economic gains of the last few years look like vanishing.     

Stock Prices and Financial Analysts' Recommendations

The recommendations of a Canadian brokerage house are evaluated by a number of techniques. The results reveal that an investor following the recommendations would have achieved significantly positive abnormal returns, even after allowing for transactions cost.     

Low-Risk Anomalies?

This paper shows that low-risk anomalies in the capital asset pricing model and in traditional factor models arise when investors require compensation for coskewness risk. Empirically, we find that option-implied ex ante skewness is strongly related to ex post residual coskewness, which allows us to construct coskewness factor-mimicking portfolios. Controlling for skewness renders the alphas of betting-against-beta and betting-against-volatility insignificant. We also show that the returns of beta- and volatility-sorted portfolios are driven largely by a single principal component, which in turn is explained largely by skewness.     

The Impact of Deregulation and Financial Innovation on Consumers: The Case of the Mortgage Market

We develop a technique to assess the impact of changes in mortgage markets on households, exploiting an implication of the permanent income hypothesis: The higher a household's expected future income, the higher its desired consumption, ceteris paribus. With perfect credit markets, desired consumption matches actual consumption and current spending forecasts future income. Because credit market imperfections mute this effect, the extent to which house spending predicts future income measures the "imperfectness" of mortgage markets. Using micro-data, we find that since the early 1980s, mortgage markets have become less imperfect in this sense, and securitization has played an important role.     

INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITION: DETERMINANTS OF ENTERPRISE EFFICIENCY IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA AND HUNGARY

Firm level data are employed to estimate frontier productionfunctions for Czechoslovak industry in 1990 and for Hungarianindustry in 1991. In both countries there is evidence of inefficientfirms, with the distribution of efficiency characterized bya small number of inefficient outliers. Enterprise efficiencyis positively related to firm size and negatively to managerialeffort expended in lobbying for easier targets, but export orientationhas no effect on efficiency. Most importantly, in Hungary'smore reformed economy, efficient firms are more profitable,while profit redistribution by the center in Czechoslovakialed to an inverse relationship between efficiency and profitability.