Wagering markets provide a natural laboratory for testing models of market prices and behavior under uncertainty. The literature on wagering, albeit contentious, has established the following. First, prices set in these markets, to a first approximation, are efficient forecasts of outcomes. Second, price changes in these markets are driven by an informed class of bettors and improve prediction. Nevertheless, there are important departures from generic notions of market efficiency. Recent models focusing on diverse information, heterogeneous agents, and transaction costs help to explain these findings.

This paper studies the term structure of real rates, expected inflation, and inflation risk premia. The analysis is based on new estimates of the real term structure derived from the prices of index-linked and nominal debt in the U.K. I find strong evidence to reject both the Fisher Hypothesis and versions of the Expectations Hypothesis for real rates. The estimates also imply the presence of time-varying inflation risk premia throughout the term structure.

This paper examines the extent to which swings in stock prices can be related to variations in the discounted value of expected future dividends when investors face uncertainty about their future behaviour. I develop an econometric model that accounts for the instability of U.S. dividend growth and discount rates during the past 120 years. Estimates of the model reveal that changing forecasts of future dividend growth account for more than 90% of the predictable variations in dividend-prices. The estimates also imply that instability in the dividend and discount rate processes contribute significantly to the predictability of long-horizon stock returns.

A high proportion of skilled workers in the labor force implies a large market size for skill-complementary technologies, and encourages faster upgrading of the productivity of skilled workers. As a result, an increase in the supply of skills reduces the skill premium in the short run, but then it induces skill-biased technical change and increases the skill premium, possibly even above its initial value. This theory suggests that the rapid increase in the proportion of college graduates in the United States labor force in the 1970s may have been a causal factor in both the decline in the college premium during the 1970s and the large increase in inequality during the 1980s.

Journal Article A New Assessment of Openness and Inflation: Reply Get access David Romer David Romer University of California, Berkeley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 113, Issue 2, May 1998, Pages 649–652, https://doi.org/10.1162/003355398555612 Published: 01 May 1998

This paper examines the impact of reducing the tick size on market-making behavior on The Toronto Stock Exchange. The results indicate a significant decrease in the percentage of trades of fewer than 10,000 shares involving the upstairs traders and a significant increase in the percentage of trades of fewer than 1,000 share involving the designated market makers. Consistent with this finding, the upstairs traders earn significantly lower returns on non-block trades and the designated market markers earn lower returns on trades smaller than 1,000 shares. We conclude the tick size reduction benefits the trading public.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers, G20, G24.

This study uses Social Security data on the earnings of military applicants to the all-volunteer forces to compare the earnings of Armed Forces veterans with the earnings of military applicants who did not enlist. Matching, regression, and Instrumental Variables (IV) estimates are presented. The matching and regression estimates control for most of the characteristics used by the military to select qualified applicants from the military applicant pool. The IV estimates exploit an error in the scoring of exams used by the military to screen applicants between 1976 and 1980. All the estimates suggest that soldiers who served in the early 1980s were paid considerably more than comparable civilians while in the military. Military service also appears to have led to a modest (less than 10 percent) increase in the civilian earnings of nonwhite veterans while actually reducing the civilian earnings of white veterans. Most of the positive effects of military service on civilian earnings appear to be attributable to improved employment prospects for veterans.

This paper describes three new sources of data on small business finances: Bank Call Report data on small business lending, the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), and the 1993 National Survey of Small Business Finances (NSSBF). Each of these data sources offers publicly available micro-level data useful for examining a wide variety of issues and questions about small business finances. A number of studies which have utilized these data are cited and information on how to access these data is provided.

This paper proposes a Bayesian approach to incorporating specification and identification uncertainty into a VAR analysis of the dynamic effects of money supply shocks on the macroeconomy. The approach follows Poirier (1991) in averaging over discrete model specifications in forming posterior densities of the dynamic responses to such shocks. Two distinct means of identifying money supply shocks are considered here: one that imposes contemporaneous restrictions, and one that imposes long-run monetary neutrality. I estimate bounds on dynamic responses that account for specification and parameter uncertainty, and find strong evidence of short-run real effects of money on the economy, including a liquidity effect for both long-term and short-term interest rates. Furthermore, some results differ substantially across identifying restrictions if model uncertainty is ignored.

Multinational subsidiaries are generally financed with a mixture of internal debt and equity from the parent corporation. Yet, financial theory has relatively little to say regarding the debt-equity tradeoff and the timing of dividend repatriation in an international setting. In this paper, we derive optimal rules for financing multinational subsidiaries that take into account tax rate differentials and the exploitation of tax-loss credits. We develop a formal multi-period dynamic model to characterize the optimal dividend repatriation policy and the optimal choice of debt-equity mix. The model generates several testable empirical implications that are consistent with available empirical evidence and several others that have not been either discussed or empirically tested in the literature.