This paper tests for the existence of discrimination in consumer lending by finance companies in Texas before the passage of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. The data used permit conclusions about discrimination in the market, not just in the behavior of a small number of creditors. The tests suggest that lenders did not discriminate against factors now protected by ECOA. These companies may have discriminated against single borrowers of both sexes and against widows but not married women or divorced borrowers. The results support the view that consumer credit markets as a whole were not characterized by widespread systematic discrimination. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.

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This study constructs dynamic welfare measures for a system of futures markets that express the allocative efficiency of a particular market as a function of its accuracy and speed of adjustment following a shock to the system. The system comprises futures prices for T-bills, exchange rates (German mark, British pound, Canadian dollar and yen), and agricultural commodities (corn, wheat, and cotton) for delivery in 1981 and 1982. The results suggest that, although agricultural, exchange, and financial markets allover-react to a disturbance, agricultural markets do so to a much greater degree. Owing to their much greater size, however, the welfare loss arising from the overshooting is likely to be much larger for interest rate and exchange markets.

Richard C. K. Burdekin, Paul Burkett, A Re-Examination of the Monetary Model of Exchange Market Pressure: Canada, 1963-1988, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 72, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 677-681

Econometric analysis often addresses model misspecification due to the improper pooling of observations. One major problem in testing for improper pooling is the requirement that alternative stratifications be obtained from others through sets of restrictions (i.e., that they be nested stratifications), thus eliminating a large class of alternative non-nested stratifications. We propose that non-nested tests can be used to compare non-nested stratifications. We formally define the econometric problem, and show the applicability of the J, JA, Cox and non-nested F tests. We then use the four tests to compare spatial stratifications in a model of a house price determination. Copyright 1990 by MIT Press.