There is now a large literature that attributes the investment decline in heavily indebted countries to the effects of the international debt crisis which began in 1982. However, these countries also faced falling export prices and high world real interest rates in the early 1980s, and these shocks could have directly caused investment to decline. One way to test for debt effects is to see whether equations without any debt-related information can nevertheless forecast the investment declines that these countries experienced. This paper shows that such equations can forecast investment in many indebted countries, and thus casts doubt on many debt-related explanations for the investment declines. I.

We estimate the conditional distribution of trade-to-trade price changes using ordered probit, a statistical model for discrete random variables. This approach recognizes that transaction price changes occur in discrete increments, typically eighths of a dollar, and occur at irregularly-spaced time intervals. Unlike existing models of discrete transactions prices, ordered probit can quantify the effects of other economic variables like volume, past price changes, and the time between trades on price changes. Using 1988 transactions data for over 100 randomly chosen U.S. stocks, we estimate the ordered probit model via maximum likelihood and use the parameter estimates to measure several transaction-related quantities, such as the price impact of trades of a given size, the tendency towards price reversals from one transaction to the next, and the empirical significance of price discreteness.

We analyze taxpayer choices of return preparation services. We distinguish between two types of nonpaid preparers, six types of paid third parties, and self-preparation. Among other things, we find significant differences in the factors which explain the demand for paid third parties who are and are not able to represent clients before the IRS. Among these factors are increases in IRS audit rates and the frequency of IRS penalties.

We undertake a comprehensive investigation of price and volume co-movement using daily New York Stock Exchange data from 1928 to 1987. We adjust the data to take into account well-known calendar effects and long-run trends. To describe the process, we use a seminonparametric estimate of the joint density of current price change and volume conditional on past price changes and volume. Four empirical regularities are found: (i) positive correlation between conditional volatility and volume; (ii) large price movements are followed by high volume; (iii) conditioning on lagged volume substantially attenuates the “leverage” effect; and (iv) after conditioning on lagged volume, there is a positive risk-return relation.

Nasser Daneshvary, Henry W. Herzog, Jr., Richard A. Hofler, Alan M. Schlottmann, Job Search and Immigrant Assimilation: An Earnings Frontier Approach, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 74, No. 3 (Aug., 1992), pp. 482-492

Standard models of informed speculation suggest that traders try to learn information that others do not have. This result implicitly relies on the assumption that speculators have long horizons, i.e, can hold the asset forever. By contrast, we show that if speculators have short horizons, they may herd on the same information, trying to learn what other informed traders also know. There can be multiple herding equilibria, and herding speculators may even choose to study information that is completely unrelated to fundamentals. These equilibria are informationally inefficient.

We estimate and compare a variety of continuous-time models of the short-term riskless rate using the Generalized Method of Moments. We find that the most successful models in capturing the dynamics of the short-term interest rate are those that allow the volatility of interest rate changes to be highly sensitive to the level of the riskless rate. A number of well-known models perform poorly in the comparisons because of their implicit restrictions on term structure volatility. We show that these results have important implications for the use of different term structure models in valuing interest rate contingent claims and in hedging interest rate risk.