Knowledge that Transforms

This paper studies the effect of corruption on foreign direct investment. The sample covers bilateral investment from twelve source countries to 45 host countries. There are two central findings. First, a rise in either the tax rate on multinational firms or the corruption level in a host country reduces inward foreign direct investment (FDI). In a benchmark estimation, an increase in the corruption level from that of Singapore to that of Mexico would have the same negative effect on inward FDI as raising the tax rate by fifty percentage points. Second, American investors are averse to corruption in host countries, but not necessarily more so than average OECD investors, in spite of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977.

We introduce a simple allocation-of-time model to explain the high school athletic participation choice and the implications of this choice for educational and labor market outcomes. Four different factors that could explain athletic participation are identified in the context of this model. A variety of tests of the model are provided using two data sets: the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972. We find some evidence that athletic participation directly affects wages and educational attainment. However, much of the effect of athletic participation on wages and educational attainment appears to reflect differences across individuals in ability or value of leisure.

This study proposes using correlations between neighboring children in their later socioeconomic status to bound the proportion of inequality in socioeconomic outcomes that can be attributed to disparities in neighborhood background. We apply this approach to educational attainment data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has sampled neighboring children and followed them into adulthood. We find that, once the effects of a few readily observed family background characteristics are accounted for, the correlation between neighboring children in their eventual educational attainment is only about 0.1. Given that even this figure is inflated by neighbors' similarity in unmeasured aspects of family background, the results suggest a limited role for neighborhood factors in accounting for inequality in educational attainment.

We examine the structure of preferences for mitigating impacts of global climate change that will not occur during the lifetimes of most who are alive today. Because no market data exist for such distant markets, a statedpreference approach is used. The analysis is based on the random-parameters logit model, and the results indicate substantial heterogeneity in respondent preferences, that mean willingness to pay is a significant and increasing function of the scope of the impact, and, provocatively, that respondents have the same preferences over the two very different time horizons that we consider.

We study the impact of profit uncertainty on investment and whether or not this response is different in industries that are dominated by small firms versus those that are dominated by relatively larger firms. Our key findings are that the sign of the investment-uncertainty relationship is negative, and that the quantitative negative impact is substantially greater in industries dominated by small firms. These results are robust to accounting for potential endogeneity of the uncertainty measure, alternate procedures for measuring uncertainty, and alternate ways of segmenting industries into small- and large-firm groups.

This paper incorporates a Bayesian learning model into a hedonic framework to estimate the value that residents place on avoiding cancer risks from hazardous-waste sites. We show that residents are willing to pay to avoid cancer risks from Superfund sites before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) releases its assessment (known as the Remedial Investigation) of the site. Residents' willingness to pay to avoid risks actually decreases after the release of the Remedial Investigation, suggesting that the information lowers the perceived levels of risk. This estimated willingness to pay implies a statistical value of cancer similar to the value-of-life estimates in labor market studies.

Researchers using cross-sectional data have failed to produce systematic evidence that teacher salaries affect student outcomes. These studies generally do not account for non-pecuniary job attributes and alternative wage opportunities, which affect the opportunity cost of choosing to teach. When we employ the methodology used in previous studies, we replicate their results. However, once we adjust for labor market factors, we estimate that raising teacher wages by 10% reduces high school dropout rates by 3% to 4%. Our findings suggest that previous studies have failed to produce robust estimates because they lack adequate controls for non-wage aspects of teaching and market differences in alternative occupational opportunities.

This paper reexamines the benefits of pooling and, in addition, contrasts the performance of newly proposed heterogeneous estimators. The analysis utilizes a panel data set from 46 American states over the period 1963 to 1992 and a dynamic demand specification for cigarettes. Also, the forecast performance of the various estimators is compared.

It depends. If volatility fluctuates in a forecastable way, volatility forecasts are useful for risk management (hence the interest in volatility forecastability in the risk management literature). Volatility forecastability, however, varies with horizon, and different horizons are relevant in different applications. Moreover, existing assessments of volatility forecastability are plagued by the fact that they are joint assessments of volatility forecastability and an assumed model, and the results can vary not only with the horizon but also with the assumed model. To address this problem, we develop a model-free procedure for assessing volatility forecastability across horizons. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that volatility forecastability decays quickly with horizon. Volatility forecastability—although clearly of relevance for risk management at the short horizons relevant for, say, trading desk management—may be much less important at longer horizons.

In this paper, we examine empirically whether credit plays a role as a nonlinear propagator of shocks. This propagation takes the form of a threshold vector autoregression in which a regime change occurs if credit conditions cross a critical threshold. Using nonlinear impulseresponse functions, we evaluate the dynamics implied by the threshold model. These suggest that shocks have a larger effect on output in the ''tight'' credit regime than is normally the case, and that contractionary monetary shocks typically have a larger effect than expansionary shocks. Finally, using a nonlinear version of historical decompositions, we attempt to determine the relative contribution to output growth of shocks and the nonlinear structure.