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Sweep programs and optimal monetary aggregation

Journal of Banking & Finance 2005 29(2), 483-508
This paper examines the admissibility of monetary aggregate groupings for the US over 1993–2001, based upon weak separability. We investigate the impact of retail and commercial demand deposit sweep programs on the separability of monetary asset groupings. Weak separability is tested using the Swofford–Whitney and Fleissig–Whitney tests. We use Varian's measurement error adjustment procedure to eliminate violations of the Generalized Axiom of Revealed Preference (GARP). When funds from both retail and commercial demand deposit sweep programs are placed within checkable deposits, all groupings, narrow and broad, pass GARP and weak separability. For groupings based on conventional money measures, tests tend to favor broad aggregates.

Ownership and Control in Outsourcing To China: Estimating the Property-Rights Theory Of the Firm*

Quarterly Journal of Economics 2005 120(2), 729-761
In this paper, we develop a simple model of international outsourcing and apply it to processing trade in China.We observe China's processing exports broken down by who owns the plant and by who controls the inputs the plant processes.Multinational firms engaged in export processing in China tend to split factory ownership and input control with managers in China: the most common outcome is to have foreign factory ownership but Chinese control over input purchases.To account for this organizational arrangement, we appeal to a property-rights model of the firm.Multinational firms and the Chinese factory managers with whom they contract divide the surplus associated with export processing by Nash bargaining.Investments in input search, production, and marketing are partially relationship specific.In our benchmarks estimates, this relationship specificity is lowest in southern coastal provinces, where export markets are thickest, and highest in interior and northern provinces.The probability contracts are enforced has a similar pattern and is the lowest along the southern coast and the highest in the north.

The dynamics of dealer markets and trading costs

Journal of Banking & Finance 2005 29(12), 3041-3059
In this study we examine the temporal dynamics of dealer market share and their ramification for competition and trading costs using a large sample of NASDAQ securities. Our results show that although the total market share of the top five dealers is relatively stable over time, there is significant monthly variation in the composition of the top five dealers. We show that market share turbulence among top dealers is another form of competition that narrows bid–ask spreads, especially for stocks with less competitive market structure.

Vertical Production Networks in Multinational Firms

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2005 87(4), 664-678
In recent decades, growth of world trade has been driven largely by rapid growth of trade in intermediate inputs. Much of input trade involves multinational firms locating input processing in their foreign affiliates, thereby creating global vertical production networks. We use firm-level data on U.S. multinationals to examine trade in intermediate inputs for further processing between parent firms and their foreign affiliates. Among our main findings are that demand for imported inputs is higher when affiliates face lower trade costs, lower wages for less-skilled labor, and lower corporate income tax rates.

The Stock Market's Reaction to Unemployment News: Why Bad News Is Usually Good for Stocks

Journal of Finance 2005 60(2), 649-672
We find that on average, an announcement of rising unemployment is good news for stocks during economic expansions and bad news during economic contractions. Unemployment news bundles three types of primitive information relevant for valuing stocks: information about future interest rates, the equity risk premium, and corporate earnings and dividends. The nature of the information bundle, and hence the relative importance of the three effects, changes over time depending on the state of the economy. For stocks as a group, information about interest rates dominates during expansions and information about future corporate dividends dominates during contractions.

The dynamics of international equity market expectations

Journal of Financial Economics 2005 77(2), 257-288
This paper develops a noisy rational expectations model of the way in which international investors adjust their expectations of asset payoffs in a given country in response not only to public information signals but also to private information signals whose precision differs across investors. The model predicts that the perceptions of investors in one country about the future market returns in another country are related differently to realized past returns depending on their informational disadvantage relative to other investors: the greater is that informational disadvantage, the greater is the change in perception associated with returns. The predictions are confirmed by monthly survey data of institutional money managers investing in developed markets from 1995 to 2000.

Behavioral Identification in Coalitional Bargaining: An Experimental Analysis of Demand Bargaining and Alternating Offers

Econometrica 2005 73(6), 1893-1937
Alternating-offer and demand bargaining models of legislative bargaining make very different predictions in terms of both ex ante and ex post distribution of payoffs, as well as in the role of the order of play. The experiment shows that actual bargaining behavior is not as sensitive to the different bargaining rules as the theoretical point predictions, whereas the comparative statics are in line with both models. We compare our results to studies that attempt to distinguish between these two approaches using field data, finding strong similarities between the laboratory and field data regardless of the underlying bargaining process. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.

Bond Risk Premia

American Economic Review 2005 95(1), 138-160
We study time variation in expected excess bond returns. We run regressions of one-year excess returns on initial forward rates. We find that a single factor, a single tent-shaped linear combination of forward rates, predicts excess returns on one-to five-year maturity bonds with R 2 up to 0.44. The return-forecasting factor is countercyclical and forecasts stock returns. An important component of the return-forecasting factor is unrelated to the level, slope, and curvature movements described by most term structure models. We document that measurement errors do not affect our central results.

Distributional and Efficiency Impacts of Gasoline Taxes: An Econometrically Based Multi-market Study

American Economic Review 2005 95(2), 282-287
Distributional and Efficiency Impacts of Gasoline Taxes: An Econometrically Based Multi-market Study by Antonio M. Bento, Lawrence H. Goulder, Emeric Henry, Mark R. Jacobsen and Roger H. von Haefen. Published in volume 95, issue 2, pages 282-287 of American Economic Review, May 2005

International Migration, Self‐Selection, and the Distribution of Wages: Evidence from Mexico and the United States

Journal of Political Economy 2005 113(2), 239-281
We use the 1990 and 2000 Mexican and U.S. population censuses to test Borjas's negative‐selection hypothesis that the less skilled are those most likely to migrate from countries with high skill premia/earnings inequality to countries with low skill premia/earnings inequality. We find that Mexican immigrants in the United States are more educated than nonmigrants in Mexico; and were Mexican immigrants to be paid according to current skill prices in Mexico, they would be concentrated in the middle of Mexico's wage distribution. These results are inconsistent with the negative‐selection hypothesis and instead suggest that there is intermediate selection of immigrants from Mexico.