A Fast Literature Search Engine based on top-quality journals, by Dr. Mingze Gao.
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Results 552 resources
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Schulz (2016) replicates the findings of van Binsbergen, Brandt, and Koijen (2012)–henceforth, BBK–and agrees that the average pretax returns on short-term dividend strips are higher than those of the index, but argues that the after-tax returns are not. He thus provides a possible economic interpretation of the results in BBK: taxes. Schulz (2016) estimates the differential tax rates of dividends versus capital gains from ex-dividend day returns. We show that these estimated tax rates are suspect and imprecisely measured, peaking at over 100 percent in some periods. The results in BBK are robust to using tax rates from the literature (Sialm 2009). The arguments in Schulz (2016) thus crucially depend on implausibly large tax estimates. We further discuss two other financial market imperfections discussed in the literature and show that they are also unlikely to explain the results in BBK.
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Regulations governing the energy efficiency of new buildings have become a cornerstone of US environmental policy. California enacted the first such codes in 1978 and has tightened them every few years since. I evaluate the resulting energy savings three ways: comparing energy used by houses constructed under different standards, controlling for building and occupant characteristics; examining how energy use varies with outdoor temperatures; and comparing energy used by houses of different vintages in California to that same difference in other states. All three approaches yield estimated energy savings significantly short of those projected when the regulations were enacted.
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In recent years, central banks have increasingly turned to forward guidance as a central tool of monetary policy. Standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance has huge effects on current outcomes, and these effects grow with the horizon of the forward guidance. We present a model in which the power of forward guidance is highly sensitive to the assumption of complete markets. When agents face uninsurable income risk and borrowing constraints, a precautionary savings effect tempers their responses to changes in future interest rates. As a consequence, forward guidance has substantially less power to stimulate the economy.
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Antipoverty programs in developing countries are often difficult to implement; in particular, many governments lack the capacity to deliver payments securely to targeted beneficiaries. We evaluate the impact of biometrically authenticated payments infrastructure ("Smartcards") on beneficiaries of employment (NREGS) and pension (SSP) programs in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, using a large-scale experiment that randomized the rollout of Smartcards over 157 subdistricts and 19 million people. We find that, while incompletely implemented, the new system delivered a faster, more predictable, and less corrupt NREGS payments process without adversely affecting program access. For each of these outcomes, treatment group distributions first-order stochastically dominated those of the control group. The investment was cost-effective, as time savings to NREGS beneficiaries alone were equal to the cost of the intervention, and there was also a significant reduction in the "leakage" of funds between the government and beneficiaries in both NREGS and SSP programs. Beneficiaries overwhelmingly preferred the new system for both programs. Overall, our results suggest that investing in secure payments infrastructure can significantly enhance 'state capacity' to implement welfare programs in developing countries.
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Because of scale effects, idea-based growth models imply that larger countries should be much richer than smaller ones. New trade models share the same counterfactual feature. In fact, new trade models exhibit other counterfactual implications associated with scale effects: import shares decrease and relative income levels increase too steeply with country size. We argue that these implications are largely a result of the standard assumption that countries are fully integrated domestically. We depart from this assumption by treating countries as collections of regions that face positive costs to trade among themselves. The resulting model is largely consistent with the data.
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I present novel empirical evidence on the term structure of the equity risk premium. In contrast to previous research that documented high discount rates for the short-term component of the market portfolio, I show evidence for an unconditionally flat term structure of equity risk premia. The tension with previous literature arises largely as a result of differential treatments of heterogeneous investment taxes, manifested in micro evidence on abnormal equity returns on ex-dividend days, and liquidity. The results not only help resolve an important recent "puzzle" but provide further important insights on the role of investment taxes in asset pricing.
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This paper exploits quasi-experimental variation in tariffs in southern Africa to estimate trade elasticities. Traded quantities respond only weakly to a 30 percent reduction in the average nominal tariff rate. Trade flow data combined with primary data on firm behavior and bribe payments suggest that corruption is a potential explanation for the observed low elasticities. In contexts of pervasive corruption, even small bribes can significantly reduce tariffs, making tariff liberalization schemes less likely to affect the extensive and the intensive margins of firms' import behavior. The tariff liberalization scheme is, however, still associated with improved incentives to accurately report quantities of imported goods, and with a significant reduction in bribe transfers from importers to public officials.
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We consider how a firm dynamically allocates business among several suppliers to motivate them in a relational contract. The firm chooses one supplier who exerts private effort. Output is non-contractible, and each supplier observes only his own relationship with the principal. In this setting, allocation decisions constrain the transfers that can be promised to suppliers in equilibrium. Consequently, optimal allocation decisions condition on payoff-irrelevant past performance to make strong incentives credible. We construct a dynamic allocation rule that attains first-best whenever any allocation rule does. This allocation rule performs strictly better than any rule that depends only on payoff-relevant information.
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We use a natural experiment in Indonesia to provide causal evidence on the role of location-specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity. From 1979-1988, the Transmigration Program relocated two million migrants from rural Java and Bali to new rural settlements in the Outer Islands. Villages assigned migrants from regions with more similar agroclimatic endowments exhibit higher rice productivity and nighttime light intensity one to two decades later. We find some evidence of migrants' adaptation to agroclimatic change. Overall, our results suggest that regional productivity differences may overstate the potential gains from migration.
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We study an investor who is unsure of the dynamics of the economy. Not only are parameters unknown, but the investor does not even know what order model to estimate. She estimates her consumption process nonparametrically–allowing potentially infinite-order dynamics–and prices assets using a pessimistic model that minimizes lifetime utility subject to a constraint on statistical plausibility. The equilibrium is exactly solvable and the pricing model always includes long-run risks. With risk aversion of 4.7, the model matches major facts about asset prices, consumption, and dividends. The paper provides a novel link between ambiguity aversion and nonparametric estimation.
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Journals
- American Economic Review (266)
- Journal of Finance (72)
- Journal of Financial Economics (123)
- Review of Financial Studies (91)
Topic
- Bond (16)
- CEO (13)
- Capital Structure (6)
- Director (4)
- Mergers and Acquisitions (4)
Resource type
- Journal Article (552)