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作者：Zimmer, David M.
作者单位：Western Kentucky University
摘要：Due to its simplicity and familiarity, the Gaussian copula is popular in calculating risk in collaterized debt obligations, but it imposes asymptotic independence such that extreme events appear to be unrelated. This restriction might be innocuous in normal times, but during extreme events, such as the housing crisis, the Gaussian copula might be inappropriate. This paper explores various copula specifications and finds that the degree to which housing prices are related based on the Gaussian ...
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作者：Burkhauser, Richard V.; Feng, Shuaizhang; Jenkins, Stephen P.; Larrimore, Jeff
作者单位：Cornell University; University of Melbourne; Shanghai University of Finance & Economics; University of Essex
摘要：Although most U.S. income inequality research is based on public use March CPS data, a new wave of research using IRS tax return data reports substantially faster inequality growth for recent years. We show that these apparently inconsistent estimates are largely reconciled when the income distribution and inequality are defined the same way. Using internal CPS data for 1967 to 2006, we show that CPS-based estimates of top income shares are similar to IRS data-based estimates reported by Piket...
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作者：Koetter, Michael; Kolari, James W.; Spierdijk, Laura
作者单位：University of Groningen; Texas A&M University System; Texas A&M University College Station
摘要：The quiet life hypothesis posits that firms with market power incur inefficiencies rather than reap monopolistic rents. We propose a simple adjustment to Lerner indices to account for the possibility of forgone rents to test this hypothesis. For a large sample of U.S. commercial banks, we find that adjusted Lerner indices are significantly larger than conventional Lerner indices and trending upward over time. Instrumental variable regressions reject the quiet life hypothesis for cost inefficie...
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作者：Freedman, Seth; Kearney, Melissa; Lederman, Mara
作者单位：University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of Toronto
摘要：In 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued 212 recalls of toys and other children's products, a sizable increase from previous years. We investigate changes in toy sales following these recalls. We find that for manufacturers that had recalls, unit sales of the types of toys involved in the recall fell relative to their sales of toys in other categories. We do not find evidence of within-manufacturer spillovers to dissimilar toys. We do, however, find large industry-wide spillovers...
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作者：Bruhn, Miriam; Gallego, Francisco A.
作者单位：The World Bank; Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
摘要：Levels of development vary widely within countries in the Americas. We argue that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial era, when colonizers engaged in different economic activities in different regions of a country. We present evidence consistent with the view that bad activities (those that depended heavily on labor exploitation) led to lower economic development today than good activities (those that did not rely on labor exploitation). Our results also suggest that differenc...
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作者：Wang, Shing-Yi
作者单位：New York University
摘要：This paper provides new evidence on the impact of private property rights and employer-provided housing on entrepreneurship. I find an increase in self-employment following a reform in urban China that allowed state employees who were renting state-owned housing the opportunity to buy their homes at subsidized prices. I develop a model of job choice to test two mechanisms that might explain how the reform increased entrepreneurship. I find evidence that the reform reduced labor mobility costs ...
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作者：Manacorda, Marco
摘要：This paper uses administrative longitudinal microdata on junior high school students in Uruguay to measure the effect of grade failure on students' subsequent school outcomes. Exploiting the discontinuity induced by a rule establishing automatic grade failure for pupils with more than three failed subjects, I show that grade failure leads to substantial dropout and lower educational attainment even four to five years after grade failure occurred.
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作者：Evans, William N.; Moore, Timothy J.
作者单位：University of Notre Dame; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park
摘要：We document a within-month mortality cycle where deaths decline before the first day of the month and spike after the first. This cycle is present across a wide variety of causes and demographic groups. A similar cycle exists for a range of economic activities, suggesting the mortality cycle may be due to short-term variation in levels of economic activity. We provide evidence that the within-month activity cycle is generated by liquidity. Our results suggest a causal pathway whereby liquidity...
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作者：Besedes, Tibor; Deck, Cary; Sarangi, Sudipta; Shor, Mikhael
作者单位：University System of Georgia; Georgia Institute of Technology; University of Arkansas System; University of Arkansas Fayetteville; Chapman University System; Chapman University; Louisiana State University System; Louisiana State University; University of Connecticut
摘要：Using controlled experiments, we examine how individuals make choices when faced with multiple options. Choice tasks are designed to mimic the selection of health insurance, prescription drug, or retirement savings plans. In our experiment, available options can be objectively ranked, allowing us to examine optimal decision making. First, the probability of a person selecting the optimal option declines as the number of options increases, with the decline being more pronounced for older subjec...
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作者：Brueckner, Markus; Ciccone, Antonio; Tesei, Andrea
作者单位：National University of Singapore; Barcelona School of Economics
摘要：We examine the effect of oil price fluctuations on democratic institutions over the 1960-2007 period. We also exploit the very persistent response of income to oil price fluctuations to study the effect of persistent (oil-price-driven) income shocks on democracy. Our results indicate that countries with greater net oil exports over GDP see improvements in democratic institutions following upturns in international oil prices. We estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in per capita GDP grow...
