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"2002-2004"
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Do Extended Unemployment Benefits Lengthen Unemployment Spells? Evidence from Recent Cycles in the U.S. Labor Market
In response to the recession of 2007–2009, the maximum duration of U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to an unprecedented 99 weeks. We exploit variation in the timing and size of the UI benefit extensions across states to estimate their overall impact on unemployment exits, comparing the most recent and prior extension episodes. We find a small but statistically significant increase in labor force attachment due to extended UI in both periods with little or no impact on job finding. Despite these small estimates, extended benefits can account for a substantial share of the increase in long-term unemployment.
Journal Article
Institutional Context and the Allocation of Entrepreneurial Effort
The type of activity in which entrepreneurs engage is likely to influence the potential contribution of entrepreneurship to economic growth and prosperity. Yet the entrepreneurship literature has focused largely on identifying the determinants of the level, rather than the type, of entrepreneurial activity. In this paper we hypothesize that a country's institutional environment will influence the allocation of entrepreneurial effort, and in particular will influence the extent to which entrepreneurial effort is directed toward high-growth activities. We test our hypotheses using data on 40 countries over the period 2002-2004. We find that the allocation of entrepreneurial effort toward high-growth activities is positively related to a country's financial and educational activities targeted at entrepreneurship, and is negatively related to a country's level of corruption. Our study is the first to provide empirical evidence that institutional characteristics significantly influence the allocation of entrepreneurial effort, and it is therefore the first to identify an empirically important channel through which a nation's institutions may contribute to economic growth.
Journal Article
Seeds of distrust: conflict in Uganda
We study the effect of civil conflict on social capital, focusing on Uganda's experience during the last decade. Using individual and county-level data, we document large causal effects on trust and ethnic identity of an exogenous outburst of ethnic conflicts in 2002-2005. We exploit two waves of survey data from Afrobarometer (Round 4 Afrobarometer Survey in Uganda, 2000, 2008), including information on socioeconomic characteristics at the individual level, and geo-referenced measures of fighting events from ACLED. Our identification strategy exploits variations in the both the spatial and ethnic intensity of fighting. We find that more intense fighting decreases generalized trust and increases ethnic identity. The effects are quantitatively large and robust to a number of control variables, alternative measures of violence, and different statistical techniques involving ethnic and spatial fixed effects and instrumental variables. Controlling for the intensity of violence during the conflict, we also document that post-conflict economic recovery is slower in ethnically fractionalized counties. Our findings are consistent with the existence of a self-reinforcing process between conflicts and ethnic cleavages.
Journal Article
Conflicts of Interest and Stock Recommendations: The Effects of the Global Settlement and Related Regulations
We study the effect of the Global Analyst Research Settlement and related regulations on sell-side research. These regulations attempted to mitigate the interdependence between research and investment banking. We document that following the regulations many brokerage houses have migrated from the traditional five-tier rating system to a three-tier system. Optimistic recommendations have become less frequent and more informative, whereas neutral and pessimistic recommendations have become more frequent and less informative. Importantly, the overall informativeness of recommendations has declined. The likelihood of issuing optimistic recommendations no longer depends on affiliation with the covered firm, although affiliated analysts are still reluctant to issue pessimistic recommendations.
Journal Article
Subsidies and Crowding Out: A Double-Hurdle Model of Fertilizer Demand in Malawi
This article uses a double-hurdle model with panel data from Malawi to investigate how fertilizer subsidies affect farmer demand for commercial fertilizer. The article controls for potential endogeneity caused by the nonrandom targeting of fertilizer subsidy recipients. Results show that on average 1 additional kilogram of subsidized fertilizer crowds out 0.22 kg of commercial fertilizer, but crowding out ranges from 0.18 among the poorest farmers to 0.30 among relatively nonpoor farmers. This indicates that targeting fertilizer subsidies to the rural poor is likely to maximize the contribution of the subsidy program to total fertilizer use.
Journal Article
A GARCH Option Pricing Model with Filtered Historical Simulation
We propose a new method for pricing options based on GARCH models with filtered historical innovations. In an incomplete market framework, we allow for different distributions of historical and pricing return dynamics, which enhances the model's flexibility to fit market option prices. An extensive empirical analysis based on S&P 500 index options shows that our model outperforms other competing GARCH pricing models and ad hoc Black-Scholes models. We show that the flexible change of measure, the asymmetric GARCH volatility, and the nonparametric innovation distribution induce the accurate pricing performance of our model. Using a nonparametric approach, we obtain decreasing state-price densities per unit probability as suggested by economic theory and corroborating our GARCH pricing model. Implied volatility smiles appear to be explained by asymmetric volatility and negative skewness of filtered historical innovations.
Journal Article
The Price Pressure of Aggregate Mutual Fund Flows
Using a unique database of aggregate daily flows to equity mutual funds in Israel, we find strong support for the “temporary price pressure hypothesis” regarding mutual fund flows: Mutual fund flows create temporary price pressure that is subsequently corrected. We find that flows are positively autocorrelated, and are correlated with market returns (R2 of 20%). Our main finding is that approximately one-half of the price change is reversed within 10 trading days. This support for the “temporary price pressure hypothesis” complements microstructure research concerning price impact and price noise in stocks by indicating price noise at the aggregate market level.
Journal Article