household choices and child development the growth in labor market participation among women with young children has raised concerns about the potential negative impact of the mother s absence from home on child outcomes recent data show that mother s time spent with children has declined in the last decade while the indicators of children s cognitive and noncognitive outcomes have worsened the objective of our research is to estimate a model of the cognitive development process of children nested within an otherwise standard model of household life cycle behavior the model generates endogenous dynamic interrelationships between the child quality and employment processes in the household which are found to be consistent with patterns observed in the data the estimated model is used to explore the eects of schooling subsidies and employment restrictions on household welfare and child development

sense and surprise in competitive trade theory 2010 weai presidential address i introduction the competitive theory of international trade is well known for its abundance of paradoxes perhaps the most widely known is the leontief paradox associated with the rather startling results presented by leontief 1953 that the trade pattern of the united states suggested that its export sectors were more labor intensive than factor proportions found in its import competing sectors this result stimulated decades of research but is not the focus of the present paper other so called paradoxes include the metzler 1949 result wherein a country levying a tariff on an imported item may end up with a lowering of its domestic price that is a tariff may not be protective 1 lerner 1936 who earlier hinted at the metzler outcome emphasized the possibility that a tariff might instead worsen a country s terms of trade which is at the opposite extreme to the metzler result both of these paradoxes are attributed to possible income effects in demand more recently income effects stemming from asymmetry in demand patterns among countries were shown to open the door to paradoxical results if one country makes a transfer to another in a world in which other countries are also engaged in trade in the same commodities the surprising results the giver in the transfer might end up better off i e it may pay to give rather than to receive and or the recipient of the transfer may end up worse off 2 finally a classic result that does not depend on asymmetries in taste patterns but rather upon the degree of elasticity in demand and the nature of growth is the question of whether a country that unequivocally grows transformation schedule shifts out can be made worse off as a consequence of growth the so called immiserizing growth paradox 3 this is an issue familiar to particular sectors of the economy for example agriculture can a good harvest yield lower returns because of the subsequent price fall instead of revisiting these familiar paradoxes here i wish to concentrate on the production side of competitive models used in international trade and to focus on the question involving ways of judging economic models clearly the question of realism often comes up whether it is in terms of assumptions made or of outcomes expected here i suggest a different criterion does the model conform in many ways to common sense that is would one be tempted to suggest that the model is not necessary because common sense would lead to the same results and if it does do the outcomes in certain scenarios seem to be paradoxical or surprising if so can the model reveal in simple terms why these somewhat surprising results make sense 4 i shall restrict myself to a pair of basic models of production used in competitive trade theory the specific factors model on the one hand and the heckscher ohlin model on the other i shall argue that in many ways both conform to common sense but in addition provide the very tools that expose the underlying rationale for surprise ii a preliminary question consider any economy that is characterized by competitive markets and constant returns to scale technology suppose for such an economy there is an increase in the factor endowment bundle to fix on an example suppose there is an increase in the economy s labor force the very general question i wish to ask is how does such an economy absorb this increased endowment to maintain full employment of all factors note that if this economy is not engaged in international trade there will likely result a change in commodity prices as they adjust in order to equilibrate local supply and demand given the points i wish to make later let me assume that the country is engaged in free trade with the rest of the world if this economy were particularly small world prices could be taken as given even if world prices are disturbed it is legitimate to ask how the economy absorbs the extra supplies before any change in commodity prices takes place

sports sentiment and stock returns this paper investigates the stock market reaction to sudden changes in investor mood motivated by psychological evidence of a strong link between soccer outcomes and mood we use international soccer results as our primary mood variable we find a significant market decline after soccer losses for example a loss in the world cup elimination stage leads to a next day abnormal stock return of 49 basis points this loss effect is stronger in small stocks and in more important games and is robust to methodological changes we also document a loss effect after international cricket rugby and basketball games this paper employs a novel mood variable international soccer results to investigate the effect of investor sentiment on asset prices using a cross section of 39 countries we find that losses in soccer matches have an economically and statistically significant negative effect on the losing country s stock market for example elimination from a major international soccer tournament is associated with a next day return on the national stock market index that is 38 basis points lower than average we also document a loss effect after international cricket rugby and basketball games on average the effect is smaller in magnitude for these other sports than for soccer but is still economically and statistically significant we find no evidence of a corresponding effect after wins for any of the sports that we study controlling for the pre game expected outcome we are able to reject the hypothesis that the loss effect after soccer games is driven by economic factors such as reduced productivity or lost revenues we

the causal effect of income on health evidence from german reunification we investigate whether there was a causal effect of income changes on the health satisfaction of east and west germans in the years following reunification our data source is the german socio economic panel gsoep between 1984 and 2002 and we fit a recently proposed fixed effects ordinal estimator to our health measures and use a causal decomposition technique to account for panel attrition we find evidence of a significant positive effect of income changes on health satisfaction but the quantitative size of this effect is small this is the case with respect to current income and a measure of permanent income

the macro and asset pricing implications of rising italian uncertainty evidence from a novel news based macroeconomic policy uncertainty index abstract we develop a new monthly and daily index of economic policy uncertainty for italy based on articles from the sole 24 ore a popular italian business daily newspaper var investigations document that an unexpected rise in the sole 24 ore news based epu index epu24 has mild effects on the real economic activity cross sectional asset pricing tests then show that both monthly and daily epu24 shocks command a positive risk premium a standard event study finally indicates the presence of statistically significant positive cumulative abnormal returns cars in the energy sector following different categories of policy related events negative and significant cars in the financial sector are instead found to be generated by international related events and political elections

the short term mortality consequences of income receipt many studies find that households increase their co nsumption after the receipt of expected income payments a result inconsistent wit h the life cycle permanent income hypothesis consumption can increase adverse healt h events such as traffic accidents heart attacks and strokes in this pape r we examine the short term mortality consequences of income receipt we find that mortality increases following the arrival of monthly social security payments re gular wage payments for military personnel the 2001 tax rebates and alaska permane nt fund dividend payments the increase in short run mortality is large potential ly eliminating some of the protective benefits of additional income

estimating the effect of income on health and mortality using lottery prizes as an exogenous source of variation in income a vast literature has established a strong positive relation between income and health status and a negative relation with mortality this paper studies the effects of income on health and mortality using only the part of income variation due to a truly exogenous factor monetary lottery prizes of individuals the findings are that higher income causally generates good health and that this effect is of a similar magnitude as when traditional estimation techniques are used a 10 percent income increase improves health by about 4 5 percent of a standard deviation

tackling false positives in business research a statistical toolbox with applications serious concerns have been raised that false positive findings are widespread in empirical research in business disciplines this is largely because researchers almost exclusively adopt the p value less than 0 05 criterion for statistical significance and they are often not fully aware of large sample biases which can potentially mislead their research outcomes this paper proposes that a statistical toolbox rather than a single hammer be used in empirical research which offers researchers a range of statistical instruments including a range of alternatives to the p value criterion such as the bayesian methods optimal significance level sample size selection equivalence testing and exploratory data analyses it is found that the positive results obtained under the p value criterion cannot stand when the toolbox is applied to three notable studies in finance

stock market returns a note on temperature anomaly this study investigates whether stock market returns are related to temperature research in psychology has shown that temperature significantly affects mood and mood changes in turn cause behavioral changes evidence suggests that lower temperature can lead to aggression while higher temperature can lead to both apathy and aggression aggression could result in more risk taking while apathy could impede risk taking we therefore expect lower temperature to be related to higher stock returns and higher temperature to be related to higher or lower stock returns depending on the trade off between the two competing effects we examine many stock markets world wide and find a statistically significant negative correlation between temperature and returns across the whole range of temperature apathy dominates aggression when temperature is high the observed negative correlation is robust to alternative tests and retains its statistical significance after controlling for various known anomalies

exploring the health wealth nexus the causal links between health and economic resources have long concerned social scientists we use four waves of data from the panel study of income dynamics psid to analyze the impact of wealth upon an individual s health status the difficulty in approaching this task that has bedeviled previous studies is that wealth may be endogenous a priori it is just as likely that changes in health affect wealth as vice versa we argue that inheritance is a suitable instrument for the change in wealth and implement a straightforward instrumental variables strategy to deal with this problem our results suggest that the causal relationship running from wealth to health may not be as strong as first appears in the data wealth exerts a positive and statistically significant effect on health status but it is very small in magnitude instrumental variables estimation leaves the point estimate approximately the same but renders it insignificantly different from zero and even when the point estimate is increased by twice its standard error s e the quantitative effect is small we conclude that the wealth health connection is not driven by short run changes in wealth

international evidence on the robustness of the day of the week effect consistent with connolly s 1989 1991 evidence this study finds that sample size and or error term adjustments render u s day of the week effects statistically insignificant in contrast day of the week effects in seven european countries and in canada and hong kong are robust to individual sample size or error term adjustments and day of the week effects in five european countries survive the simultaneous imposition of both types of adjustments in most countries where day of the week effects are robust however the effects are statistically significant in not more than two weeks out of the month these findings are inconsistent with explanations of the day of the week effect based on institutional differences or on the arrival of new information thus in the absence of other potential explanations already dismissed by jaffe and westerfield 1985 evidence in this study further complicates the international day of the week effect puzzle

shocking behavior random wealth in antebellum georgia and human capital across generations does the lack of wealth constrain parents investments in the human capital of their descendants we conduct a nearly fifty year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families we track descendants of participants in georgia s cherokee land lottery of 1832 in which nearly every adult white male in georgia took part winners received close to the median level of wealth a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children s human capital although winners had slightly more children than non winners they did not send them to school more sons of winners have no better adult outcomes wealth income literacy than the sons of non winners and winners grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non winners grandchildren this suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines

fear anger and credit on bank robberies and loan conditions we study the impact of emotions on real world decisions made by loan officers by analyzing the loan conditions of loans granted immediately after a bank branch robbery we find significant differences in conditions of the loans granted after a robbery compared to changes in loan conditions that occur contemporaneously at unaffected branches in general loan officers seem to adopt so called avoidance behaviour in accordance with the literature on posttraumatic stress their avoidance behavior is halved within two weeks after the robbery and the effect further varies depending on the presence of a firearm during the robbery

holiday effects and stock returns further evidence this paper provides further evidence of the holiday effect in stock returns and additional insight into the effect this paper reports abnormally high returns on the trading day before holidays in all three of the major stock markets in the u s the nyse amex and nasdaq the holiday effect is also present in the u k and japanese stock markets even though each country has different holidays and institutional arrangements this study finds that the holiday effects in the u k and japanese stock markets are independent of the holiday effect in the u s stock market unlike the other seasonal patterns in stock returns such as january and weekend effects this investigation of size decile portfolios shows that the size effect is not present in mean returns on preholidays

the effect of wealth on individual and household labor supply evidence from swedish lotteries abstract we study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of swedish lottery players winning a lottery prize modestly reduces earnings with the reduction being immediate persistent and quite similar by age education and sex a calibrated dynamic model implies lifetime marginal propensities to earn out of unearned income from 0 17 at age 20 to 0 04 at age 60 and labor supply elasticities in the lower range of previously reported estimates the earnings response is stronger for winners than their spouses which is inconsistent with unitary household labor supply models jel d14 j22 j31

do stock markets react to soccer games a meta regression analysis this study applies meta regression analysis to aggregate a sample of 1126 empirical estimates of the stock market reaction to soccer matches collected from 37 primary studies our results indicate

good day sunshine stock returns and the weather psychological evidence and casual intuition predict that sunny weather is associated with upbeat mood this paper examines the relationship between morning sunshine in the city of a country s leading stock exchange and daily market index returns across 26 countries from 1982 to 1997 sunshine is strongly significantly correlated with stock returns after controlling for sunshine rain and snow are unrelated to returns substantial use of weather based strategies was optimal for a trader with very low transactions costs however because these strategies involve frequent trades fairly modest costs eliminate the gains these findings are difficult to reconcile with fully rational price setting

the pitch rather than the pit investor inattention trading activity and fifa world cup matches this paper analyzes stock market trading in 15 countries during the 2010 and 2014 soccer fifa world cups we find evidence for substantial investor inattention during these major sporting events the lack of attention for the trading pit is particularly large when the national soccer team is competing with traded volumes declining by as much as 48 during national team matches prices on local stock markets can temporarily decouple from global financial market developments these findings suggest that major sporting events can act as a laboratory in which to investigate investor inattention

how large are the effects from changes in family environment a study of korean american adoptees i analyze a new set of data on korean american adoptees who were quasi randomly assigned to adoptive families i find large effects on adoptees education income and health from assignment to parents with more education and from assignment to smaller families parental education and family size are significantly more correlated with adoptee outcomes than are parental income or neighborhood characteristics outcomes such as drinking smoking and the selectivity of college attended are more determined by nurture than is educational attainment using the standard behavioral genetics variance decomposition i find that shared family environment explains 14 percent of the variation in educational attainment 35 percent ofthe variation in college selectivity and 33 percent of the variation in drinking behavior

income receipt and mortality evidence from swedish public sector employees in this paper we study the short run effect of salary receipt on mortality among swedish public sector employees by exploiting variation in paydays across work places we completely control for mortality patterns related to for example public holidays and other special days or events coinciding with paydays and for general within month and within week mortality patterns we find a dramatic increase in mortality on the day that salaries arrive the increase is especially pronounced for younger workers and for deaths due to activity related causes such as heart conditions and strokes the effect is entirely driven by an increase in mortality among low income individuals who are more likely to experience liquidity constraints all things considered our results suggest that an increase in general economic activity on salary receipt is an important cause of the excess mortality

winter blues a sad stock market cycle and god said let there be light and there was light and god saw that the light was good genesis 1 3 depression has been linked with seasonal affective disorder sad a condition that affects many people during the seasons of relatively fewer hours of daylight experimental research in psychology has documented a clear link between depression and lowered risktaking behavior in a wide range of settings including those of a financial nature through the links between sad and depression and between depression and risk aversion seasonal variation in length of day can translate into seasonal variation in equity returns based on supportive evidence from psychology which suggests sad is linked closely with hours of daylight we consider stock market index data from countries at various latitudes and on both sides of the equator we model differences in the seasonal variation of daylight across coun

liquidity economic activity and mortality abstract 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 problems reduce activity which in turn reduces mortality these relationships may help explain the procyclical nature of mortality

the impact of income shocks on health evidence from cohort data we study the eect of permanent income innovations on health for a prime aged population using information on more than half a million individuals sampled over a twenty five year period in three dierent cross sectional surveys we aggregate data by date of birth cohort to construct a synthetic cohort dataset with details of income expenditure socio demographic factors health outcomes and selected risk factors we then exploit structural and arguably exogenous changes in cohort incomes over the eighties and nineties to uncover causal eects of permanent income shocks on health we find that such income innovations have little eects on health but do aect health behaviour and mortality

the individual investor and the weekend effect it is well known that stock returns on average are negative on mondays yet it is less well known that this finding is substantially the consequence of returns in prior trading sessions when friday s return is negative monday s return is negative nearly 80 percent of the time with a mean return of 0 61 percent when friday s return is positive the subsequent monday s mean return is positive 0 11 percent this relationship is stronger than for any other pair of trading days and is most acute in small and medium size companies the trading behavior of individual investors appears to be at least one factor contributing to this pattern individual investors are more active sellers of stock on mondays particularly following bad news in the market

wealth health and child development evidence from administrative data on swedish lottery players we use administrative data on swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players own health and their children s health and developmental outcomes our estimation sample is large virtually free of attrition and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned in adults we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10 year mortality one sixth as large as the crosssectional wealth mortality gradient in our intergenerational analyses we find that wealth increases children s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk the effects on most other child outcomes including drug consumption scholastic performance and skills can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero overall our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth mortality gradients nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income jel codes i10 i14 j24

the effects of government transfers on monthly cycles in drug abuse hospitalization and mortality this paper analyzes the monthly patterns of adverse outcomes due to the consumption of illegal drugs by recipients of government transfer payments we find evidence that certain subpopulations on government cash aid significantly increase their consumption of drugs when their checks arrive at the beginning of the month and as a result experience adverse events including hospitalization and death using data from california we find that the overall rate of drug related hospital admissions increases abruptly at the beginning of the month with admissions increasing 23 during the first five days of the month we find that this cycle is driven largely by recipients of supplemental security income ssi ssi recipients also experience an abrupt 22 increase in within hospital mortality after receiving their checks these findings suggest that full wallets adversely affect some aid recipients and that policymakers should explore alternate disbursement regimes such as a staggered disbursement schedule or in kind support that have the potential to reduce the rate of adverse events

exploitable predictable irrationality the fifa world cup effect on the u s stock market in a recently published paper edmans garcia and norli 2007 reveal a strong association between results of soccer games and local stock returns inspired by their work we propose a novel approach to exploit this effect on the aggregate international level with the following three unique features i the aggregate effect does not depend on the games results hence the effect is an exploitable predictable effect ii the aggregate effect is based on many games hence it is very large and highly significant we find that the average return on the u s market over the world cup s effect period is 2 58 compared to 1 21 for all days average returns over the same period length iii exploiting the aggregate effect is involved with trading in a single index for a relatively long period

divergence of sentiment and stock market trading this paper introduces the concept of divergence of sentiment to the behavioral finance literature we measure the distance between people with positive and negative sentiment on a daily basis for 20 countries by using data from status updates on facebook the prediction is that a higher divergence of sentiment leads to more diverging views on prospects and risks and thus to more diverging views on the value of a stock in line with this prediction divergence of sentiment is positively related to trading volume we further predict and find a positive relation between divergence of sentiment and stock price volatility the observed relations are stronger when individual investors are more likely to trade we compare the effect of our country specific measures to a global measure of divergence of sentiment we find that the separate effects of country specific and global divergence measures depend on a country s level of market integration

nonsecular regularities in returns and volume this study addressed u s stock daily returns and volume around days when the market is open that correspond to religious or cultural occasions specifically st patrick s day and the jewish high holy days of rosh hashanah and yom kippur on rosh hashanah and yom kippur volume was found to be down relative to volume on all trading days in the sample the reason may be that the nonfinancial opportunity cost of trading is high for a considerable number of traders on these days returns were significantly higher on the days preceding st patrick s day and rosh hashanah which is consistent with the notion that market returns reflect the festive nature of these occasions evidence was also found of significantly negative returns after yom kippur in the second half of the sample period which accords with the idea that the market reflects the solemn nature of this occasion overall the results are consistent with the view that mood is a viable explanation for some market movements

healthy bodies and thick wallets the dual relation between health and economic status there is abundant evidence of a quantitatively large association between many measures of economic status including income and wealth and a variety of health outcomes such as mortality or morbidity however considerable and often heated debate remains especially across disciplines about the direction of causation and about why the association arises although medical scientists are often convinced that the dominant if not exclusive pathway is that variation in socioeconomic status produces health disparities they are increasingly debating among themselves about why low economic status might lead to poor health at least for modern industrial countries 1 the old standby arguments the less well to do have access to less or lower quality medical care or a stronger pattern of deleterious personal behaviors have been rejected as insufficient instead a series of intriguing competing theories have arisen that emphasize long term impacts of early childhood or even inter uterine environmental factors the cumulative effects of prolonged exposures to individual stressful events or reactions to macro societal factors such as rising levels of income inequality a common link is that each theory attempts to document the physiological processes through which low economic status leads to poorer health while these scientific questions are extremely important this research has taken place with little input from economists economists are now making contributions about the alternative pathway the impact poor health may have on economic resources poor health may restrict a family s capacity to earn income or to accumulate assets by limiting work or by raising medical expenses at a minimum this work should provide a caution against exaggerating the magnitude of causation from economic status to health outcomes but the potential contribution runs deeper as people age the evolving variation in individual health outcomes may offer additional statistical information to estimate parameters of household savings and consumption behavior that so far have proven to be somewhat elusive thus incorporating health uncertainty and risk into economic models should eventually enrich our understanding of basic tenets of household behavior the first section of this paper documents the size of the association between health and one prominent economic status measure household wealth section two deals with how health influences economic status by sketching out reasons why health may alter household savings and eventually wealth and then providing estimates of the empirical magnitude of these effects section three shifts attention to the alternative pathway the links between economic status and health and summarizes 2major controversies and evidence surrounding these issues

is soccer good for you the motivational impact of big sporting events on the unemployed we examine the effect of salient international soccer tournaments on the motivation of unemployed individuals to search for employment using the german socio economic panel 1984 2010 exploiting the random scheduling of survey interviews we find significant effects on motivational variables such as the intention to work or the reservation wage furthermore the sporting events increase perceived health as well as worries about the general economic situation

the impact of family income on child achievement evidence from the earned income tax credit using an instrumental variables strategy we estimate the causal effect of income on children s math and reading achievement our identification derives from the large nonlinear changes in the earned income tax credit the largest of these changes increased family income by as much as 20 percent or approximately 2 100 between 1993 and 1997 our baseline estimates imply that a 1 000 increase in income raises combined math and reading test scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation in the short run test gains are larger for children from disadvantaged families and robust to a variety of alternative specifications jel h24 h31 i21 i38 j13

losing sleep at the market the daylight saving anomaly reply motivated by the recent flurry of activity in sleep research this paper explores the connection between sleep disruptions following spring and fall clock shifts associated with daylight savings time and equity returns it is shown that the weekend effect in the form of the lower than expected friday to monday returns is particularly pronounced for the two weekends involving daylight savings clock changes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item