the retirement behaviour of the self employed in britain we analyze the retirement behaviour of older self employed workers using a life cycle framework and a multinomial logit model of dynamic employment and retirement choices using data from the two wave retirement survey we find that greater actual or potential earnings decrease the probability of retirement among the self employed in contrast to employees none of gender health or family circumstances appear to affect self employed retirement decisions the dynamic analysis reveals that relatively few employees and virtually no retirees switch into self employment in later life the switches that do occur are motivated less by attempts to use self employment as a bridge job or stepping stone to full retirement than by self employment being a last resort for less affluent workers with job histories of weak attachment to the labour market we compare self employed and employee retirement behaviour and discuss the policy implications of our results

incentives productivity and labor contracts the relationship between age earnings profiles and worker incentives is examined by contrasting wage and salary workers with the self employed it is argued that the steepness of wage and salary workers age earnings profiles reflects the desire to provide work incentives to those workers since self employed workers do not face this agency problem they are used as a benchmark to gauge productivity empirical support of the proposition is provided and the effects of human capital accumulation are separated empirically from incentive effects the most important conclusion is that under some strong assumptions most of the slope in age earnings profiles is accounted for by the desire to provide incentives rather than by on the job training

an equilibrium model of asset trading with sequential information arrival in an effort to better understand the dynamic market price adjustment process this paper develops a model which describes the impact of new information on a financial market the primary emphasis is on the price change volume relationship in the presence of a margin requirement we find that the margin requirement significantly affects the relation of price change to volume furthermore this relationship is shown to be affected by the number of investors in the market the degree of information dissemination differences in interpretation of information and the implicit cost of the margin requirement

causality in variance and the type of traders in crude oil futures abstract this article examines the causal relationship and in particular informational dependence between crude oil futures return and the trading volume using daily data over a ten year period using a recent econometric methodology the two step procedure developed by cheung and ng 1996 cheung y w ng l k 1996 a causality in variance test and its applications to financial market prices journal of econometrics 72 33 48 is robust to distributional assumption and does not depend on simultaneous modeling of the two variables we find only causality at higher order lags running from return to volume in the mean as well as in conditional variance our result is not in complete agreement with several earlier studies in this area however the result does indicate mild support for noise traders hypothesis in the crude oil futures market

comparative statics in a simple class of strategic market games this paper investigates the effects of entry in two sided markets where buyers and sellers act strategically applying new tools from supermodular optimization games sufficient conditions for different comparative statics results are obtained while normality of one good is sufficient for the equilibrium price to be increasing in the number of buyers normality of both goods is required for equilibrium bids and sellers equilibrium utilities to be increasing in the number of buyers when the economy is replicated normality of both goods and gross substitutes guarantee that the equilibrium of the strategic market game converges monotonically in quantities to the competitive equilibrium simple counter examples are provided to settle other potential conjectures of interest c 2007 elsevier inc all rights reserved

a theory of trading volume a theory of trading volume is developed based on assumptions that market agents frequently revise their demand prices and randomly encounter potential trading partners the model describes two distinct ways informational events affect trading volume one is consistent with conjectures made by empirical researchers that investor disagreement leads to increased trading but the observation of abnormal trading volume does not necessarily imply disagreement and volume can increase even if investors interpret the information identically if they also have had divergent prior expectations simulation tests support the model and are used to contrast the random pairing environment with costless market clearing volume is lower in the costly market and volume increases caused by an informational event persist after the event period this is consistent with existing empirical evidence and suggests that markets do not immediately clear all orders or that investors have demands to recontract

are women graduates jacquelines of all trades challenging lazear s view on entrepreneurship this study challenges the basic reasoning behind lazear s theory on entrepreneurship 2005 based on the key motive of maximizing one s lifetime income lazear posits that individuals with a balanced set of skills should have a higher probability of being self employed his jack of all trades hypothesis presumes that entrepreneurs need sufficient knowledge in a variety of areas to succeed while paid employees benefit from being specialists in a certain area demanded by the labor market because most women led businesses are neither based on the motive of making money nor are they growth oriented we argue that maximizing their lifetime income is not the main motivation of many women to start a business however we argue that lazear s theory can be extended to motivations that are mostly stated for women entrepreneurs as well we apply it to a specific representative sample of 1384 women graduates in germany and test our hypothesis with logit regression a dichotomized measure indicating whether a women graduate was self employed n 706 or not n 678 served as the dependent variable our results widely confirm lazear s assumption for women graduates who run relatively small businesses in terms of sales and employment professional training balanced industry experience and balanced entrepreneurship based self efficacy increase the probability of being self employed solo self employed tend to have balanced industry experience more often than those being in a team or having employees lazear s theory has male as the norm and as such does not readily apply to the case of women but could and should be extended to women s specifics

trade fragmentation and coordination in strategic market games abstract this paper analyzes the incentives to trade and the validity of the law of one price in three strategic market games with multiple trading posts in bilateral oligopolies where traders have corner endowments in one commodity all agents participate in all the markets the law of one price holds in bilateral oligopolies and in the buy or sell market game where equilibrium strategies are locally unique when traders can simultaneously buy and sell on every market the law of one price fails and the set of equilibrium prices generically has the same dimension as the number of active markets journal of economic literature classification numbers d43 d51

the interrelation of stock and options market trading volume data this research empirically investigates the relation between common stock and call option trading volumes the paper hyothesizes and tests a sequential flow of information between the stock and option markets if information trading for cboe listed firms is predominantly accomplished through option trading then existing research methodologies may be biased against finding any significant economic consequences in those instances where option listing is an important variable results indicate that trading in call options leads trading in the underlying shares with a one day lag black 2 suggests that information traders may prefer trading in options rather than shares due to economic incentives provided by reduced transaction costs capital requirements and trading restrictions and due to the greater action afforded by option trading manaster and rendleman 12 empirically support black s 2 option information trading preference finding incremental information content in option prices up to twenty four hours prior to its reflection in stock prices jennings and starks 10 report that the stock price adjustment process upon arrival of new information differs for those firms listed on the chicago board option exchange cboe and they demonstrate that stock price adjustment to new information occurs more rapidly for firms with listed call options the results in both papers appear to warrant consideration of an optiontrading variable in the design of empirical tests both manaster and rendleman 12 and jennings and starks 10 investigate the price relation between shares and call options this paper investigates trading volume copeland 4 posits the use of trading volume as a proxy for the rate of information arrival he concludes that the relation between absolute value of price changes and volume is positive and linear if one accepts a sequentialinformation arrival hypothesis as valid the present research hypothesizes and tests a sequential flow of information between the stock and option markets analyses presented are based on econometric tests for causality1 derived from the works of granger 6 and sims 22 if information trading takes place

security analysis and trading patterns when some investors receive information before others in existing models of information acquisition all informed investors receive their information at the same time this article analyzes trading behavior and equilibrium information acquisition when some investors receive common private information before others the model implies that under some conditions investors will focus only on a subset of securities herding while neglecting other securities with identical exogenous characteristics in addition the model is consistent with empirical correlations that are suggestive of oft cited trading strategies such as profit taking short term position reversal and following the leader mimicking earlier trades in existing models of information acquisition all informed investors receive their information at the same time while these models provide many important insights in reality some investors either fortuitously or owing to superior skill acquire pertinent information before others by being first an investor can exploit this information to great advantage information that is uncovered only slightly later is less valuable even if it has not yet been publicly revealed we show in this article that the sequential nature of information arrival has a significant effect on both the trading decisions and the types of information collected by investors the model we develop describes the investment choices of a set of competitive risk averse investors who investigate the long term prospects of firms lucky or high ability investors uncover the

price volatility trading volume and market depth evidence from futures markets the relations between volume volatility and market depth in eight physical and financial futures markets are examined evidence suggests that linking volatility to total volume does not extract all information when volume is partitioned into expected and unexpected components the paper finds that unexpected volume shocks have a larger effect on volatility further the relation is asymmetric the impact of positive unexpected volume shocks on volatility is larger than the impact of negative shocks finally consistent with theories of market depth the study shows large open interest mitigates volatility

the effect of residential location on retirement age theory and some evidence on male behaviour in the us retirement age choice is introduced into a conventional model of residential location to show that the retirement age of workers who do not move after retirement can be influenced by the urban variation of leisure and housing prices a retirement demand equation that incorporates commuting characteristics is estimated on a sample of us urban male owners interviewed by the panel study of income dynamics it is found that commuters retire around two years earlier than comparable home based workers although the evidence provides no support for this gap to be the result of differences in leisure or housing prices across both groups

an empirical evaluation of the overconfidence hypothesis abstract recently several behavioral finance models based on the overconfidence hypothesis have been proposed to explain anomalous findings including a short term continuation momentum and a long term reversal in stock returns we characterize the overconfidence hypothesis by the following four testable implications first if investors are overconfident they overreact to private information and underreact to public information second market gains make overconfident investors trade more aggressively in subsequent periods third excessive trading of overconfident investors in securities markets contributes to the observed excessive volatility fourth overconfident investors underestimate risk and trade more in riskier securities to document the presence of overconfidence in financial markets we empirically evaluate these four hypotheses using aggregate data overall we find empirical evidence in support of the four hypotheses

the sources of garch empirical evidence from an intraday returns model incorporating systematic and unique risks abstract garch models propose that volatility is time varying and persistent as a parsimonious statistical description of the process driving returns in many financial markets these models have been very successful however garch lacks a substantiated economic motivation this paper provides new and more definitive evidence on the mixture of distributions hypothesis a prominent potential economic explanation the mixture hypothesis posits that autocorrelation in the time varying rate of information arrival leads to the volatility dependencies captured by garch models previous investigations of this hypothesis have been inconclusive this paper makes use of a more theoretically appealing risk specification more appropriate measures of the rate of information arrival and higher frequency data from the currency futures market the results show that the mixture hypothesis explains substantial portions of contracts unique risks but systematic garch remains

late career entrepreneurship income and quality of life late career transitions to entrepreneurship are discussed as a promising way to address some of the problematic implications of population aging by extending employment choice theory to simultaneously account for career stage and for non monetary rewards from entrepreneurship we investigate how late career transitions from organizational employment to entrepreneurship influence the returns from the monetary income and non monetary quality of life components of an individual s utility using data from the english longitudinal study of ageing our empirical analysis shows that for late career individuals starting a business is positively associated with change in quality of life and negatively associated with change in income

stable trading structures in bilateral oligopolies abstract this paper analyzes the formation of trading groups in a bilateral market where agents trade according to a shapley shubik j polit econ 85 1977 937 968 trading mechanism the only strongly stable trading structure is the grand coalition where all agents trade on the same market other weakly stable trading structures exist and are characterized by an ordering property trading groups can be ranked by size and cannot contain very different numbers of traders of the two types journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d43 d51

causality in quantiles and dynamic stock return volume relations abstract this paper investigates the causal relations between stock return and volume based on quantile regressions we first define granger non causality in all quantiles and propose testing non causality by a sup wald test such a test is consistent against any deviation from non causality in distribution as opposed to the existing tests that check only non causality in certain moment this test is readily extended to test non causality in different quantile ranges in the empirical studies of three major stock market indices we find that the causal effects of volume on return are usually heterogeneous across quantiles and those of return on volume are more stable in particular the quantile causal effects of volume on return exhibit a spectrum of symmetric v shape relations so that the dispersion of return distribution increases with lagged volume this is an alternative evidence that volume has a positive effect on return volatility moreover the inclusion of the squares of lagged returns in the model may weaken the quantile causal effects of volume on return but does not affect the causality per se

the effect of changing expectations upon stock returns the relationship between heterogeneous expectations on the part of investors with respect to a security s future return and asset prices is an area of increasing interest in finance theoretical examples include miller 14 williams 23 and jarrow 8 empirical examples include bart and masse 1 and peterson and peterson 18 miller bart and masse and peterson and peterson address issues related to whether an increase in divergence of opinion will lead to an increase in an asset s price unfortunately little is known of how different types of changes in investors probability distributions of returns influence asset returns an even more basic problem is that it is not clear what is meant in terms of investor probability distributions when it is said that divergence of opinion increases or decreases the answer to this problem has important implications for understanding equilibrium price

intradaily price volume adjustments of nyse stocks to unexpected earnings the speed and path of adjustment in stocks to the degree of earnings surprise in their quarterly announcements are studied using price volume transactions data a differential price adjustment process was observed with stocks having large positive earnings surprises experiencing a faster adjustment compared with those stocks with negative earnings surprises volume transaction frequency and size were found to be directly related to the absolute degree of surprise but very favorable earnings surprise stocks experienced initially a large number of smaller trades while stocks with large unfavorable earnings surprises had relatively fewer transactions but higher volume per trade the stock market s microstructure has received increasing attention from researchers especially from an empirical perspective as transaction data on prices and volume have become more readily available 1 an important subset of this research has been the study of stock price adjustments to significant news events specifically publicly announced information with economic content should be quickly reflected in prices in an unbiased manner this paper contains a study of the intradaily adjustment in stocks to the informational content of earnings reports using price changes trading volume and transaction frequency and size we examine the transaction to transaction and time series stock behavior associated with different degrees of earnings surprise embedded in earnings announcements the degree of surprise is measured by a comparison of actual with forecasted earnings for 325 new york stock exchange nyse firms these firms are subdivided into five earnings surprise categories in order to determine whether the speed and path of their price volume adjustment processes are different one question of interest is whether the adjustment process for favorable versus unfavorable earnings surprises is similar or different another is whether any adjustment is distinguished by a few large trades or a large number of smaller

short sale restrictions and market reaction to short interest announcements according to the diamond verrecchia hypothesis if increases in short interest are correlated with information that is not yet public they should precipitate a price adjustment stocks with unexpected increases in short interest are found to generate statistically significant but small negative abnormal returns for a short period around the announcement date when the sample is divided into stocks with and without tradable options nonoptioned stocks closely mimic these results but the optioned stocks do not in a cross sectional analysis of individual firms the short term negative abnormal returns are found to be 1 more negative the higher the degree of unexpected short interest and 2 less negative if the firm has tradable options

self employment and labor force participation of older males this longitudinal analysis of the labor market behavior of older urban white males in 1969 1971 and 1973 focuses on changes from wage and salary to self employment and changes from working to nonworking status in each two year transition approximately 4 percent of wage and salary workers switched to self employment controlling for a large number of economic and demographic variables the self employed were significantly more likely to continue to work partly by reducing their workweek to under 35 hours other significant predictors of continuing to work are good health years of schooling white collar occupation no expectation of a private pension and a workweek longer than 50 hours age is also important especially at the eligibility ages set by social security

an information theoretic analysis of stock returns volatility and trading volumes information theory is used to examine the dynamic relationships between stock returns volatility and trading volumes for s p500 stocks this provides an alternative approach to traditional granger causality tests when dealing with nonlinear relationships the article highlights the dominant role played by trading volumes in all of these relationships even in the return volatility relation and finds evidence of a market level feedback effect from index returns to the return volatility relation at the stock level the article also produces a number of stylized facts from an information theoretic perspective

the impact of short selling on the price volume relationship evidence from hong kong this paper considers the relationship between traded volume and volatility allowing for the impact of short sales the evidence supports a nonlinear bidirectional relationship between volume and volatility short selling is found to have a significant impact on this relationship and our results suggest i that the hong kong market displays greater volatility following a period of short selling and ii that asymmetric responses to positive and negative innovations to returns appear to be exacerbated by short selling

does vix or volume improve garch volatility forecasts abstractthis article considers whether the inclusion of two additional variables can improve volatility forecasts over a standard garch based model we consider three alternative ways of incorporating the volatility index vix and trading volume as exogenous variables within a selection of garch models we are particularly interested in whether these variables have additional incremental forecast power over and above the baseline garch specification our results suggest that both the vix and volume do provide some additional forecast power and this is generally improved when considering both of these series jointly in the model however while the results may be statistically significant the gain is marginal and the coefficient values small moreover in a horse race exercise vix does not outperform the garch approach in answering the question of whether vix produces better forecasts than the garch model then the answer is no but the informational content of vix cannot be ignored and should be incorp

short interest and the asymmetry of the price volume relationship in the canadian stock market abstract several studies have revealed an asymmetry in the price volume relationship in the equities markets this paper verifies this relationship using canadian data and presents an alternative test of the costly short sales hypothesis based on the volume of outstanding short interest in the stock market contrary to previous studies the empirical tests in this study do not rely on futures markets data but rather measure and compare the effects of relative short interest positions on the price volume relationship for positive and negative price changes the results suggest that the greater the ratio of short positions to the number of shares outstanding the greater the trading volume associated with price increases relative to that accompanying price decreases

bad news and dow jones make the spanish stocks go round this paper is a data based attempt to analyse what kind of information basically affects close to open returns open to close returns volatility and volume in actively traded individual securities on the spanish stock market specifically we are interested in detecting how these variables react to specific pieces of news considered as exogenous information however as volume itself could be interpreted as a proxy of the information flow we first apply the linear and nonlinear granger causality tests from volume to return and to volatility we do not find evidence supporting this latter hypothesis furthermore we only find significant evidence of linear causality from volume to volatility the other major finding is that both bad news and the dow jones play a significant informational role in explaining price changes and volatility as a consequence of these findings we also test the residual role of volume as a proxy for noise liquidity trading after filtering for news although we do not find evidence in favour of this argument

participation and earnings of older people in argentina nice work if you can get it abstract the article explores the potential contribution of better labour market participation among older people in argentina to address old age poverty and vulnerability the acute financial crisis in 2001 led to a steep rise in poverty and renewed concerns over the deterioration of old age support broadly two main strategies took shape to strengthen pension provision for poorer and vulnerable older people and to improve their labour market participation using data from a dedicated survey of older people the article tests the feasibility and effectiveness of the second strategy through a detailed analysis of the labour market participation and earnings of older people in argentina

strategic complements and substitutes in bilateral oligopolies this note analyzes the effect of product complementarity in a bilateral oligopoly we show that offers of traders on the two sides of the market are strategic complements substitutes if and only if the two goods are substitutes complements the outcome of the bilateral oligopoly game converges monotonically to the competitive equilibrium as the elasticity of substitution between the goods decreases to minus infinite

seasonality estimation in thin markets the greater availability of daily data in the u s has led to a number of studies of the seasonality of daily stock index returns while the studies recognized the potential impacts of nontrading and price adjustment delays in general no formal analyses of such impacts were presented in this paper analytic results are presented for the articulation between these phenomena the implications of the analysis are discussed and shown to be consistent with a sample of u k index data a modified form of the negative weekend effect is found to be present in the u k data analyzed tests for the presence of seasonality in equity returns have been carried out by a number of authors at both the monthly and daily return levels at the monthly level rozeff and kinney 18 discovered evidence of seasonality in the u s while officer 15 detected the presence of seasonality in australian data fama 7 carried out some early work on u s daily data and more recent contributions have been made by cross 5 french 9 and gibbons and hess 10 while these studies recognized the presence of thin trading and its potential impacts upon the experimental results no formal analyses were presented in this paper we derive analytic results for the articulation between seasonality and nontrading effects section i the implications of this analysis are tested using a sample described in section ii of u k daily index data2 in section iii section iv discusses the implications of the results for capital market efficiency finally

the behavior of bid ask spreads in the electronically traded corn futures market this is the first paper to analyze liquidity costs in agricultural futures markets based on the observed bid ask spread bas faced by market participants the results reveal a highly liquid corn market that mostly offers order execution at minimum cost the bas responds negatively to volume and positively to price volatility but also affects volume traded and price volatility while statistically significant these responses on a cents bushel or a percentage basis are generally small liquidity costs are also virtually impervious to short term changes in demand for spreading and trend following trader activity as well as differences from day of the week changes in market activity much larger cents bushel and percentage changes in bas occur during commodity index trader roll periods and on usda report release days the roll period findings indicate a sunshine trading effect while announcement effects identify the importance of unexpected information and adverse selection on order execution costs overall our research demonstrates that the transition to electronic trading in the corn futures market has led to low and stable liquidity costs despite the market turbulence in 2008 2009

strategic trading behavior and price distortion in a manipulated market anatomy of a squeeze abstract this paper investigates an attempted delivery squeeze in a bond futures contract traded in london using cash and futures trades of dealers and customers we analyze their strategic trading behavior price distortion and learning in a market manipulation setting we argue that marked differences in settlement failure penalties in the cash and futures markets create conditions that favor squeezes we recommend that regulators require special flagging of forward term repurchase agreements on the key deliverables that span futures contract maturity dates and that exchanges mark to market their contract specifications more frequently or consider a cash settled contract on a basket of bonds

intraday trading volume and return volatility of the djia stocks a note abstract we examine the contemporaneous correlation as well as the lead lag relation between trading volume and return volatility in all stocks comprising the dow jones industrial average djia we use 5 minute intraday data and measure return volatility by the exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity method contrary to the mixture of distribution hypothesis the vast majority of the djia stock shows no contemporaneous correlation between volume and volatility however we find evidence of significant lead lag relations between the two variables in a large number of the djia stocks in accordance with the sequential information arrival hypothesis

testing for linear and nonlinear granger causality in the stock price volume relation linear and nonlinear granger causality tests are used to examine the dynamic relation between daily dow jones stock returns and percentage changes in new york stock exchange trading volume we find evidence of significant bidirectional nonlinear causality between returns and volume we also examine whether the nonlinear causality from volume to returns can be explained by volume serving as a proxy for information flow in the stochastic process generating stock return variance as suggested by clark s 1973 latent common factor model after controlling for volatility persistence in returns we continue to find evidence of nonlinear causality from volume to returns

employer seniority discrimination evidence from enterpreneurial occupational choice abstract this research examines the theories presented in the human capital literature by becker 1975 lazear 1979 1981 and others that the relative paths of earnings and value of marginal product henceforth vmp diverge over the worklife the findings support lazear s work incentive theory for professionals but reject its application to non professionals as predicted by orthodox human capital theory documentation is also developed that earnings for non professionals equal their vmp over the job life cycle on the other hand the analysis provides no support to becker s specific training model

the dependence between hourly prices and trading volume this study provides evidence on joint characteristics of hourly common stock trading vol ume and returns on the new york stock exchange average volume traded shows signifi cant differences across trading hours of the day and across days of the week average returns differ across hours ofthe day and to some extent across days ofthe week there is a strong contemporaneous relation between trading volume and returns and also a rela tion between trading volume and returns lagged up to four hours furthermore the trading volume returns relation is steeper for positive returns than for nonpositive returns

market conditions trader types and price volume relation in energy futures markets we investigate the asymmetric relations between trading volume and price changes and trading volume and price volatility of energy futures contracts across maturities and under different market conditions using a relatively long sample of daily observations we examine whether the impact of trading volume on returns and volatility of futures contracts can be time varying and dependent on the market condition we differentiate the market condition based on the slope of the forward curve into backwardation and contango the results indicate that trading volume and returns are positively related when the market is in backwardation and negatively related when the market is in contango in addition the positive relation between changes in trading volume and volatility of futures contracts seem to be stronger when the market is in backwardation than when it is in contango finally the results indicate that to a certain extent trade participation and trading activities of agents in energy futures markets can be explained by the slope of the forward curve which reflects the market condition and sentiment

explaining international variations in self employment evidence from a panel of oecd countries organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd data from 1972 to 1996 reveals substantial differences in the levels and trends of self employment rates across countries this article uses recently developed panel integration and cointegration techniques to explore the determinants of aggregate self employment rates we find that within the panel self employment rates are positively and significantly related to personal income tax rates and negatively and significantly related to the unemployment benefit replacement rate this accords a central role to government tax and transfer policies in contrast to nonrobust influences from macroeconomic variables which have been widely used in previous studies

on information dissemination and equilibrium asset prices a note previous analyses of market structures characterized by gradual information dissemination presume the equilibrium price existing after all market participants are informed is inde pendent of the order of information dissemination in these papers final market elearing price given the investors posterior beliefs is known a priori and is assumed to equal the price that would exist if data were disseminated simultaneously we demonstrate that final equilibrium price is dependent in general on the order of information dissemination this implies that if the dissemination sequence is stochastic price is unknown prior to the complete dissemination of information even if the investors posterior beliefs given the information event are known we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for equilib rium price to be independent of the dissemination sequence in our economy our analysis highlights the importance of the wealth redistribution dynamics inherent in the informa tion dissemination process

the relation between price changes and trading volume a survey this paper reviews previous and current research on the relation between price changes and trading volume in financial markets and makes four contributions first two empiri cal relations are established volume is positively related to the magnitude of the price change and in equity markets to the price change per se second previous theoretical research on the price volume relation is summarized and critiqued and major insights are emphasized third a simple model ofthe price volume relation is proposed that is consis tent with several seemingly unrelated or contradictory observations and fourth several directions for future research are identified

an empirical analysis of the stock price volume relationship abstract this paper investigates the empirical relationship between absolute stock price changes and trading volume in the stock market using granger causality tests we find that there is a significant causal relationship between absolute price changes and volume at the firm level and that this relationship is stronger in periods surrounding earnings announcements we view this as suggesting that information arrival follows a sequential rather than a simultaneous process although the results do not support an extreme version of either information arrival model

ageing and entrepreneurial preferences previous research on age and entrepreneurship assumed homogeneity and downplayed age related differences in the motives and aims underlying enterprising behaviour we argue that the heterogeneity of entrepreneurship influences how the level of entrepreneurial activity varies with age using a sample of 2 566 respondents from 27 european countries we show that entrepreneurial activity increases almost linearly with age for individuals who prefer to only employ themselves self employers whereas it increases up to a critical threshold age late 40s and decreases thereafter for those who aspire to hire workers owner managers age has a considerably smaller effect on entrepreneurial behaviour for those who do not prefer self employment but are pushed into it by lack of alternative employment opportunities reluctant entrepreneurs our results question the conventional wisdom that entrepreneurial activity declines with age and suggest that effective responses to demographic changes require policy makers to pay close attention to the heterogeneity of entrepreneurial preferences

choice of employment status and the wages of employees and the self employed some further evidence summary using us data drawn from the 1978 young men nls sample this paper replicates a key finding reported by rees and shah in their analysis of self employment using large scale british data a wage equation which allows for sample selectivity is estimated for subsamples of employees and the self employed despite differences between the data sets and the variables analysed the nls results support rees and shah s conclusion that there is positive selection bias in the observed earnings of employees choice of employment status in separate paid employment self employment earnings equations to allow for self selectivity and was tested using data drawn from the general household survey for 1978 ghs78 one key finding reported by rees and shah is that there is positive selection bias in the observed earnings of paid employees this result which is consistent with comparative advantage in chosen work activities suggests that failure to account for this selection process will result in biased parameter estimates of the earnings equation this paper re examines the potential selection bias in the earnings of paid employees and the self employed using us data drawn from the 1978 young men sample of the national longitudinal surveys despite important differences between the data sets and variables analysed the nls results support rees and shah s finding of positive selection bias in paid employment together these findings should raise questions about the appropriateness of ols estimation of wage or earnings equations for subsamples of workers which exclude the self employed

entrepreneurial intentions in the third age the impact of perceived age norms this article investigates the impact of perceived age norms on the formation of entrepreneurial intentions in the third age age norms refer to those social norms that determine whether establishing and running a business are considered appropriate behavior for a mature individual an empirical analysis of finnish individuals finds that norms perceived as permissive of enterprising activity in the third age exert a significant positive influence on entrepreneurial intentions in this segment even when controlling for the general level of entrepreneurship in the municipalities this influence is partially mediated by whether the individual has a positive attitude toward entrepreneurship by how the individual perceives their own ability to start and run a business by the extent of support from their family and friends they perceive and by the importance of that support to them thus if policy aims to increase enterprising activity in the third age segment the portfolio of instruments should include measures that address people s general awareness of third age entrepreneurship as a viable positive and attractive late career option

the dynamic relationship between stock returns and trading volume domestic and cross country evidence abstract this paper examines the dynamic relations causal relations and the sign and magnitude of dynamic effects between stock market trading volume and returns and volatility for both domestic and cross country markets by using the daily data of the three largest stock markets new york tokyo and london major findings are as follows first trading volume does not granger cause stock market returns on each of three stock markets second there exists a positive feedback relationship between trading volume and return volatility in all three markets third regarding the cross country relationships us financial market variables in particular us trading volume contains an extensive predictive power for uk and japanese financial market variables fourth sub sample analyses show evidence of stronger spillover effects after the 1987 market crash and an increased importance of trading volume as an information variable after the introduction of options in the us and japan

dependent self employment as a way to evade employment protection legislation this paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self employment while making transitions to independent self employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and self employment in favour of the former in conducting this analysis discrete choice models are applied to data drawn from the european community household panel from 1994 to 2001 to test the hypotheses a tentative individual measure of the potential severance payment that a worker would receive in the case of dismissal is included as well as aggregated variables that try to capture differences in labour market institutions and macroeconomic conditions evidence for a positive impact of the strictness of employment protection legislation and the potential severance payment on transitions to dependent self employment is found the opposite effects however are detected for individuals becoming independent self employed

futures price variability a test of maturity and volume effects a number of previous studies have examined the contemporaneous relation between asset price variability and volume traded for example clark 1973 cornell 1981 and tauchen and pitts 1983 have investigated this relation for futures markets and epps and epps 1976 harris 1984a 1984b and smirlock and starks 1984 for the stock market underlying this empirical research is a theoretical framework that suggests that price variability or the absolute change in prices and volume traded should be positively correlated according to this theoretical framework the so called mixture of distributions hypothesis mdh 1 the correlation between price variability and volume should be positive because of joint dependence on a common directing variable or event this study uses contract disaggregated data on futures prices to obtain evidence on the relation between price variability and volume of trading strong positive contemporaneous correlations between trading volume and price volatility are documented consistent with the mixture of distributions hypothesis it is concluded that maturity is not a suitable surrogate for the common directing variable specifically while maturity has a strong effect on volume no such relation is found for price variability finally while in the majority of cases price variability and trading volume are contemporaneously correlated there are a significant number of cases in which a sequential relation appears to be present an earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1984 meeting of the european finance association in manchester england and at southern methodist university the university of wisconsin madison duke university mcgill university and the university of toronto we wish to thank the seminar participants and an anonymous referee from this journal for constructive comments and criticism all remaining errors are of course our responsibility we would also like to thank the columbia center for the study of futures markets and the interactive data corp for providing some of the data used in the study 1 see clark 1973 and harris 1984a 1984b