do employees sickness absences react to a change in costs for firms evidence from a natural experiment we analyse the impact of a social security reform that changed the costs incurred by firms due to sickness absences the reform abolished a compulsory insurance for firms which insured them against the wages paid to sick blue collar workers during the first year after its introduction we estimate that the reform resulted in about 6 3 percent fewer sickness absences and in about 8 6 percent fewer absence days we do not find evidence for changes in hiring or firing and we find only limited workforce composition changes we do not find spillover effects on the absences of white collar workers robustness checks confirm these results

s p 500 cash stock price volatilities s p 500 stock return volatilities are compared to the volatilities of a matched set of stocks after controlling for cross sectional differences in firm attributes known to affect volatility no significant difference in volatility is observed between 1975 and 1983before the start of trade in index futures and index options since then s p 500 stocks have been relatively more volatile the difference is statistically but not economically significant the relative increase occurs primarily in daily returns and only to a lesser extent in longer interval returns other factors besides the start of derivative trade could be responsible for the small increase in volatility stock price volatility has received much attention in the popular press over the last few years especially since the october 19 1987 stock market crash the rise in volatility has alarmed investors regulators and the public in general some suggest that the start of trade in stock index futures and index options increased speculative activity that in turn destabilized cash markets causing higher volatility large trading activity in the derivative contracts makes the suggestion plausible volume in index futures and index options increased dramatically since their introductions in 1982 and 1983 by 1987 the average daily dollar volume in the s p 500 futures contracts alone exceeded the dollar volume of cash s p 500 trade by a factor of about two while the dollar value of the daily net change in total open interest is about 8 of s p 500 stock dollar volume speculative trade in futures and options frequently is accused of destabilizing underlying cash markets the charge has been made for more than a century in the agricultural precious metal and currency markets recent evidence by french and roll 1986 showing stock variance to be strongly related to trading session hours heightens these concerns unfortunately theoretical analyses of whether speculative trade destabilizes cash markets lead to conflicting conclusions depending on what assumptions are made 1 school of business administration university of southern california and office of economic analysis u s securities and exchange commission i wish to thank mary denny mcsweeny and steve hornstein for their valuable research assistance and the referee and editor for their many suggestions and insights the opinions expressed in this paper do not necessarily reflect those of the u s securities and exchange commission or those of the author s colleagues on its staff an increase in well informed speculative trade has two opposite effects on measured volatility it decreases volatility due to order flow imbalances caused by uninformed traders because informed traders provide liquidity in such events and it increases volatility due to new fundamental information since the information which is assumed to be generated at discrete time intervals is impounded into

a natural experiment on sick pay cuts sickness absence and labor costs abstract this study estimates the reform effects of a reduction in statutory sick pay levels on sickness absence behavior and labor costs german federal law reduced the legal obligation of german employers to provide 100 continued wage pay for up to six weeks per sickness episode in 1996 statutory sick pay was decreased to 80 of foregone gross wages within the reform s target group private sector employees this measure increased the proportion of employees having zero days of absence between 6 and 8 quantile regression estimates indicate that employees with up to 5 5 annual absence days reduced their days of absence by about 12 extended analyses suggest that in industries that enforced the cut behavioral effects were about twice as large we show that the direct labor cost savings effect stemming from the cut in replacement levels clearly exceeds the indirect effect due to the decrease in absenteeism our calculations about the total decrease in labor costs are very much in line with official data which suggest that total employer provided sick pay decreased by 6 7 or 1 7 billion per year

information transmission in informationally linked markets evidence from us and chinese commodity futures markets abstract this paper investigates information transmission and price discovery in informationally linked markets within the multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity and information share frameworks based on both synchronous and non synchronous trading information from chinese futures spot markets the new york mercantile exchange nymex chicago board of trade cbot and cme globex futures markets for copper and soybeans we show that there is a bidirectional relationship in terms of price and volatility spillovers between us and chinese markets with a stronger effect from us to chinese markets than the other way around additionally the nymex and cbot play a more important role than the cme globex in the flow of information from us to chinese markets moreover we find that chinese copper market adjusts more quickly than the nymex copper market to correct the disparity between both markets however the converse is true in the case of soybeans finally our results highlight the remarkable role of chinese futures markets in the price formation process though nymex and cbot futures markets are the main driving force in price discovery

stock volatility and the levels of the basis and open interest in futures contracts this article tests a theoretical model of the basis and open interest of stock index futures the model is based on the differences between stock and futures in terms of investors ability to customize stock portfolios and liquidity empirical evidence confirms the model s prediction that increased volatility decreases the basis and increases open interest copyright 1995 by american finance association

international transmission of information evidence from the euroyen and eurodollar futures markets abstract this paper examines the information transmission between japan and the us by using the tokyo euroyen and chicago eurodollar futures these two interest rate futures markets provide a better understanding of international information transmission than stock markets which have been shown to exhibit nonsynchronous trading and market segmentation the results show that traders in tokyo chicago use information that is revealed overnight in chicago tokyo the bivariate egarch t model provides no evidence of volatility spillovers in either direction suggesting that the opening price rapidly reflects foreign information the overall results support the hypothesis that the domestic market efficiently adjusts to foreign news the results are also broadly consistent with the covered interest arbitrage effects

a transactions data test of stock index futures market efficiency and index arbitrage profitability this paper investigates the efficiency of the market for stock index futures and the profitability of index arbitrage for the chicago board of trade s major market index contracts the spot value of the index is computed with transactions prices for the component shares of the index obtained from the fitch database the tests account for transaction costs execution lags and the uptick rule for short sales of stocks results indicate that the size and frequency of boundary violations are substantially smaller than those reported by earlier studies and have declined sharply with time index arbitrage is a strategy whereby institutions brokerage houses or other large investors seek to profit from the spread between prices in the spot and futures markets for stock indices for example an investor might purchase predetermined baskets of stocks on the floor of the new york stock exchange and simultaneously sell a related index futures contract on the floor of the chicago board of trade hoping to profit from the price differences on the two exchanges computer programs constantly monitor stock and futures prices and automatically execute buy and sell orders when it appears that a profit is possible stock index futures can be priced by a simple arbitrage argument if the dividends paid by the underlying basket of shares and interest rates are nonstochastic markets are perfect and there are no taxes the pricing equation is

reexamining intraday simultaneity in stock index futures markets abstract this note examines three empirical examples involving intraday dynamic relationships associated with stock index futures markets researchers often employ a vector autoregressive var model to analyze such high frequency transactions data while such a model can provide useful information regarding the nature of causal priority inherent in the data it is not the proper model to investigate the structural relationships of interest because it omits the contemporaneous interaction on the other hand a var model specification which is altered to incorporate simultaneity may enable the data to reveal the structural relationships of interest

conditional heteroscedasticity in time series of stock returns evidence and forecasts this article presents new evidence about the time series behavior of stock prices daily return series exhibit significant levels of second order dependence and they cannot be modeled as linear white noise processes a reasonable return generating process is empirically shown to be a first order autoregressive process with conditionally heteroskedastic innovations in particular generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic garch 1 1 processes fit to data very satisfactorily various out of sample forecasts of monthly return variances are generated and compared statistically forecasts based on the garch model are found to be superior copyright 1989 by the university of chicago

the dynamic structure of optimal debt contracts abstract in a two period model of costly state verification the optimal contract is characterized and shown to exist the optimal contract is interpreted as a bond contract the model extends the result of one period models that the verification region must be a left tail interval to a multi period setting conditions are identified for the optimal contract to exhibit features such as call prepayment option coupon payment or sinking fund the optimality of certain bond covenants such as refinancing covenants and dividends covenants is also studied

the linkages persistence asymmetry in the volatility the price discovery and efficiency and the effect of the us subprime mortgage financial crisis on the spot and the futures market s returns the case of india abstractthis article examines the effects of persistence asymmetry and the us subprime mortgage crisis on the volatility of the returns and also the price discovery efficiency and the linkages and causality between the spot and futures volatility by using various classes of the arch and garch models and through the granger s causality we have used two indices one for spot and the other for futures for the daily data from 12 june 2000 to 30 september 2013 from nifty stock indices we have then tested for arch effects and subsequently employed various models of the arch and garch conditional volatility the garch 1 1 model is found to be significant and it implies that the returns are not autocorrelated and have short memory it supports the hypothesis of the efficiency of the markets the negative news has more significant effect on volatility corroborating the leverage impact in finance on market volatility we have also tested the volatility spillover effects the two methods we employed

optimal hedging under departures from the cost of carry valuation evidence from the spanish stock index futures market abstract we provide an analytical discussion of the optimal hedge ratio under discrepancies between the futures market price and its theoretical valuation according to the cost of carry model assuming a geometric brownian motion for spot prices we model mispricing as a specific noise component in the dynamics of futures market prices empirical evidence on the model is provided for the spanish stock index futures ex ante simulations with actual data reveal that hedge ratios that take into account the estimated time varying correlation between the common and specific disturbances lead to using a lower number of futures contracts than under a systematic unit ratio without generally losing hedging effectiveness while reducing transaction costs and capital requirements besides the reduction in the number of contracts can be substantial over some periods finally a mean variance expected utility function suggests that the economic benefits from an optimal hedge can be substantial

volatility in wheat spot and futures markets 1950 1993 government farm programs seasonality and causality we explore how wheat spot and futures market volatility has been impacted by government farm programs during the 1950 1993 period we find that changing volatility in both markets is highly associated with changing farm programs the mandatory allotment programs of the 1950s and early 1960s 1 3 50 4 10 64 were associated with low volatility while the voluntary programs initiated in the mid 1960s seem to have induced high volatility 4 11 64 12 22 85 both market driven loan rates and conservation reserve programs appear to have helped volatility revert to lower levels since the mid 1980s 12 23 85 12 30 93 we also examine seasonality and causality in conjunction with the farm programs we explore how wheat spot and futures price volatility has been impacted by government farm programs many studies have examined the effects of various farm policies mckinnon 1967 blakeslee 1980 miranda and helmberger

price discovery and volatility spillovers in index futures markets some evidence from mexico abstract this paper investigates the hypotheses that the recently established mexican stock index futures market effectively serves the price discovery function and that the introduction of futures trading has provoked volatility in the underlying spot market we test both hypotheses simultaneously with daily data from mexico in the context of a modified egarch model that also incorporates possible cointegration between the futures and spot markets the evidence supports both hypotheses suggesting that the futures market in mexico is a useful price discovery vehicle although futures trading has also been a source of instability for the spot market several managerial implications are derived and discussed

an analysis of the spillover effects of exchange traded funds this article used the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity autoregressive moving average garch arma and the exponentially generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity autoregressive moving average egarch arma models to study the impact of the spillover and the leverage effects on returns and volatilities of stock index and exchange trade fund etf for developed and emerging markets previous unexpected returns for developed and emerging markets which have an opposite influence pattern on etfs returns were identified the spillover effects from returns are excellent for hong kong followed by singapore meanwhile taiwan s stock index return was recorded to have a strong negative impact on etf return notably this article shows that the spillover effects on stock index and etf volatilities existed with bilateral influences despite a strong positive asymmetric volatility effect in korea s etf market the leverage effect appears to play important roles in the explana

revisiting incentive effects in workers compensation do higher benefits really induce more claims an important question to ask regarding social insurance programs such as workers compensation wc is to what extent do higher benefits lead to more claims the authors of this study revisit incentive effects of wc using 25 years of data 1977 2004 from the march current population survey cps to estimate the relationship between wc cash benefit levels and the frequency of wc receipt providing new evidence on the subject they demonstrate that conclusions regarding workers incentives to claim benefits differ dramatically depending upon how one controls for the confounding influence of an individual s past earnings the authors expanded empirical specifications which include flexible earnings controls yield benefit participation elasticities smaller than 0 1 their findings suggest that wc claims are not particularly responsive to changes in benefit levels and that labor supply disincentives may warrant less concern than economists or policymakers have typically exhibited the authors also find th

the dynamics of stock index and stock index futures returns in rational efficiently functioning markets the returns on stock index and stock index futures contracts should be perfectly contemporaneously correlated this study investigates the time series properties of 5 minute intraday returns of stock index and stock index futures contracts and finds that sp however the effect is not completely unidirectional with lagged stock index returns having a mild positive predictive impact on futures returns

time varying volatility spillover between chinese fuel oil and stock index futures markets based on a dcc garch model with a semi nonparametric approach abstract this paper reveals some new evidence on the volatility spillover between fuel oil and stock index futures markets in china by considering its time variant feature time varying effect is specified by the legendre polynomials in a dcc garch model moreover the semi nonparametric snp approach accounting for marginal excess kurtosis and asymmetry is applied we find different time evolving patterns of volatility spillover across multiple periods due to the structural breaks the direction of mean volatility spillover is found to be bilateral moreover the strength of mean volatility spillover shows that the effect from stock index to fuel oil futures is much stronger than the other way around this implies that the stock index futures market plays a leading role in information processing these findings have important implications for the fuel oil stakeholders as well as risk management

information transmission and market interactions across the atlantic an empirical study on the natural gas market abstract this paper studies the international information transmission and market interactions in the u s and u k natural gas markets three well documented approaches are used to measure the relative importance on the process of price discovery under a quadvariate system after adjusting the effects of nonsynchronous trading prices robust results indicate our system that includes spot and futures prices within the two countries are driven by one common factor information disseminates efficiently among the four markets concerned the u s futures market dominates as the center for price discovery the u k futures market comes as the second the spot markets in the u s and u k are less efficient than their corresponding futures market where the u k spot market contributes the least and almost zero to the price discovery process asymmetric volatility spillovers are found in three of the four markets volatility in the u s futures market increases with positive returns which illustrates the inverse leverage effect in most of the commodity market volatilities in the spot markets are negatively related to returns which is analogous to the traditional leverage effect prevailing in most of the equity stock markets

price discovery and volatility spillovers in the european union emissions trading scheme a high frequency analysis abstract this paper models the relationship of european union allowance spot and futures prices within the second commitment period of the european union emissions trading scheme based on high frequency data we analyze the transmission of information in first and second conditional moments to reveal long run price discovery we compute common factor weights of schwarz and szakmary 1994 and information shares of hasbrouck 1995 based on estimated coefficients of a vecm to analyze the short run dynamics we perform granger causality tests we identify the futures market to be the leader of the long run price discovery process whereas the informational role of the futures market increases over time in addition we employ a version of the ueccc garch model as introduced by conrad and karanasos 2010 to analyze the volatility transmission structure the volatility analysis indicates a close relationship between the volatility dynamics of both markets whereas in particular we observe spillovers from the futures to the spot market as a whole the investigation reveals that the futures market incorporates information first and then transfers the information to the spot market

the temporal price relationship between s p 500 futures and the s p 500 index this paper empirically examines the intraday price relationship between s p 500 futures and the s p 500 index using minute to minute data three stage least squares regression is used to estimate lead and lag relationships with estimates for expiration days of the s p 500 futures compared with estimates for days prior to expiration the results suggest that futures price movements consistently lead index movements by twenty to forty five minutes while movements in the index rarely affect futures beyond one minute

japan s financial deregulation and linkage of the gensaki and euroyen deposit markets summary this paper examines whether japan s financial deregulation weakened the linkage between the euroyen and gensaki markets it defines and analyses the linkage of the two markets in terms of the persistence and predictability of yield spreads as well as cross market causality by using johansen tests and an error correction model this paper shows first cross market causality before and after deregulation and second one common trend in interest rates substantial gensaki euroyen yield spreads and a slower response of the one month gensaki euroyen yield spread to a shock after deregulation

a further analysis of the lead lag relationship between the cash market and stock index futures market the intraday lead lag relation between returns of the major market cash index and returns of the major market index futures and s p 500 futures is investigated empirical results show strong evidence that the futures leads the cash index and weak evidence that the cash index leads the futures the asymmetric lead lag relation holds between the futures and all component stocks including those that trade in almost every five minute interval evidence indicates that when more stocks move together market wide information the futures leads the cash index to a greater degree this suggests that the futures market is the main source of market wide information article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

how much does absenteeism cost this paper presents evidence on the output loss resulting from absenteeism hedonic wage equations are estimated over two different data sets the 1972 1973 quality of employment survey and the pooled may 1973 1975 current population survey to calculate the cost in terms of reduced output and increased labor costs per payroll hour also a manufacturing production function is estimated to directly compute the productivity loss the results indicate that the effect of absenteeism on output is quite small a 10 percentage point increase in the absence rate is associated with at most a 2 1 percent decrease in the wage

events that shook the market tick data on the standard and poor s 500 stock index s p 500 futures contract and newswire searches are used to match events to large 1 to 5 minute stock price changes sixty nine events that led to large stock price changes are identified between 1982 and 1999 53 of which are directly or indirectly related to monetary policy many large stock price changes have no events associated with them

from search to match when loan contracts are too long a model of lending is presented where loans are established in matches between banks lenders and entrepreneurs borrowers who meet in a search process projects turn out randomly a quick payoff or a long term payoff that requires a rollover of the loan the model generates under proper parameter conditions two steady states without or with rollover and rollover is socially inefficient under imperfect information the standard debt contract is privately efficient however it extends the domains of equilibria with socially inefficient rollover the global dynamics displays a continuum of equilibrium paths that each exhibits sudden discontinuities crises in which the mass of outstanding loans is reduced by a quantum amount of terminations crises have a cleansing effect

impulse response function for conditional volatility in garch models this article defines and analyzes the impulse response function for conditional volatility in generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch models it first derives the function from a vector autoregressive and moving average representation of the garch models and obtains the corresponding standard errors from the first order derivatives of the function and the covariance matrix of the estimated parameters then this article employs a monte carlo study to assess the finite sample properties of the standard errors and provides an empirical example of the dependence of exchange rate volatility to demonstrate its use in empirical applications

a multivariate garch model of international transmissions of stock returns and volatility the case of the united states and canada this study examines the short run dynamics of returns and volatility for stocks traded on the new york and toronto stock exchanges the main finding is that inferences about the magnitude and persistence of return innovations that originate in either market and that transmit to the other market depend importantly on how the cross market dynamics in volatility are modeled moreover much weaker cross market dynamics in returns and volatility prevail during later subperiods and especially for canadian stocks with shares dually listed in new york implications for international asset pricing hedging strategies and regulatory policy are discussed

the rise and fall of disability insurance enrollment in the netherlands as recently as 15 years ago the high level of disability insurance di enrollment was considered to be one of the major social and economic problems of the netherlands indeed the netherlands was characterized as the country with the most out of control disability program of oecd countries but since about 2002 the netherlands has seen a spectacular decline in its disability insurance enrollment rate radical reforms to the dutch di system were implemented over the period 1996 to 2006 we cluster these reforms in three broad categories 1 reducing the incentives of employers to move workers to disability 2 increased gatekeeping and 3 tightening disability eligibility criteria while enhancing worker incentives the reforms appear to have been very effective since 2002 yearly di inflow rates dropped from 1 5 percent in 2001 to about 0 5 percent of the insured population in 2012 we argue that particularly the interaction of employer incentives and formal employer obligations has contributed to the substantial decrease in di inflow on the downside however it seems workers with bad health have sorted into temporary employment without employers bearing the financial responsibility of their benefit costs

work environment and individual background explaining regional shirking differentials in a large italian firm the prevalence of shirking within a large italian bank appears to be characterized by significant regional differentials in particular absenteeism and misconduct episodes are substantially more prevalent in the south we consider a number of potential explanations for this fact different individual backgrounds group interaction effects sorting of workers across regions differences in local attributes different hiring policies and discrimination against southern workers our analysis suggests that individual backgrounds group interaction effects and sorting effects contribute to explaining the north south shirking differential none of the other explanations appears to be of first order importance i introduction whether individual behavior is determined by group interactions or by individual background is undoubtedly a fundamental question for the social sciences this question presented itself forcefully when we stumbled onto the following piece of evidence there appear to be significant regional differentials in the prevalence of shirking among the employees of a large italian bank in particular absenteeism and misconduct episodes are considerably more frequent in the southern branches of the bank in this paper we examine several potential explanations for this fact first individual preferences for shirking versus working may differ according to one s region of hirth we will refer to this hj othesis as one of different individual hackgrounds the second possibility is one of locational sorting low shirking types may tend to migrate to the north high shirking types may tend to migrate to the south or hoth third the northern and southern

index arbitrage with heterogeneous investors a smooth transition error correction analysis abstract the traditional index arbitrage model assumes a constant threshold mispricing between the futures and cash prices for all investors allowing for heterogeneity in investors transaction costs objectives and capital constraints we model the intraday mispricing of djia futures as a smooth transition autoregressive star process with the speed of adjustment toward equilibrium varying directly with the mispricing we show that the observed mean reversion in mispricing changes is induced by heterogeneous arbitrageurs instead of a statistical illusion infrequent trading of index portfolio stocks we further use a star error correction model to describe the nonlinear dynamics between the djia futures and index this model describes not only which market is more informationally efficient than the other but also the legging process the nonsimultaneous establishing of cash and futures positions

moral hazard and sickness insurance abstract we study if the replacement level in the swedish national sickness insurance which replaces foregone earnings due to temporary illnesses affects work absence behavior we use micro data and estimate the effects of a major reform whereby the replacement level during the first 90 days in each absence spell was reduced on work attendance to separate out the effect of the reform from any trend in work absence we distinguish between the implications on the incidence of work absence i e the frequency of spells and the duration of the spells we also use a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effects on the prevalence of work absence finally we estimate elasticities with respect to the replacement level in the sickness insurance

pairwise credit in search equilibrium pairwise extension of credit is introduced into the barter search economy previously analyzed by the author the penalty for failure to repay a debt is modeled as the end of trading opportunities since credit availability makes access to trade more valuable there may be multiple equilibrium credit limits since the credit limit affects the implicit interest rate and the stock of inventories it is necessary to check the net impact of the credit limit on the incentive to repay in a calculated example with lumpy credit availability multiple equilibria are very common with a greater credit limit associated with a lower implicit interest rate with smooth credit availability no multiple equilibria were found surprisingly credit can break the no production equilibrium

stock market structure and volatility the procedure for opening stocks on the nyse appears to affect price volatility an analytical framework for assessing the magnitude of the structurally induced volatility is presented the ratio of variance of open to open returns to closeto close returns is shown to be consistently greater than one for nyse common stocks during the period 1982 through 1986 tbe greater volatility at the open is not attributable to the way in which public information is released since both the opento open return and the close to close return span the same period of time instead the greater volatility appears to be attributable to private information revealed in trading and to temporaryprice deviations induced by specialist and other traders the implied cost of immediacy at the open is significantly higher than at the close other empirical evidence in this article documents the volume of trading at the open the time delays between the exchange opening and the first transaction in a stock the difference in daytime volatility versus overnight volatility and the extent to which volatility is related to trading volume

the case for presenteeism evidence from norway s sickness insurance program can a work first strategy control moral hazard problems in temporary disability insurance and accelerate recovery based on empirical analysis of norwegian data we show that it can activation requirements not only bring down benefit claims they also reduce the likelihood that long term sickness absence leads to inactivity our findings show that absentees who are assigned graded partial absence certificates by their physician have shorter absences and higher subsequent employment rates than they would have had on regular sick leave we conclude that the activation strategies that in recent years have permeated european and us welfare policy may fruitfully be carried over to sick leave insurance for temporary disabled workers

asymmetric predictability of conditional variances we show that there is an asymmetry in the predictability of the volatilities of large versus small firms using both univariate and multivariate arma garch m parameterizations we find that volatility surprises to large market value firms are important to the future dynamics of their own returns as well as the returns of smaller firms conversely however shocks to smaller firms have no impact on the behavior of either the mean or the variance of the returns of larger capitalization companies article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

corporate debt overhang and macroeconomic expectations one way in which corporate financial structure affects macroeconomic performance is by creating debt overhang debt overhang occurs when existing debt deters new investment because the benefits from new investment will go to the existing creditors not to the new investors if the economy is booming debt overhang will not bind because the returns to investing are high if the economy is stagnant debt overhang will bind because the returns to investing are low as a result high levels of debt can create multiple expectational equilibria in which animal spirits determine economy activity copyright 1995 by american economic association

petroleum spreads and the term structure of futures prices we employ the term structure of gasoline and heating oil prices proxied by convenience yields to explain the variation in the spread between the prices of gasoline and crude oil and the prices of heating oil and crude oil we demonstrate that the marginal convenience yields in the gasoline and heating oil markets explained much of the variation in the spreads between 1986 and 1999 the evidence indicates the importance of a disaggregated treatment of the term structure of prices the convenience yield is found to explain a substantially higher amount of the variation in the spread when it is decomposed by maturity even after controls for seasonality and inventory levels are implemented these findings support the notion that the futures term structure contains information beyond what can be garnered via obvious or easily available proxies of current supply and demand the findings are also supported in an alternate specification that tests for the origins of information spillover leadership between t

the price of worker reliability abstract worker absenteeism is costly to firms that use assembly line production processes this paper shows why an assembly line firm may prefer to pay higher average wages and reduce sick pay entitlement relative to firms with constant returns

intraday volatility in the stock index and stock index futures markets we examine the intraday relationship between returns and returns volatility in the stock index and stock index futures markets our results indicate a strong intermarket dependence in the volatility of the cash and futures returns price innovations that originate in either the stock or futures markets can predict the future volatility in the other market we show that this relationship persists even during periods in which the dependence in the returns themselves appears to weaken the findings are robust to controlling for potential market frictions such as asynchronous trading in the stock index our results have implications for understanding the pattern of information flows between the two markets article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

intraday relationships among index arbitrage spot and futures price volatility and spot market volume a transactions data test abstract this paper examines intraday temporal relationships among arbitrage spreads cash and futures price volatility and cash trading volume using transactions data for the major market index futures contracts and the component stocks of the index results indicate that changes in the spread have a significant impact on cash and futures price volatility as well as on cash trading volume the impact of the spread however is attenuated by the short sale restriction in the cash market contrary to popular beliefs a more volatile market leads to subsequent decreases in the spread probably because of increases in the supply of arbitrage services or faster price adjustments

stock volatility and the great depression stock return volatility during the great depression has been labeled a volatility puzzle because the standard deviation of stock returns was 2 to 3 times higher than any other period in american history we investigate this puzzle using a new series of building permits and leverage our results suggest that volatility in building permit growth and financial leverage largely explain the high level of stock volatility during the great depression markets factored in the possibility of a forthcoming economic disaster received september 30 2017 editorial decision august 27 2018 by editor philip e strahan authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

incentive effects of workers compensation insurance abstract this paper uses micro level data from the current population survey to estimate the determinants of participation in state workers compensation programs in the united states the principal finding is that higher workers compensation benefits are associated with greater participation in the workers compensation program after accounting for a variety of covariates in addition the waiting period is found to have a substantial negative effect on program participation finally time series estimates based on the cross sectional model show that the growth in workers compensation claims in the 1970s corresponds reasonably well with the growth in real benefits in this time period

loan commitments and the debt overhang problem the debt overhang problem is shown to arise in the context of an entrepreneurial project that requires a sequence of investments financed by an outside lender the entrepreneur not internalizing losses accruing to the lender which financed the initial investments may inefficiently cancel the project and instead pursue an outside opportunity it is shown that loan commitments contracts that allow the entrepreneur to borrow a variable amount at a set interest rate in return for a fixed fee are the optimal financial contracts in this setting strictly dominating standard debt the existence of the fixed fee allows loan commitments to set a relatively low interest rate improving the entrepreneur s incentives to continue the project the paper specifies the optimal contract fully derives robust comparative statics properties using an extension of milgrom and roberts 1994 and extends the results to more realistic settings e g allowing the market risk free rate to be stochastic

index futures arbitrage and the behavior of stock index futures prices this article examines intraday transaction datafor s p 500 stock indexfutures prices and the intraday quotes for the underlying index the data indicate that thefutures price changes are uncorrelated and that the variability of these price changes exceeds the variability ofprice changes in the s p 500 index this excess variability of the futures over the index remains even after controlling for the nonsynchronous prices in the index quotes which induces autocorrelation in the index changes we advance and examine empirically two hypotheses regarding the difference between the futures price and its theoretical value that this mispricing increases on average with maturity and that it is path dependent evidence supporting these hypotheses is presented

a note on the predictability of finnish stock market returns evidence from stock index futures markets abstract this paper provides further evidence on the predictability of the finnish stock market returns the results show the significant role of index futures returns as an important vehicle in stock market return and volatility prediction

the impact of the listing of options in the foreign exchange market abstract this paper documents the impact of the introduction of foreign currency options and options on foreign currency futures on the underlying securities we find that the volatility of exchange rates decreases following the listing of options for a majority of the currencies under consideration in addition we find that trading volume and open interest in currency futures increases after option introduction this evidence is consistent with the notion that derivative securities are important innovations for stabilizing and increasing liquidity in the market for the underlying assets

market interactions in returns and volatilities between spot and forward shipping freight markets abstract the lead lag relationship in both returns and volatilities between spot and futures markets has been investigated extensively in the financial economics literature only a limited number of such studies have appeared on forward markets primarily due to the lack of easy access to empirical data this paper uses a unique database in over the counter forward freight agreements ffa to investigate the issue the underlying commodity is non storable being that of a shipping service with the additional feature of transactions costs being higher in the spot market in comparison to the forward market these features have interesting implications for the markets at the practical level the better understanding of the mean and variance dynamics can improve risk management and budget planning decisions

economic news and equity market linkages between the u s and u k abstract the source of equity market linkages between the u s and u k is investigated by focusing on intraday price movements of stock index futures contracts we document heightened u k return volatility at 11 30 a m and 1 30 p m gmt which corresponds to regular macroeconomic releases in the u k and u s respectively the response of u k equities in the half hour surrounding the u s announcements is significant and similar to price movements for u s equities to the same announcements these results support the hypothesis that the documented international equity market linkages are attributable to reactions of foreign traders to public information originating from the u s

meteor showers or heat waves heteroskedastic intra daily volatility in the foreign exchange market this paper seeks to explain the causes of volatility clustering in exchange rates careful examination of intra daily exchange rates provides a test of two hypotheses heat waves and meteor showers the heat wave hypothesis is that the volatility has only country specific autocorrelation alternatively the meteor shower is a phenomenon of intra daily volatility spillovers from one market to the next using the garch model to specify the heteroskedasticity across intra daily market segments we find that the empirical evidence is generally against the null hypothesis of the heat wave using a volatility type of vector autoregression we examine the impact of news in one market on the time path of per hour volatility in other markets

the october 1987 s p 500 stock futures basis five minute changes in the s p 500 index and futures contract are examined over a ten day period surrounding the october 1987 stock market crash since nonsynchronous trading problems are severe in these data new index estimators are derived and used the estimators use the complete transaction history of all 500 stocks nonsynchronous trading explains part of the large absolute futures cash basis observed during the crash the remainder may be due to disintegration of the two markets even after adjustment for nonsynchronous trading the index displays more autocorrelation than does the futures and the futures leads the index

expiration and maturity effect empirical evidence from the spanish spot and futures stock index the paper studies how the time remaining to the expiration date of derivative markets affects the volatility of the ibex 35 index expiration effect and its futures market maturity effect the innovation of the study lies in both effects being studied together for the spanish stock market using bivariate ecm garch including dummy variables that express the time left to expiration day the results obtained show that during the week of the expiration day the conditional variance of both markets increases without presenting any significant behaviour in the correlation level during the second week however the conditional variance diminishes and the degree of correlation between both markets increases

count data models with variance of unknown form an application to a hedonic model of worker absenteeism we examine an econometric model of counts of worker absences due to illness in a sluggishly adjusting hedonic labor market we compare three estimators that parameterize the conditional variance least squares poisson and negative binomial pseudo maximum likelihood to generalized least squares gls using nonparametric estimates of the conditional variance our data support the hedonic absenteeism model semiparametric gls coefficients are similar in sign magnitude and statistical significance to coefficients where the mean and variance of the errors are specified ex ante in our data coefficient estimates are sensitive to a regressor list but not to the econometric technique including correcting for possible heteroskedasticity of unknown form

do wages compensate for anticipated working time restrictions evidence from seasonal employment in austria this article investigates the existence of compensating wage differentials across seasonal and long term jobs that arise due to anticipated working time restrictions using longitudinal information from the austrian administrative records we derive a definition of seasonality based on observed regularities in employment patterns as wages change across seasonal and long term jobs for the same individual over time we can control for individual specific effects and use variation in the starting month of seasonal jobs as an exogenous predictor of anticipated unemployment we find that employers pay on average a positive wage differential of about 11 for seasonal jobs

teams teamwork and absence we argue that firms with interdependent worker productivity team production have a higher cost of absence and as a consequence spend additional resources on monitoring absence as a result firms with team production should have lower absence rates we estimate the determinants of absence for blue collar workers using a sample of german manufacturing establishments workplace teams are used as a proxy for team production the estimates reveal that firms with teams have lower absence rates as do smaller establishments the size effect however is unique to establishments with teams which fits prior theoretical work that has not been previously tested

a transaction data study of weekly and intradaily patterns in stock returns abstract weekly and intradaily patterns in common stock prices are examined using transaction data for large firms negative monday close to close returns accrue between the friday close and the monday open for smaller firms they accrue primarily during the monday trading day for all firms significant weekday differences in intraday returns accrue during the first 45 minutes after the market opens on monday mornings prices drop while on the other weekday mornings they rise otherwise the pattern of intraday returns is similar on all weekdays most notable is an increase in prices on the last trade of the day

sickness absence an international comparison this paper shows how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from labour force surveys and describes some important features of data that we have generated using the luxembourg employment study we also analyse sickness absence rates by age gender and other socio economic characteristics of workers these relationships prove to be similar across countries with widely differing mean rates of absence in this dataset workers with longer tenure tend to have higher absence rates even when age is controlled for absence is also positively correlated with higher usual hours of work we show how internationally and intertemporally consistent information on sickness absence can be constructed from labour force surveys lfs and describe some important features of data that we have generated using the luxembourg employment study les such data fill an important gap in available information about absence since they have the potential to provide answers to a number of issues that remain unresolved in its study there is now substantial evidence going back to the work of the industrial fatigue research board in the 1920s and 1930s i that sickness absence is not purely a response to a medical condition workers who have access to compensation payments are more likely to be absent than those without buzzard and shaw 1952 the higher the rate of compensation the more absences workers are likely to take buzzard and shaw 1952 furthermore the higher the rate of compensation the longer absences are likely to be barmby et al 1991 the analysis of sickness absence is placed firmly in the agenda of economics by the idea that sickness absence rates are the consequence of choices that can be mediated by financial and other incentives the provision and level of sickpay is typically determined at two levels by negotiation between firms and their workforces and by government regulation interfirm variations in absence and their correlates are not well understood coles and treble 1996 have argued that the marginal cost of an absence is partially in the control of firms and can be usefully seen as driven by the nature of the technology adopted these theoretical arguments remain largely unexplored empirically but the ability to compare similar industries across different countries is likely to be revealing this paper was drafted during a visit to ceps instead in the summer of 1999 the research was funded by a grant of the european commission under the tmr programme access to large scale facilities hosted by iriss c i at ceps instead in differdange luxembourg we are also grateful for support from the leverhulme foundation through a grant to the institute for labour research at the university of essex and to colleagues at the ilr for their constructive comments acknowledgements to les data providers are given at the end of the paper we would also like to thank paul alkemade elena bardasi and pascal garin for their help any remaining errors are our own and the views expressed herein are not necessarily those of ceps instead 1 see for example vernon and bedford 1928

standard poor s 500 index futures volatility and price changes around the new york stock exchange close we examine the effects of the closing of the new york stock exchange nyse on volatility and price changes in the standard poor s s p futures market which trades for 15 more minutes each day when the nyse closes volatility in the futures market drops significantly only to increase at the close of the futures market thus exhibiting a u shaped pattern after the nyse closes we also find that friday s close is the period of highest volatility in the futures market also in the final minutes on friday the s p futures price anticipates the well known weekend effect found in equities copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

intraday relationships between volatility in s p 500 futures prices and volatility in the s p 500 index abstract this paper examines the intraday relationships between the volatility of s p 500 futures prices and the volatility of the s p 500 index we calculate variance measures for minute to minute price changes on a daily basis and across 30 minute intervals the empirical results indicate that i futures volatility is greater than index volatility ii volatility increased for both futures prices and the index in absolute terms from 1984 through 1986 iii both futures and index volatility increased directly with futures trading volume and iv index volatility was systematically greater during the first 30 minutes of trading each day than at other times granger tests however reveal no systematic pattern of futures volatility leading index volatility or index volatility leading futures volatility

the price variability volume relationship on speculative markets this paper concerns the relationship between the variability of the daily price change and the daily volume of trading on the speculative markets our work extends the theory of speculative markets in two ways first we derive from economic theory the joint probability distribution of the price change and the trading volume over any interval of time within the trading day and second we determine how this joint distribution changes as more traders enter or exit from the market the model s parameters are estimated by fiml using daily data from the 90 day t bills futures market the results of the estimation can reconcile a conflict between the price variability volume relationship for this market and the relationship obtained by previous investigators for other speculative markets this paper concerns the relationship between the variability of the daily price change and the volume of trading on speculative markets previous empirical studies 2 3 6 12 14 16 of both futures and equity markets always find a positive association between price variability as measured by the squared price change ap2 and the trading volume 2 there are two explanations for the relationship clark s 2 explanation which is secondary to his effort to explain why the probability distribution of the daily price change is leptokurtic emphasizes randomness in the number of within day transactions in clark s model the daily price change is the sum of a random number of within day price changes the variance of the daily price change is thus a random variable with a mean proportional to the mean number of daily transactions clark argues that the trading volume is related positively to the number of within day transactions and so the trading volume is related positively to the variability of the price change the second explanation is due to epps and epps 6 their model examines the mechanics of within day trading the change in the market price on each within day transaction or market clearing is the average of the changes in all of the traders reservation prices epps and epps assume there is a positive relationship between the extent to which traders disagree when they revise their reservation prices and the absolute value of the change in the market price that is an increase in the extent to which traders disagree is associated with a larger absolute price change the price variability volume relationship arises then because the volume of trading is positively related to the extent to which traders disagree when they revise their reservation prices