women don t run election aversion and candidate entry to study gender differences in candidate emergence we conduct a laboratory experiment in which we control the incentives potential candidates face manipulate features of the electoral environment and measure beliefs and preferences we find that men and women are equally likely to volunteer when the representative is chosen randomly but that women are less likely to become candidates when the representative is chosen by an election this difference does not arise from disparities in abilities risk aversion or beliefs but rather from the specific competitive and strategic context of campaigns and elections thus we find evidence that women are election averse whereas men are not election aversion persists with variations in the electoral environment disappearing only when campaigns are both costless and completely truthful

the effects of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity this paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on global real economic activity using a quarterly vector autoregressive model with stochastic volatility in mean stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices and allows one to incorporate an extraneous indicator of oil price uncertainty such as realized volatility that greatly improves the precision of the estimated uncertainty series the estimation results show that an oil price uncertainty shock has negative effects on world industrial production all else equal for example it is shown that a doubling of oil price volatility is associated with a cumulative decline as high as 0 3 percentage points in world industrial production

do competitive workplaces deter female workers a large scale natural field experiment on job entry decisions an important line of research using laboratory experiments has provided a new potential reason for gender imbalances in labour markets men are more competitively inclined than women whether and to what extent gender differences in attitudes toward competition lead to differences in naturally occurring labour markets remains an open question to examine this we run a natural field experiment on job entry decisions where we randomize almost 9000 job seekers into different compensation regimes by varying the role that individual competition plays in setting the wage and the gender composition we examine whether a competitive compensation regime by itself can cause differential job entry the data highlight the power of the compensation regime in that women disproportionately shy away from competitive work settings yet there are important factors that attenuate the gender differences including whether the job is performed in teams whether the position has overt gender associations and the age of the job seekers we also find that the effect is most pronounced in labour markets with attractive alternative employment options furthermore our results suggest that preferences over uncertainty can be just as important as preferences over competition per se in driving job entry choices

performance in competitive environments gender differences even though the provision of equal opportunities for men and women has been a priority in many countries large gender differences prevail in competitive high ranking positions suggested explanations include discrimination and differences in preferences and human capital in this paper we present experimental evidence in support of an additional factor women may be less effective than men in competitive environments even if they are able to perform similarly in non competitive environments in a laboratory experiment we observe as we increase the competitiveness of the environment a significant increase in performance for men but not for women this results in a significant gender gap in performance in tournaments while there is no gap when participants are paid according to piece rate this effect is stronger when women have to compete against men than in single sex competitive environments this suggests that women may be able to perform in competitive environments per se

another perspective on the effects of inflation uncertainty this paper examines the effects of inflation uncertainty on real economic activity by utilizing a flexible dynamic multivariate framework that accommodates possible interaction between the conditional means and variances the empirical model is based on a familiar identified vector autoregressive framework modified to accommodate multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity our empirical model is preferred to the baseline var by likelihood based information criteria and it retains the important dynamics of the underlying var we find that an average shock to inflation uncertainty has tended to reduce output growth over three months by about 22 basis points

gender and competition at a young age gender gaps may be observed in a variety of economic and social environments one of the possible determining factors is that men are more competitive than women and so when the competitiveness of the environment increases the performance of men increases relative to that of women we test this hypothesis in a field study conducted with 9 year old children running on a track they first run alone and then in pairs over a short distance with different gender composition of the pairs the results support the hypothesis that performance in competition varies according to gender when children ran alone there was no difference in performance in competition boys but not girls improved their performance this finding relates to the discussion regarding single sex schools the outcomes of examinations in a mixed sex school can show a gender gap in favor of boys even when this gap does not reflect actual abilities girls who are as talented as boys will end up performing worse just because they are not as competitive and will not achieve as high scores in examinations as boys

term premia and inflation uncertainty empirical evidence from an international panel dataset this paper provides cross country empirical evidence on bond risk premia i construct a panel of zero coupon nominal government bond yields spanning ten industrialized countries and nearly two decades i hence compute forward rates and then use two different methods to decompose these forward rates into expected future short term interest rates and term premiums the first method uses an affine term structure model with macroeconomic variables as unspanned risk factors the second method uses surveys i find that term premium estimates declined across countries over the sample period especially in countries that appear to have reduced inflation uncertainty by making substantial changes in the monetary policy frameworks of their central banks during the recent financial crisis term premiums have remained flat and even declined further in some countries perhaps reflecting the effects of quantitative easing actions by many central banks

the robustness of equilibria to incomplete information a number of papers have shown that a strict nash equilibrium action profile of a game may never be played if there is a small amount of incomplete information see for example carlsson and van damme 1993a we present a general approach to analyzing the robustness of equilibria to a small amount of incomplete information a nash equilibrium of a complete information game is said to be robust to incomplete information if every incomplete information game with payoffs almost always given by the complete information game has an equilibrium which generates behavior close to the nash equilibrium we show that many games with strict equilibria have no robust equilibrium and examine why we get such different results from existing refinements if a game has a unique correlated equilibrium it is robust a natural many player many action generalization of risk dominance is a sufficient condition for robustness

do women shy away from competition do men compete too much we examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task first under a noncompetitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme although there are no gender differences in performance men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance while 73 percent of the men select the tournament only 35 percent of the women make this choice this gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only playa negligible role instead the tournament entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition the result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it

can interest rate volatility be extracted from the cross section of bond yields most affine models of the term structure with stochastic volatility predict that the variance of the short rate should play a dual role in that it should also equal a linear combination of yields however we find that estimation of a standard affine three factor model results in a variance state variable that while instrumental in explaining the shape of the yield curve is essentially unrelated to garch estimates of the quadratic variation of the spot rate process or to implied variances from options we then investigate four factor affine models of the models tested only the model that exhibits unspanned stochastic volatility usv generates both realistic short rate volatility estimates and a good cross sectional fit our findings suggest that short rate volatility cannot be extracted from the cross section of bond prices in particular short rate volatility and convexity are only weakly correlated c 2009 elsevier b v all rights reserved

the impact of the volatility of monetary policy shocks this paper studies the impact of the volatility of monetary policy using a structural vector auroregression svar model enriched along two dimensions first it allows for time varying variance of monetary policy shocks via a stochastic volatility specification second it allows a dynamic interaction between the level of the endogenous variables in the var and the time varying volatility the analysis establishes that the nominal interest rate output growth and inflation fall in reaction to an increase in the volatility of monetary policy the analysis also develops a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model enriched with stochastic volatility to monetary policy that generates similar responses and provides a theoretical underpinning of these findings

diffusion and cascading behavior in random networks abstract the spread of new ideas behaviors or technologies has been extensively studied using epidemic models here we consider a model of diffusion where the individuals behavior is the result of a strategic choice we study a simple coordination game with binary choice and give a condition for a new action to become widespread in a random network we also analyze the possible equilibria of this game and identify conditions for the coexistence of both strategies in large connected sets finally we look at how can firms use social networks to promote their goals with limited information our results differ strongly from the one derived with epidemic models and show that connectivity plays an ambiguous role while it allows the diffusion to spread when the network is highly connected the diffusion is also limited by high degree nodes which are very stable

extracting a robust u s business cycle using a time varying multivariate model based bandpass filter we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that accounts for potential time variation in macroeconomic variables the coincident economic indicator is based on a multivariate trend cycle decomposition model and is constructed from a moderate set of us macroeconomic time series in particular we consider an unobserved components time series model with a common cycle that is shared across different time series but adjusted for phase shift and amplitude the extracted cycle can be interpreted as a model based bandpass filter and is designed to emphasize the business cycle frequencies that are of interest to applied researchers and policymakers stochastic volatility processes and mixture distributions for the irregular components and the common cycle disturbances enable us to account for the heteroskedasticity present in the data forecasting results are presented for a set of different specifications point forecasts from the preferred model indicate a future recession with the uncertainty over the business cycle growing quickly as the forecast horizon increases copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

what does monetary policy do to long term interest rates at the zero lower bound this article uses a structural var with daily data to identify the effects of monetary policy shocks on various longer term interest rates since the federal funds rate has been stuck at the zero lower bound the var is identified using the assumption that monetary policy shocks are heteroskedastic monetary policy shocks have especially high variance on days of fomc meetings and certain speeches while there is otherwise nothing unusual about these days a complementary high frequency event study approach is also used i find that stimulative monetary policy shocks lower treasury and corporate bond yields but the effects die off fairly fast

do bonds span the fixed income markets theory and evidence for unspanned stochastic volatility most term structure models assume bond markets are complete that is that all fixed income derivatives can be perfectly replicated using solely bonds however we find that in practice swap rates have limited explanatory power for returns on at the money straddles portfolios mainly exposed to volatility risk we term this empirical feature unspanned stochastic volatility usv while usv can be captured within an hjm framework we demonstrate that bivariate models cannot exhibit usv we determine necessary and sufficient conditions for trivariate markov affine systems to exhibit usv for such usv models bonds alone may not be sufficient to identify all parameters rather derivatives are needed

cooperation with network monitoring this paper studies the maximum level of cooperation that can be sustained in perfect bayesian equilibrium in repeated games with network monitoring where players observe each other s actions either perfectly or not at all the foundational result is that the maximum level of cooperation can be robustly sustained in grim trigger strategies if players are equally well monitored comparative statics on the maximum level of cooperation are highly tractable

non exclusive conventions and social coordination we study the long run outcome when communities with different conventions interact we introduce the notion of non exclusive conventions to model the idea that by incurring some additional costs agents can remain flexible and hence coordinate their activities more successfully we show that if these costs of flexibility are low high and interaction is local then the pareto efficient risk dominant convention prevails in both communities at intermediate cost levels the conventions coexist we also show that the importance of relative size of the two communities varies across interaction structures journal of economic literature classification

noisy contagion without mutation in a local interaction game agents play an identical stage game against their neighbours over time for nearest neighbour interaction it is established that starting from a random initial configuration in which each agent has a positive probability of playing the risk dominant strategy a sufficiently large population coordinates in the long run on the risk dominant equilibrium almost surely our result improves on blume 1995 ellison 2000 and morris 2000 by showing that the risk dominant equilibrium spreads to the entire population in a two dimensional lattice and without the help of mutation as long as there is some randomness in the initial configuration

innovation diffusion in heterogeneous populations contagion social influence and social learning new ideas products and practices take time to diffuse a fact that is often attributed to some form of heterogeneity among potential adopters this paper examines three broad classes of diffusion models contagion social influence and social learning and shows how to incorporate heterogeneity into each at a high level of generality without losing analytical tractability each type of model leaves a characteristic footprint on the shape of the adoption curve which provides a basis for discriminating empirically between them the approach is illustrated using the classic study of ryan and gross 1943 on the diffusion of hybrid corn

term premia and inflation uncertainty empirical evidence from an international panel dataset comment term premia implied by maximum likelihood estimates of affine term structure models are misleading because of small sample bias we show that accounting for this bias alters the conclusions about the trend cycle and macroeconomic determinants of the term premia estimated in wright 2011 his term premium estimates are essentially acyclical and often just parallel the secular trend in longterm interest rates in contrast bias corrected term premia show pronounced countercyclical behavior consistent with theoretical and empirical arguments about movements in risk premia jel e31 e43 e52 g12 h63 in an important recent paper wright 2011 presents a new international interest rate dataset and estimates term premia in far ahead forward rates using an affine gaussian dynamic term structure model dtsm as well as a survey based method he then relates these empirical term premia to macroeconomic conditions notably inflation uncertainty in particular he shows that the marked secular decline in estimated forward term premia across countries is correlated with decreases in measures of uncertainty around forecasts of future inflation in this comment we demonstrate that his model based term premium estimates are distorted by smallsample bias in the estimated model parameters accounting for this bias changes the behavior of the resulting term premium estimates in terms of their trend and cyclical behavior in an affine gaussian dtsm bond yields are determined by a small number of risk factors and the dynamic evolution of these risk factors follows a gaussian vector autoregression var if the risk factors in such a model are observable and if the model is maximally flexible i e if it has no parameter restrictions beyond those required for identification we know from joslin singleton and zhu 2011 that the maximum likelihood estimates of the var parameters can be found by

the electronic mail game strategic behavior under almost common knowledge the paper addresses a paradoxical game theoretic example which is closely related to the coordinated attack problem two players have to play one of two possible coordination games only one of them receives information about the coordination game to be played it is shown that the situation with almost common knowledge is very different from when the coordination game played is common knowledge

why women don t run experimental evidence on gender differences in political competition aversion abstract women s underrepresentation in leadership positions has been well documented but the reasons behind it are not well understood we carry out a field experiment to test a prominent theory about the source of the gender gap in leadership ambition women s higher aversion to competitive environments using politics as a context for our study we employ two distinct subject pools highly politically active individuals and workers from an online labor market we find that priming individuals to consider the competitive nature of politics has a strong negative effect on women s interest in political office but not on men s interest hence significantly increasing the gender gap in leadership ambition

a dynamic multivariate heavy tailed model for time varying volatilities and correlations we propose a new class of observation driven time varying parameter models for dynamic volatilities and correlations to handle time series from heavy tailed distributions the model adopts generalized autoregressive score dynamics to obtain a time varying covariance matrix of the multivariate student t distribution the key novelty of our proposed model concerns the weighting of lagged squared innovations for the estimation of future correlations and volatilities when we account for heavy tails of distributions we obtain estimates that are more robust to large innovations we provide an empirical illustration for a panel of daily equity returns

information in the term structure of yield curve volatility using a novel no arbitrage model and extensive second moment data we decompose conditional volatility of u s treasury yields into volatilities of short rate expectations and term premia short rate expectations become more volatile than premia before recessions and during asset market distress correlation between shocks to premia and shocks to short rate expectations is close to zero on average and varies with the monetary policy stance while treasuries are nearly unexposed to variance shocks investors pay a premium for hedging variance risk with derivatives we illustrate the dynamics of the yield volatility components during and after the financial crisis

contagion and uninvadability in local interaction games the bilingual game and general supermodular games abstract in a setting where an infinite population of players interact locally and repeatedly we study the impacts of payoff structures and network structures on contagion of a convention beyond 2 2 coordination games first we consider the bilingual game where each player chooses one of two conventions or adopts both i e chooses the bilingual option at an additional cost for this game we completely characterize when a convention spreads contagiously from a finite subset of players to the entire population in some network and conversely when a convention is never invaded by the other convention in any network we show that the pareto dominant risk dominant resp convention is contagious if the cost of bilingual option is low high resp furthermore if the cost is in a medium range both conventions are each contagious in respective networks and in particular the pareto dominant convention is contagious only in some non linear networks second we consider general supermodular games and compare networks in terms of their power of inducing contagion we show that if there is a weight preserving node identification from one network to another then the latter is more contagion inducing than the former in all supermodular games

identification of endogenous social effects the reflection problem this paper examines the reflection problem that arises when a researcher observing the distribution of behaviour in a population tries to infer whether the average behaviour in some group influences the behaviour of the individuals that comprise the group it is found that inference is not possible unless the researcher has prior information specifying the compisition of reference groups if this information is available the prospects for inference depend critically on the population relationship between the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes inference is difficult to implossible if these variables are functionally dependent or are statistically independent the prospects are better if the variables defining reference groups and those directly affecting outcomes are moderately related in the population

gender competitiveness and career choices gender differences in competitiveness have been hypothesized as a potential explanation for gender differences in education and labor market outcomes we examine the predictive power of a standard laboratory experimental measure of competitiveness for the later important choice of academic track of secondary school students in the netherlands although boys and girls display similar levels of academic ability boys choose substantially more prestigious academic tracks where more prestigious tracks are more math and science intensive our experimental measure shows that boys are also substantially more competitive than girls we find that competitiveness is strongly positively correlated with choosing more prestigious academic tracks even conditional on academic ability most important we find that the gender difference in competitiveness accounts for a substantial portion about 20 of the gender difference in track choice

unspanned stochastic volatility in affine models evidence from eurodollar futures and options unspanned stochastic volatility usv refers to the inability of bonds to replicate volatility sensitive derivative securities affine term structure models require special restrictions on the parameters to exhibit usv we use a joint eurodollar futures and options data set to estimate affine three factor models with and without usv restrictions the unrestricted model captures prices of futures and options well option pricing errors are much larger in the usv model the usv model is rejected in favor of the unrestricted model based on the likelihood ratio and wald tests we use the implications of the unrestricted model as a benchmark for understanding the extant evidence that favors usv specifically we replicate extant tests in samples simulated from the unrestricted model we show that none of the existing findings contradict the model without usv restrictions

noise independent selection in multidimensional global games abstract this paper examines many player many action global games with multidimensional state parameters it establishes that the notion of noise independent selection introduced by frankel morris and pauzner d frankel s morris a pauzner equilibrium selection in global games with strategic complementarities j econ theory 108 2003 1 44 for one dimensional global games is robust when the setting is extended to the one proposed by carlsson and van damme h carlsson e van damme global games and equilibrium selection econometrica 61 1993 989 1018 more precisely our main result states that if an action profile of some complete information game is noise independently selected in one dimensional global games then it is also noise independently selected in all multidimensional global games

monetary policy uncertainty and economic fluctuations uncertainty associated with the monetary policy transmission mechanism is a key driving force of business cycles to investigate this link we propose a new term structure model that allows the volatility of the yield curve to interact with macroeconomic indicators the data favors a model with two volatility factors that capture shortterm and long term monetary policy uncertainty increases in either of them lead higher unemployment rates but they interact with ination in opposite directions

an approach to equilibrium selection abstract we consider equilibrium selection in 2 2 bimatrix both symmetric and asymetric games with two strict nash equilibria by embedding the static games in a dynamic random matching framework played by a continuum of anonymous agents unlike in evolutionary games the players are rational and maximize discounted payoffs but they are restricted to make a short run commitment when choosing actions this dynamic game with frictions has stationary states which correspond to the nash equilibria of the static game our selection is based on differential stability properties of the stationary states it is shown that for a small degree of friction a strict nash equilibrium becomes uniquely absorbing and globally accessible if and only if it is risk dominant harsanyi and selten a general theory of equilibrium selection in games mit press cambridge ma 1988 journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 and c73