will tighter futures price limits decrease hedge effectiveness abstract the events triggered by the global financial crisis gfc have led to calls for the regulation of financial markets given that regulation may involve opportunity costs this paper examines whether tighter futures price limits can reduce the effectiveness of a futures hedge we propose a new model that uncovers the underlying spot futures dynamics when futures prices are subject to limits we use the model to determine the maximum number of limit days that can occur before minimum variance hedging outcomes are adversely affected application of this model to the us soybean and corn markets reveals that existing limits do not reduce hedge effectiveness if the frequency of limit days increases from current levels of 1 to approximately 3 4 conventional hedging approaches will experience economically and statistically significant increases in portfolio variance these results are important for hedgers clearing houses and regulators in light of the recent calls for derivatives regulation

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

allowance trading and energy consumption under a personal carbon trading scheme a dynamic programming approach abstract in response to the challenge of climate change personal carbon trading was put forward as a policy instrument to promote low carbon behavior in the household sector to evaluate the effectiveness of this scheme it is important to gain insight into the allowance trading and energy consumption behavior in a long emission commitment period this paper proposes a dynamic programming model to investigate allowance trading and energy consumption a main feature of the model is its consideration of allowance banking and borrowing activities ten simulated scenarios with different allowance prices price volatility and carbon emission rates are discussed the findings show that consumers would trade more actively when allowance price is volatile it is also found that energy consumption and allowance trading will decrease when the carbon emission rate increases overall the analysis in this paper implies that personal carbon trading scheme would be an effective policy measure to change consumers behavior therefore it would be valuable for decision makers to consider the introduction and implementation of this scheme

program trading and expiration day effects the arbitrage between index futures and the underlying cash index and the cash settlement feature of index futures contracts which requires arbitrageurs to unwind positions in the stock market are thought to be at the heart of the abnormal stock price movements during the triple witching hour the last hour of trading on days on which index futures index options and options on index futures expire simultaneously during 1984 and 1985 volume was substantially higher than normal in the last hour of trading on those quarterly fridays open interest in the expiring futures contracts on the expiration day amounted to about 40 per cent of the average month end open interest the incremental stock market volume however was approximately one third the volume that would be inmplied if the entire expiration day open interest were traded in the stock market analysis of stock market price changes in the last hour of expiration days and the first halfhour of the following day indicates that the volatility of price changes was significantly higher on expiration days with the stock market tending to fall stocks not in the sp index option expirations themselves did not lead to abnormal market movements when the magnitude of price effects was measured by the degree of reversal in prices on the morning after the expiration day the average magnitude of the price effect in the 10 most recent quarterly futures contract expirations examined was about 0 4 per cent of the closing index value at expiration the average expiration day price effect of 0 4 per cent is not large considering that a price impact of approximately 0 25 per cent of the value of the transaction can be expected on the basis of the bid ask spread once this market impact cost is drawn out the average expiration day price impact falls to about 0 15 per cent of the value of the transaction an amount representing the additional cost of liquidity furthermore price impacts in excess of those found on expiration days are frequently encountered in large block transactions where the cost of providing liquidity also increases on expiration days however transactions in many stocks occur simultaneously so the market as a whole is affected

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

the role of free entry in an oligopolistic heckscher ohlin model retaining the basic properties of the heckscher ohlin trade model namely free entry and exit fully integrated international commodity markets and the same number of sectors with that of factors the authors develop a two country model with cournot oligopoly in this economy factor price equalization and the standard heckscher ohlin theorem on comparative advantage hold between two countries which are identical except for size however autarkic prices are different even though the level of trade is zero under the free trade regime nevertheless free trade reduces the oligopoly price and increases welfare copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

distinguished fellow mincering labor economics jacob mincer has helped set the research agenda and professional style in labor economics for over 30 years his research helped uncover the empirical content of human capital theory where he used those ideas to study the determinants of earnings and the sources and nature of earnings inequality he was also a pioneer in studying labor force participation decisions of married women for the past decade jacob has set his characteristic stamp on the empirical study of job mobility the following brief survey is meant to convey some of the flavor of jacob mincer s work and why it has been so influential in labor economics

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

horizontal mergers with free entry abstract we consider the impact of horizontal mergers in the presence of free entry and exit in contrast to much of the previous literature on mergers our model yields predictions that seem intuitively reasonable with only moderate cost synergies mergers of a small number of industry participants are beneficial even under quantity competition there is no free rider problem in that insiders always benefit more than outsiders and quantity setting and price setting games yield similar predictions about profitability we also derive two welfare results that hold under quantity competition with homogeneous goods if the initial no merger equilibrium is symmetric then with free entry 1 a horizontal merger has no impact on the equilibrium price and 2 all privately beneficial mergers are socially beneficial

on the effects of schooling vintage on experience earnings profiles theory and evidence abstract in this paper a distinction is made between human capital depreciation related to a worker s aging and depreciation due to the obsolescence of the worker s education schooling specific obsolescence of human capital is incorporated in the mincerian model of earnings and it is shown how this obsolescence affects the worker s earnings profile using the israeli 1983 census we show that for high tech oriented industries for which obsolescence is relatively important obsolescence effects are more significant than for low tech oriented industries and consequently the experience earnings peak falls faster with increasing education in the former

foreign direct investment local content requirement and profit taxation we develop a partial equilibrium model of foreign direct investment fdi in which identical foreign firms locate themselves in a host country to compete in an oligopolistic market for a non tradeable commodity the host country assumed to be small in the market for fdi makes use of two instruments viz a profit tax and a local content requirement to compete for fdi in the international market we assume the existence of unemployment in the host country the structure of optimal instruments and their relationship to the number and the relative efficiency levels of the domestic firms are established

an empirical examination of information differences of opinion and trading activity abstract we investigate the relations between trading volumes and our proxies for information flows and divergences in opinions we view s p 500 index futures open interest as a useful proxy for divergences of traders opinions and find that volumes are higher on days when open interest increases than on days with declines volume in individual equities is more closely related to firm specific information flows while equity basket volume is more closely associated with market information this differential impact is greatest for small capitalization stocks where market wide news has no explanatory power

age seniority and labour costs lessons from the finnish it revolution the bad labour market performance of the workforce over 50 indicates that an aged workforce is often a burden for firms our paper seeks to investigate whether and why this is the case by providing evidence on the relation between age seniority and experience on the one hand and the main components of labour costs namely productivity and wages on the other for a sample of plants in three manufacturing industries forest industrial machinery and electronics in finland during the it revolution in the 1990s in average industries those not undergoing major technological shocks productivity and wages keep rising almost indefinitely with the accumulation of either seniority in the forest industry or experience in the industry producing industrial machinery in these industries the skill depreciation often associated with higher seniority beyond a certain threshold does not seemingly raise labour costs in electronics instead the seniority productivity profile shows a positive relation first and then becomes negative as one looks at plants with higher average seniority this body of evidence is consistent with the idea that fast technical change brings about accelerated skill depreciation of senior workers we cannot rule out however that our correlations are also simultaneously produced by worker movements across plants the seniority earnings profile in electronics is instead rather similar to that observed for the other industries a likely symptom of the prevailing finnish wage bargaining institutions which tend to make seniority one essential element of wage determination in the end seniority matters for labour costs not age as such but only in high tech industries not in the economy at large this is well tuned with previous research on gross flows of workers and jobs in the us and other oecd countries which unveiled the productivity driving role of resource reallocation or lack thereof between plants to improve the employability of the elderly at times of fast technical change public policy should thus divert resources away from preserving existing jobs and lend more attention to the retraining of old workers to ease their reallocation away from less productive plants or plants where they have become less productive into new jobs francesco daveri and mika maliranta

stackelberg cournot and collusive monopoly performance and welfare comparisons this article compares and evaluates performance and welfare in three classical oligopoly models stackelberg leader cournot and collusive monopoly hahn s stability conditions render an unambiguous ranking of market price the monopoly price is highest and the stackelberg price is lowest welfare comparisons are less clear cut due to additional effects coming from reallocation of outputs among sellers conditions under which these reallocation effects will enhance or offset the unambiguous price effects on welfare are discussed and examples are given possible implications for antitrust policy regarding constraints on market share of large producers in noncompetitive markets are examined

bid ask spreads in the interbank foreign exchange markets abstract this study provides evidence on quotations and bid ask spreads in the wholesale foreign exchange market and introduces a method to document variation in the placement of quotes relative to asset value i find that spreads widen with proxies for inventory carrying costs including forecasts of price risk and a measure of liquidity costs increases in spreads before nontrading periods can also be attributed to inventory costs the location of currency quotes in relation to value is not constant and the outcome of hypothesis tests regarding changes in currency value can be sensitive to allowances for variation in quote location

free entry and social inefficiency our goal is to provide a simple yet general exposition of the conditions under which the number of entrants in a free entry equilibrium is excessive insufficient or optimal our analysis compares the number of firms that enter a market when there is free entry with the number that would be desired by a social planner who is unable to control the behavior of firms once they are in the market that is we consider the second best problem of choosing the welfare maximizing number of firms while we take as given their noncompetitive behavior after entry we demonstrate that the crucial conditions for establishing the presence of an entry bias can be stated quite simply in terms of the outcome of the postentry game played by entrants in contrast to previous work we do not need to model this postentry game explicitly

stackelberg versus cournot a differential game approach abstract we propose an infinite horizon differential oligopoly game where at each point in time m stackelberg leaders and n m stackelberg followers exploit a common pool renewable resource and sell their harvest in the marketplace at a price that depends on total harvest we derive a feedback generalized stackelberg nash cournot equilibrium a generalization of the feedback stackelberg equilibrium nesting feedback stackelberg and feedback cournot as special cases we proceed with a comparison between the feedback stackelberg and the feedback cournot equilibria and find a number of interesting results in contrast with static oligopoly theory as to the relative efficiency of the two equilibria we show that the cournot equilibrium can be more efficient than the stackelberg equilibrium this holds true in the short run at the steady state and in terms of discounted welfare

market competition r d and firm profits in asymmetric oligopoly we investigate a cournot model with strategic r d investments wherein efficient low cost firms compete against less efficient high cost firms we findthat an increase in the number of high cost firms can stimulate r d by the low cost firms while it always reduces r d by the high cost firms more importantly this force can be strong enough to compensate for the loss that arises from more intense market competition the low cost firms profits may indeed increase with the number of high cost firms an implication of this result is far reaching as it gives low cost firms an incentive to help rather than harm high cost competitors we relate this implication to a practice known as open knowledge disclosure especially ford s strategy of disclosing its know how publicly and extensively at the beginning of the 20th century

how many firms should be leaders beneficial concentration revisited we investigate how the number of stackelberg leaders and followers aects economic welfare first we discuss the model with m leaders and n m followers compete in a homogeneous good market daughety 1990 nds that under constant marginal costs the stackelberg model m2 0 n yield a higher welfare than the cournot model m 0 or

retraining for the unemployed and the quality of the job match in germany retraining is an important measure in active labour market policy providing unemployed individuals with extensive vocational training using administrative data we show that retrainin

do investors follow the herd in option markets we investigate the previously unexplored herding behaviour of investors in option markets by examining equity option contracts traded in the us between 1996 and 2012 we document strong herding effects in option trading activity that are conditional on a set of systematic factors related to periods of market stress more specifically we find that option investors tend to herd during periods of high market volatility risk on dates of macroeconomic announcements during the financial crisis of 2008 when a large number of market option positions is either opened or closed and during periods of a large average dispersion of analysts forecasts

an analysis of the implications for stock and futures price volatility of program trading and dynamic hedging strategies the notion that a real security is redundant when it can be synthesized by a dynamic trading strategy ignores the informati onal role of real securities markets portfolio insurance uses a dyna mic strategy to synthesize a european put the absence of trading in an appropriate real put option prevents the transmittal of informatio n to market participants about the future price volatility associated with current dynamic hedging strategies less information is transmi tted to potential liquidity providers it will therefore be more di fficult for the market to absorb the trades implied by the dynamic he dging strategies and the stocks future price volatility will rise copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

a multiple leader stackelberg model and analysis this paper presents a new multiple leader follower model that is a consistent extension of stackelberg s leader follower duopoly the development contrasts with other existing extensions by demonstrating how the leader firms can utilize the true reaction curve of the follower firms it also provides sufficient conditions for some useful convexity and differentiability properties of this function for the proposed model we conduct a static analysis and discuss the existence uniqueness and computation of an equilibrium solution as well as study certain issues regarding the relative profits of leader and follower firms since the cournot oligopoly and the stackelberg leader follower models are special cases of this model the analysis in this paper hopefully provides some further insights about these types of models

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

does option trading have a pervasive impact on underlying stock prices the question of whether and to what extent option trading impacts underlying stock prices has been a focus of intense interest since options began exchange based trading in 1973 despite considerable effort no convincing evidence for a pervasive impact has been produced a recent strand of theoretical literature predicts that rebalancing by traders who hedge their option positions increases decreases underlying stock return volatility when these traders have net written purchased option positions this paper tests this prediction and finds a statistically and economically significant negative relationship between stock return volatility and net purchased option positions of investors who are likely to hedge hence we provide the first evidence for a substantial and pervasive influence of option trading on stock prices

endogenous timing with infinitely many firms abstract a model with constant marginal costs is considered where firms choose first a period for production and then the amount to produce when competing in the market according to the resulting timing decisions multiple equilibria arise allowing for infinitely many industry output configurations encompassing one limit output dominant firm and the cournot equilibrium with free entry as extreme cases at each of these equilibria a firm produces a positive amount only if this firm commits to produce at period one both stackelberg and cournot like outcomes are sustainable as equilibria however when the number of leaders is given production at subsequent periods is always prevented and industry output is sometimes larger than the entry preventing level

endogenous market structures and strategic trade policy we characterize the optimal export promoting policies for international markets whose structure is endogenous contrary to the ambiguous results of strategic trade policy for markets with a fixed number of firms it is always optimal to subsidize exports as long as entry is endogenous under both competition in quantities and in prices with homogenous goods the optimal export subsidy is a fraction 1 of the price where is the elasticity of demand the exact opposite of the optimal export tax in the neoclassical trade theory a similar argument can be applied to show the general optimality of r d subsidies and of competitive devaluations to promote exports in foreign markets where entry is endogenous

entry barriers and economic welfare the relationship between economic welfare and the number of firms in a quasi cournot market is examined in the first place we presuppose the existence of a strong first best government that can enforce the marginal cost principle to the firms along with regulating the number of firms it is shown that there exist excessive number of firms at the free entry quasicournot equilibrium vis a vis the first best welfare maximizing number of firms the thrust of this result essentially survives even if we replace a utopian first best government by a secondbest government that leaves the firms to pursue their respective profit maximization freely and engages solely in regulating the number of firms it can be shown that the excess entry prevails again in this second best world recent studies in the theoretical industrial organization literature have uncovered several instances which cast serious doubt on the reasonableness of a widespread belief that increasing competition will increase welfare stiglitz 1981 p 184 it has been shown that there are cases which are not altogether unreasonable where social welfare will be increased by strengthening rather than weakening the protection of incumbent firms from the threat of potential entry this is in sharp contrast with the traditional belief 2 what is not known however is how robust these pathologies in fact are we intend to settle this problem by proving two excess entry theorems in the quasi cournot parametric conjectural variations homogeneous oligopoly model seade 1980a b in the first place we presuppose the existence of a strong first best government that could costlessly enforce the marginal cost pricing principle by firms in an oligopolistic market and regulate entry in pursuit of first best social welfare optimization it is shown that the number of firms at the free entry equilibrium exceeds the first best welfare optimizing number of firms the result has already been noted by von weizsacker 1980a b and others in terms of numerical examples our theorem 1 asserts that this phenomenon always holds true for the family of quasi cournot models at hand an implication of this result is that the existence of entry barriers which protect incumbent firms from potential competitors is not necessarily welfare decreasing in sharp contrast with the traditional belief a problem remains with theorem 1 however in that an omnipotent first best government does not exist in reality and the first best ideal is unrealizable in the actual economy therefore even if the intervention by a first best government with a view to restricting the number of firms within an industry may be welfare improving it does

futures trading and volatility in the gnma market futures markets for agricultural commodities have existed for well over 100 years recently there has been a major expansion of futures trading into nontraditional areas particularly interest bearing securities and foreign currenciesthe so called financial futures the introduction of exchange traded futures contracts for treasury bills gnma pass through certificates and other securities has created new hedging arbitrage and speculative opportunities for the investors issuers and dealers who are active in the cash markets for these securities futures trading has also opened these markets to participation by new classes of traders particularly private and smaller institutional investors through the process of arbitrage a financial futures market will be closely linked to the cash market for the underlying securities an important concern of the regulatory authorities is what effect opening a futures market is likely to have on an existing cash market the purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of futures trading in government national mortgage association gnma passthrough certificates on price volatility in the cash market for these securities there are several major ways in which opening futures trading can increase efficiency and smooth price variations in a cash market most importantly futures provide a mechanism for those who buy and sell the actual security or commodity to hedge themselves against unfavorable price changes through the futures market risk can be spread across a large number of investors and transferred away from those hedging spot positions to professional speculators who are more willing and able to bear it this risk transfer may substantially improve the functioning of the spot market because it reduces the need to incorporate risk premia in cash market transactions to compensate for the risk of price fluctuations second futures market may increase the informational efficiency of a cash market since futures prices are determined in a unified highly visible market by traders who specialize in gathering and evaluating information the futures market is expected to be an efficient market in the sense that prices will reflect the best estimate of true future values given the information currently available if anything an informationally efficient futures market should lead to more efficient pricing in the cash market the importance of both of these effects will depend upon the structure of the existing cash market the more developed and integrated is the cash market the

impacts of derivative markets on spot market volatility and their persistence in this article we investigate the impacts of futures and options markets on the volatility of the underlying market unlike earlier studies the focus is on their persistence over time tests on the hang seng index yield several interesting results that often contrast with previous findings empirical results suggest that the quality of new information generated by derivative trading determines the impacts on the spot market volatility the futures market provides new material information reducing spot market volatility the options market on the other hand generates noisy information and distorts price which is followed by an increase in volatility and a decrease in its sensitivity to price change while the impact of futures persists that of options mostly disappears as the market matures our conjecture is that the futures market is mainly driven by informed experienced participants while the options market attracts new inexperienced investors

quantity setting oligopoly with endogenous sequencing abstract this paper investigates endogenous sequencing in a quantity setting oligopoly i formulate an n firm m period model where each firm chooses both how much to produce and when to produce it i find that at least n 1 firms simultaneously produce in the first period in every pure strategy equilibrium this result shows that the generalized stackelberg type outcome never appears in equilibrium except in a duopoly

partial privatization in mixed duopoly abstract we investigate a quantity setting duopoly involving a private firm and a privatized firm jointly owned by the public and private sectors the private firm maximizes profits while the privatized firm takes both profits and social welfare into consideration we consider how many shares the government should hold in the privatized firm we find that neither full privatization the government does not hold any shares nor full nationalization the government holds all of the shares is optimal under moderate conditions

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

futures trading activity and stock price volatility we examine whether greater futures trading activity volume and open interest is associated with greater equity volatility we partition each trading activity series into expected and unexpected components and document that while equity volatility covaries positively with unexpected futures trading volume it is negatively related to forecastable futures trading activity further though futures trading activity is systematically related to the futures contract life cycle we find no evidence of a relation between the futures life cycle and spot equity volatility these findings are consistent with theories predicting that active futures markets enhance the liquidity and depth of the equity markets

market share dynamics and the persistence of leadership debate this paper introduces a novel analysis of the classic persistence of leadership question and applies it to a newly constructed dataset for japanese manufacturing the analysis rests on an appeal to an empirical scaling relationship between current market share and the variance of changes in market share this relationship provides a powerful model selection criterion for candidate models of market share dynamics it also makes it feasible even in small datasets to test directly for the properties of the first passage times corresponding to loss of leadership

foreign investor reactions to risk and uncertainty in antitrust u s merger policy investigations and the deterrence of foreign acquirer presence motivated by the potential for antitrust and competition policies to be protectionist in effect we formulate the theoretical prior that merger policy deters foreign acquirer participation in local m a markets the policy risk and policy uncertainty characteristic of merger review may negatively affect foreign acquirers more so than domestic acquirers thereby disadvantaging foreign acquisitions of local firms and deterring future cross border investment activities we test this prior by employing sector level data on u s merger policy investigations and foreign acquirer presence in u s m a markets over the 2002 2017 period our panel data methodological approach indicates that the risk and uncertainty characteristic of u s merger policy disproportionately deters the acquisition activities of foreign investors the empirical results also suggest that the application of competition and merger policies in other national jurisdictions where there is less of a strong commitment to antitrust principles might also be effectively protectionist

the impact of stock index futures trading on daily returns seasonality a multicountry study in this article we investigate the impact of the introduction of stock index futures trading on the daily returns seasonality of the underlying index for seven national markets it has been previously argued that the introduction of futures trading should lead to reduced seasonality of mean returns and generally our results support this conclusion the impact of index futures introduction on return autocorrelations and volatility is also tested and the evidence presented suggests that futures trading has no impact on the former although a change in the seasonal for the latter was detected

the persistence of volatility and stock market fluctuations this paper examines the potential influence of changing volatility in stock market prices on the level of stock market prices it demonstrates that volatility is only weakly serially correlated implying that shocks to volatility do not persist these shocks can therefore have only a small impact on stockmarket prices since changes in volatility affect expected required rates of return for relatively short intervals these findings lead us to be skeptical of recent claims that the stock market s poor performance during the 1970 s can be explained by volatility induced increases in risk premia this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

why do low educated workers invest less in further training several studies document that low educated workers participate less often in further training than high educated workers this article investigates two possible explanations low educated workers invest less in training because of 1 the lower economic returns to these investments or 2 their lower willingness to participate in training controlling for unobserved heterogeneity we find that the economic returns to training for low educated workers are positive and not significantly different from those for high educated workers however low educated workers are significantly less willing to participate in training we show that this lesser willingness to train is driven by economic preferences and personality traits

a new approach to measure speculation in the oil futures market and some policy implications abstract we propose using a new relative measure the speculative ratio defined as trading volume divided by open interest to gauge speculative activity in the oil futures market we apply the speculative ratio to examine the relation between basis and speculative activity in the oil futures market before and after the financialization of the oil market in 2003 our finding suggests that the oil futures market is dominated by uninformed speculators in the post financialization period our finding carries several practical policy implications as follows 1 both the commodity exchange and the regulator should design regulations and trading policies that improve basis risk 2 on the commodity exchange side new policies on margin requirements and position limits for speculators should be implemented 3 margin requirements should be based on the level of basis risk 4 regulators should speed up implementation of the position limit rule in the dodd frank act and 5 stronger and more meaningful enforcement actions by regulators are required to punish and deter market manipulators

the impact of energy derivatives on the crude oil market we examine the effects of energy derivatives trading on the crude oil market there is a common public and regulatory perception that derivative securities increase volatility and can have a destabilizing effect on the underlying market consistent with this view we find an abnormal increase in volatility for three consecutive weeks following the introduction of nymex crude oil futures while there is also evidence of a longer term volatility increase this is likely due to exogenous factors such as the continuing deregulation of the energy markets subsequent introductions of crude oil options and derivatives on other energy commodities have no effect on crude oil volatility we also examine the effects of derivatives trading on the depth and liquidity of the crude oil market this analysis reveals a strong inverse relation between the open interest in crude oil futures and spot market volatility specifically when open interest is greater the volatility shock associated with a given unexpected increase in volume is much smaller

the persistence of market leadership evidence from japan this article explores the persistence of market leadership in japanese manufacturing industries over the period 1975 2004 by applying survival data techniques we examine how long market leadership persists and how the duration of market leadership varies according to industry specific characteristics our findings indicate that market leaders maintain their leadership positions for on average 20 years from 1975 in japanese manufacturing industries we provide evidence that market leadership tends to persist in capital intensive and legally cartelized industries whereas it is less likely to persist in demand volatile r d intensive and import intensive industries copyright 2009 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

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

trade size order imbalance and the volatility volume relation abstract this paper examines the roles of the number of trades size of trades and order imbalance buyer versus seller initiated trades in explaining the volatility volume relation for a sample of nyse and nasdaq stocks our results reconfirm the significance of the size of trades beyond that of the number of trades in the volatility volume relation on both markets after controlling for the return impact of order imbalance the volatility volume relation becomes much weaker for nyse stocks the order imbalance in large trade size categories affects the return more than in smaller size categories for nasdaq stocks the largest return impact comes from the order imbalance in maximum sized small order execution system soes trades

the economics of new blood abstract we construct a dynamic general equilibrium model of search and matching where public knowledge grows through time and workers accumulate a fraction of this knowledge through education retraining due to search delays the unemployment pool is populated by vintages of workers of differing productivities through intergenerational rivalry the human capital of older generations is rendered obsolete relative to that of the new blood higher knowledge growth exacerbates intergenerational competition thereby lowering education and growth while raising unemployment and inequality these findings help explain wage compression expansion and the hump shaped wage tenure profile across cohorts

consumer benefiting exclusive territories i investigate the effect of exclusive territories which are typical vertical controls imposed by upstream firms using shipping spatial models i consider an industry that consists of many independent local markets an upstream monopolist restricts competition between downstream firms using exclusive territories i find that exclusive territories reduce the prices of final products in all local markets in quantity setting competition in price setting competition they raise prices in half the local markets reduce them in other markets and also reduce the total consumer surplus jel classification l42 r32 a propos de territoires exclusifs qui profitent aux consommateurs l auteur analyse les effets de la regle des territoires exclusifs qui est souvent imposee comme controle vertical par les entreprises en amont a l aide de modeles spatiaux de livraison on considere le cas d une industrie composee de plusieurs marches locaux independants un monopoleur en amont reduit la concurrence entre entreprises en aval en imposant la regle des territoires exclusifs on decouvre que cette regle reduit les prix du produit final dans tous les marches locaux s il y a concurrence par les quantites s il y a concurrence par les prix la regle accroit les prix dans la moitie des marches locaux les reduit dans les autres et reduit aussi le surplus au consommateur

helping minor firms reduces welfare the effect on national welfare of uneven technical progress and eli mination of a firm is analyzed under the existence of a cournot oligopolistic sector an increase in the share of an inefficient firm owing to its innovations results in a shift of production from more efficient firms to the inefficient firm causing a less efficie nt allocation of production it may decrease welfare even though the innovation itself is beneficial conversely policies keeping ineffic ient firms from innovations or eliminating them may increase welfare though they make the market structure more oligopolistic copyright 1988 by royal economic society

stackelberg competition with endogenous entry i characterise endogenous market structures where leaders have a first mover advantage and entry is endogenous leaders are always more aggressive than the followers independently from strategic substitutability or complementarity under quantity competition leaders produce more than any follower and i determine the conditions for entry deterrence high substitutability and non increasing marginal costs under price competition leaders set lower prices than the followers the opposite than with an exogenous number of firms in contests leaders invest more than each follower in all these cases a leadership improves the allocation of resources compared to the nash equilibrium with endogenous entry this article studies endogenous market structures where a firm has a first mover advantage in the sense of stackelberg 1934 on the other firms and entry in the market is endogenous the article characterises the equilibrium of these endo genous market structures and provides welfare analysis for some of the applications these market structures emerge in many sectors which are substantially competitive a fringe of firms is ready to enter whenever there is a profitable opportunity but where some incumbent firms have a competitive advantage over the followers because of technological historical or legal reasons or just because entry was not possible at an earlier stage and choose their strategies before them 1 while symmetric models of strategic interactions have been widely studied in the presence of endogenous entry in a marshallian tradition 2 traditional models with incumbent firms facing a competitive fringe of entrants have been mostly limited to the analysis of markets with homogeneous goods and entry deterrence for instance in the theories of limit pricing and of contestable markets baumol et al 1982 more recently vives 1988 has analysed games with sequential entry of multiple firms but without endogenising the entry process see also anderson and engers 1992 1994

liquidity and the law of one price the case of the futures cash basis deviations from no arbitrage relations should be related to market liquidity because liquidity facilitates arbitrage at the same time a wide futures cash basis may trigger arbitrage trades and in turn affect liquidity we test these ideas by studying the dynamic relation between stock market liquidity and the index futures basis there is evidence of two way granger causality between the short term absolute basis and liquidity and liquidity granger causes longer term absolute bases shocks to the absolute basis predict future stock market liquidity the evidence suggests that liquidity enhances the efficiency of the futures cash pricing system copyright 2007 by the american finance association

volatility volume co movements evidence from china metal markets abstractthis article investigates the interactional relationship between price volatility and futures trading activity for three heavily traded metal products on the shanghai metal exchange and the shanghai futures exchange using models based on vector autoregression and generalized method of moments we show in particular that futures trading activity has a strong impact on both spot and futures price volatility in copper and aluminium markets futures trading activity leads spot market volatility in copper and aluminium markets which suggests that futures markets have a destabilizing effect in order to disentangle the effect of different traders types on asset price movements we decompose futures trading into speculators and hedgers trading and investigate their contributions to volatility as a robustness check we investigate the impact of endogenous structural breaks on the interactional relationship between price volatility and futures trading

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

heteroskedasticity in stock return data volume versus garch effects this paper provides empirical support for the notion that autoregressive conditional heterqskedasticity arch in daily stock return data reflects time dependence in the process generating information flow to the market daily trading volume used as a proxy for information arrival time is shown to have significant explanatory power regarding the variance of daily returns which is an implication of the assumption that daily returns are subordinated to intraday equilibrium returns furthermore arch effects tend to disappear when volume is included in the variance equation the autoregressive conditiqnal heteroskedasticity arch process of engle 1982 has been shown to provide a good fit for many financial return time series 1 arch imposes an autoregressive structure on conditional variance allqwing volatility shocks to persist over time this persistence captures the propensity of returns of like magnitude to clu ter in time and can explain the well documented nonnormality and nonstability of empirical asset return distributions see especially fama 1965 an appealing explanation for the presence of arch is based upon the hypothesis that daily returns are generated by a maiture of distributions in which the rate of daily information arrival is the stochastic mixing variable as suggested by diebold 1986 gallant hsieh and tauchen 1988 and stock 1987 1988 arch might capture the time series properties e g serial correlation of this mixing variable hqwever this linkage has not been broadly documented with the datia the objective of this study is to examine the validity of this explanation for daily stock returns the empirical strategy exploits the implication of the mixture model that the variance of daily price increments is heteroskedastic specifically positively related to the rate of daily information arrival using daily trading volume as a proxy for the mixing variable we show that for a sample of 20 common stocks arch effects vanish when volume is included as an explanatory variable in the conditional variance equation