the collateral channel how real estate shocks affect corporate investment abstract what is the impact of real estate prices on corporate investment in the presence of financing frictions firms use pledgeable assets as collateral to finance new projects through this collateral channel shocks to the value of real estate can have a large impact on aggregate investment to compute the sensitivity of investment to collateral value we use local variations in real estate prices as shocks to the collateral value of firms that own real estate over the 1993 2007 period the representative us corporation invests 0 06 out of each 1 of collateral jel d22 g31 r30

wheat from chaff meta analysis as quantitative literature review abstract this paper presents and develops a quantitative method of literature reviewing and evaluating empirical research meta regression analysis or mra economics is theory driven yet we must learn empirically if economics is to advance mra offers a more objective statistical method to summarize our empirical knowledge and to explain the wide study to study variation in economic research mra is used to assess the evidence for ricardian equivalence and its findings are contrasted to those of conventional narrative review furthermore mra establishes a platform from which to distinguish genuine empirical effect from the exploitable specification error that infests applied econometrics

preferences and biases in educational choices and labour market expectations shrinking the black box of gender standard observed characteristics explain only part of the differences between men and women in education choices and labor market trajectories using an experiment to derive students levels of overconfidence and preferences for competitiveness and risk this paper investigates whether these behavioral biases and preferences explain gender differences in college major choices and expected future earnings in a sample of high ability undergraduates we find that competitiveness and overconfidence but not risk aversion is systematically related with expectations about future earnings individuals who are overconfident and overly competitive have significantly higher earnings expectations moreover gender differences in overconfidence and competitiveness explain about 18 of the gender gap in earnings expectations these experimental measures explain as much of the gender gap in earnings expectations as a rich set of control variables including test scores and family background and they are poorly proxied by these same control variables underscoring that they represent independent variation while expected earnings are related to college major choices the experimental measures are not related with college major choice

fdi and taxation a meta study despite the continuing political interest in the usefulness of tax competition and tax coordination as well as the wealth of theoretical analyses it still remains open whether or when tax competition is harmful moreover the influence of tax differentials on multinationals decisions is still insufficiently analyzed thus economists have increasingly resorted to empirical analysis in order to gain insights on the elasticity of fdi with respect to company taxation as a result the empirical literature on taxation and international capital flows has grown to a similar abundance during the last 25 years as the respective theoretical literature its heterogeneity leads to a rising need for concise reviews on the existing empirical evidence in this paper we extend former meta analyses on fdi and taxation in three ways first we add the most recent publications unconsidered in meta analyses up to date second we apply a different methodology by using a broad set of meta regression estimators and explicitly discuss which one is most suitable for application to our meta data third we address some important issues in research on fdi and taxation to the clarification of which meta analysis can make valuable contributions these issues are mainly the influence of variables which might moderate effects of tax differentials e g public spending the implications of using aggregate fdi data as opposed to firm level information on measured tax effects the implications of bilateral effective tax rates and the possible presence of publication bias in primary research

the income elasticity of non point source air pollutants revisiting the environmental kuznets curve abstract this paper examines the income pollution relationship for three non point source pollutants in 1990 ambient concentrations reported at monitors throughout the us are regressed on median household income and other socio economic variables for the census tracts in which the monitors were located contrary to earlier studies a u shaped relationship is obtained

estimating the effect of hierarchies on information use theory suggests that greater hierarchical distance between a subordinate and his boss makes it more di cult to share abstract and subjective information in decision making a novel data set put together from credit dossiers of large corporate loan applicants enables us to observe the information collected by loan o cers and also how it is used by the ultimate loan approving o cer we flnd that greater hierarchical geographical distance between the information collecting agent and the loan approving o cer leads to less reliance on subjective information and more on objective information by exploiting non linearities in the assignment rules that determine an applicant s hierarchical distance and using information collecting agent flxed efiects we show that our result cannot be driven by endogenous assignment of applicants we also flnd that higher frequency of interactions between the information collecting agent and loan approving o cer both over time and through geographical proximity helps mitigate the efiects of hierarchical distance on information use our results show that hierarchical distance in uences information use and highlights the importance of human touch in communication

universal banks and corporate control evidence from the global syndicated loan market we investigate the effects of bank control over borrowerfirms whether by representation on boards of directors or by the holding of shares through bank asset management divisions using a large sample of syndicated loans we find that banks are more likely to act as lead arrangers in loans when they exert some control over the borrower firm bank firm governance links are associated with higher loan spreads during the 2003 2006 credit boom but lower spreads during the 2007 2008 financial crisis additionally these links mitigate credit rationing effects during the crisis the results are robust to several methods to correct for the endogeneity of the bank firm governance link our evidence consistent with intertemporal smoothing of loan rates suggests that there are costs and benefits from banks involvement in firm governance jel g21 g32

technology is changing lending implications for research abstract costello down and mehta 2020 trace their slider intervention to deviations from the credit line amount recommended by a credit scoring model the deviations are followed by larger delinquency declines and bigger sales orders and costello et al interpret these results using discretion based theories however incremental deviations are concentrated on newer clients rather than those the lender has accumulated soft information about deviations also appear larger for public than private borrowers my discussion evaluates whether these results align with discretion based theories and explores alternative interpretations based on salience and unique aspects of the trade credit setting differences in interpretation aside the evidence is informative about technological advances in commercial lending i conclude with an overview of several recent advances and discuss the implications for lending research

two sided matching in the loan market this paper investigates the matching between banks and firms in the loan market we estimate a many to one two sided matching model using the fox 2010 matching maximum score estimator using data on the u s loan market from 2000 to 2003 we find evidence of positive assortative matching of sizes moreover we show that banks and firms prefer partners that are geographically closer giving support to the importance of physical proximity for information gathering and expertise sharing we also show that banks and firms prefer partners with whom they had prior loans indicating that prior loan relationship plays an important role in the selection of current partners

linguistic gender marking and its international business ramifications darwin 1859 considered language a form of memory that stores information in a genome like mode grammar according to cognitive science research boroditsky schmidt phillips 2003 impacts a speakers cognitive framework and mental representation of social reality gender is among the most stable grammatical features wichmann holman 2009 and comparing languages is valuable for understanding their social role corbett 2011 such research should have significant value for international business ib where national variations are of focal interest but where the study of linguistics has mostly been relegated to a subset of culture culture based research currently relies on aggregate values based measures of culture e g hofstede 1980 1998 hofstede hofstede minkov 2010 house hanges javidan dorfman gupta 2004 making it susceptible to endogeneity problems and contemporaneous to gender outcomes in contrast a language s grammatical structure is a stable feature inherited from the distant past unbiased by present social political and economic forces

another look at the income elasticity of non point source air pollutants a semiparametric approach in this paper a semiparametric model is used to examine the relationship between pollution and income for three non point source pollutants statistical tests reject the quadratic specification in favor of the semiparametric model in all cases however the results do not support the inverted u hypothesis for the pollution income relationship

anxiety and technological change explaining the inverted u curve of sulphur dioxide emissions in late 20th century finland abstract this article examines the linkage between per capita gdp and sulphur dioxide emissions for one single country in this case finland the narrow approach together with a combination of a historical and economical approach enables us to cut deeper into the controversial environmental kuznets curve hypothesis we found the main reasons for a downturn in sulphur emissions to be technological development and anxiety about possible environmental damage and economic costs related to that it can be discussed whether our results refute the environmental kuznets curve or just show possible ways in which the environmental kuznets curve is achieved nevertheless our case study casts some serious doubt on the most straightforward assumption coming out from the ekc that economic growth would automatically solve environmental problems we claim that the causal connection might also go in an opposite direction proper environmental standards and conservation comprise a necessary condition for economic growth in the long run

distance constraints the limits of foreign lending in poor economies how far does mobility of multinational banks solve problems of financial development using a panel of 80 000 loans over 7 years i show that greater cultural and geographical distance between a foreign bank s headquarters and local branches leads it to further avoid lending to informationally difficult yet fundamentally sound firms requiring relational contracting greater distance also makes them less likely to bilaterally renegotiate and less successful at recovering defaults differences in bank size legal institutions risk preferences or unobserved borrower heterogeneity cannot explain these results these distance constraints can be large enough to permanently exclude certain sectors of the economy from financing by foreign banks

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

bank competition and credit standards this article offers an explanation for the substantial variation of credit standards and price competition among banks over the business cycle as the economic outlook improves the average default probabilities of borrowers decline this affects the profitability of screening and causes bank screening intensity to display an inverse u shape as a function of economic prospects low screening activity in expansions creates intense price competition among lenders and loans are extended to lower quality borrowers as the economic outlook worsens price competition diminishes and credit standards tighten significantly deposit insurance may contribute to the countercyclical variation of credit standards copyright 2004 oxford university press

language and the estimates of the gender wage gap in this paper we link the estimates of the gender wage gap with the gender sensitivity of the language spoken in a given country we find that nations with more gender neutral languages tend to be characterized by lower estimates of gwg the results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks

unequal pay or unequal employment a cross country analysis of gender gaps we analyze gender wage gaps correcting for sample selection induced by nonemployment we recover wages for the nonemployed using alternative imputation techniques simply requiring assumptions on the position of imputed wages with respect to the median we obtain higher median wage gaps on imputed rather than actual wage distributions for several oecd countries however this difference is small in the united states the united kingdom and most central and northern eu countries and becomes sizable in southern eu countries where gender employment gaps are high selection correction explains nearly half of the observed negative correlation between wage and employment gaps

a model of a systemic bank run abstract this paper provides a model of the view that the 2008 financial crisis is reminiscent of a bank run focussing on six stylized key features in particular core financial institutions have invested their funds in asset backed securities rather than committed to long term projects in distress these can potentially be sold to a large pool of outside investors at steep discounts i consider two different motives for outside investors and their interaction with banks trading asset backed securities uncertainty aversion versus adverse selection i shall argue that the version with uncertainty averse investors is more consistent with the stylized facts than the adverse selection perspective in the former the crisis deepens the larger the market share of distressed core banks while a run becomes less likely instead as a result in the adverse selection version therefore the outright purchase of troubled assets by the government at prices above current market prices may both alleviate the financial crises as well as provide tax payers with returns above those for safe securities

the environmental kuznets curve under a new framework the role of social capital in water pollution we advance a case for including social capital in an environmental kuznets curve analysis using highly disaggregated data of water pollution in louisiana we create a social capital index and employ parametric and spatial panel regression models to explain water pollution dynamics

relational incentive contracts standard incentive theory models provide a rich framework for studying informational problems but assume that contracts can be perfectly enforced this paper studies the design of self enforced relational contracts i show that optimal contracts often can take a simple stationary form but that self enforcement restricts promised compensation and affects incentive provision with hidden information it may be optimal for an agent to supply the same inefficient effort regardless of cost conditions with moral hazard optimal contracts involve just two levels of compensation this is true even if performance measures are subjective in which case optimal contracts terminate following poor performance jel c73 d82 l14

employer skill demands and labor market outcomes of blacks and women the author uses data from a 1992 94 survey of employers in four metropolitan areas to investigate the effects of skill demands as measured by hiring requirements and job tasks on the wages and employment of newly hired workers skill demands were generally associated with lower employment of blacks than whites and with higher employment of women than men most tasks and requirements had statistically significant positive effects on starting hourly wages together these effects help to account for some of the differences between the hourly wages of white and black men and for some of the trends over time in the relative wages and employment of race and gender groups

is gender pay discrimination on the wane evidence from panel data 1968 1989 previous studies of the gender pay gap in the united states have found a narrowing of that gap in the past two decades but have differed substantially in the reported magnitude of that change this study calculates gender earnings differences using panel study of income dynamics data for 1968 89 a longer time series than has been examined by any similar study it also employs improved statistical techniques notably an adjustment for selection bias and a recently recommended modification of the most commonly used decomposition technique the author finds a significant decline both in the portion of the differential due to observed differences between men s and women s characteristics and in the unexplained component which is often attributed to discrimination the results of one analysis show that over the 1968 89 period the gender pay gap narrowed to as little as 47

declining bias and gender wage discrimination a meta regression analysis this paper extends tests and revises a previous meta regression analysis of the gender wage gap stanley and jarrell 1998 we find that there remains a strong though dampened tendency for discrimination estimates to fall and male researchers still report significantly larger amounts of wage discrimination against women this extensive research base containing 104 estimates suggests that there is less need to correct for selection bias an indirect sign of lessened discrimination there is evidence that gender research is changing and improving although gender wage discrimination has lessened the research base still finds a significant gender wage inequality

the relationships of carbon dioxide emissions and income in a newly industrialized economy this study investigates the carbon dioxide co2 emissions patterns in coordination with the economic development of taiwan the resulting quadratic relationship between emissions and income are partly due to the structural change of energy supply in taiwan with the introduction of nuclear energy in 1980 to 1986 this relationship is quite unique and different from the n shaped relationships in some developed countries de bruyn and opschoor 1997 friedl and getzner 2003 the co2 emissions in taiwan increase with the increasing imports of raw materials for economic activities and the increasing use of electricity there is no evidence that the substantial increase of taiwan s service sector contributed to slowing its co2 emissions

wage structure and gender earnings differentials an international comparison using microdata to analyse the gender pay gap in ten industrialized nations we focus on the role of wage structure the prices of labour market skills in influencing the gender gap we find wage structure enormously important in explaining why the us gender gap is higher than that in most other countries we conclude that the us gap would be similar to that in sweden and australia the countries with the smallest gaps if the united states had their levels of wage inequality this finding reflects the larger penalty in the united states for those with low skill levels or employed in low wage sectors 650 o 75 the united states was amoung the countries with the largest differ entials oecd ilo usbls this paper uses microdata to analyse inter national differences in the gender pay gap among a sample of ten industrialized nations we focus particularly on explaining the surprisingly low ranking of the united states in comparison with other industrialized countries an advan tage of an international perspective is that countries vary considerably with respect to governmental policies women s relative labour market qualifications and wage setting institutions such variability allows one to infer reasons for differences in the pay gap and by implication the impact of alternative govern ment policies empirical research on gender pay gaps has traditionally focused on the role of gender differences in qualifications and on differences in the treatment of otherwise equally qualified male and female workers i e labour market dis crimination analyses of trends over time in the gender differential within countries as well as inter country comparisons of gender earnings ratios have tended to emphasize these types of gender specific factors an innovative feature of our study is to focus on the role of wage structure as an additional factor influencing the gender gap to analyse the impact of wage structure we adapt a framework developed by juhn et al 1991 to analyse trends over time in race differentials in the united states our findings suggest that labour market institutions that affect overall wage inequality have an extremely impor tant effect on the gender earnings gap wage structure describes the array of prices set for various labour market skills measured and unmeasured and rents received for employment in par

informational frictions and the credit crunch in this paper i estimate the magnitude of an informational friction limiting credit reallocation to firms during the 2007 to 2009 financial crisis because lenders rely on private information when deciding which relationship to end borrowers looking for a new lender are adversely selected i show how to separately identify private information from information common to all lenders but unobservable to the econometrician by using bank shocks within a discrete choice model of relationships quantitatively these informational frictions appear to be too small to explain the credit crunch in the u s syndicated corporate loan market

the effect of language on economic behavior evidence from savings rates health behaviors and retirement assets languages dier widely in the ways they encode time i test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present foster future oriented behavior this prediction arises naturally when well documented eects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice empirically i nd that speakers of such languages save more retire with more wealth smoke less practice safer sex and are less obese this holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households the evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation i discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice

meta regression analysis a quantitative method of literature surveys abstract pedagogically literature reviews are instrumental they summarize the large literature written on a particular topic give coherence to the complex often disparate views expressed about an issue and serve as a springboard for new ideas however literature surveys rarely establish anything approximating unanimous consensus ironically this is just as true for the empirical economic literature to harmonize this dissonance we offer a quantitative methodology for reviewing the empirical economic literature meta regression analysis mra is the regression analysis of regression analyses mra tends to objectify the review process it studies the processes that produce empirical economic results as though they were any other social scientific phenomenon mra provides a framework for replication and offers a sensitivity analysis for model specification in this brief essay we propose a new method of reviewing economic literature mra and discuss its potential

information and bank credit allocation abstract private information obtained by lenders leads to borrower capture to the extent that such information cannot be communicated credibly to outsiders we analyze how this capture affects the loan portfolio allocation of informed lenders first we show that banks charge higher interest rates and finance relatively less creditworthy borrowers in market segments with greater information asymmetries second when faced with greater competition from outside lenders banks reallocate credit toward more captured borrowers flight to captivity third if borrower quality and captivity are sufficiently correlated an increase in the competitiveness of uninformed lenders can worsen the informed lender s overall loan portfolio the model explains observed consequences of financial liberalizations

the effects of competition and equal treatment laws on gender wage differentials discrimination if it is inefficient can be eliminated by competition in most countries it is also forbidden by law this paper evaluates the influence of economic and legal factors on the portion of male female wage differentials that is not explained by other worker characteristics and may be due to discrimination we use a new international data set of suitable gender wage gap measures constructed from the results of existing studies meta analysis of the data shows that increased competition and adoption of international conventions concerning equal treatment laws both reduce gender wage gaps while legislation that prevents women from performing strenuous or dangerous jobs tends to increase it doris weichselbaumer and rudolf winter ebmer

screening peers softly inferring the quality of small borrowers this paper examines the performance of new online lending markets that rely on nonexpert individuals to screen their peers creditworthiness we find that these peer lenders predict an individual s likelihood of defaulting on a loan with 45 greater accuracy than the borrower s exact credit score unobserved by the lenders who only see a credit category moreover peer lenders achieve 87 of the predictive power of an econometrician who observes all standard financial information about borrowers screening through soft or nonstandard information is relatively more important when evaluating lower quality borrowers our results highlight how aggregating over the views of peers and leveraging nonstandard information can enhance lending efficiency this paper was accepted by amit seru finance

are there increasing returns to pollution abatement empirical analytics of the environmental kuznets curve in pesticides abstract according to the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis economic growth and the reduction of environmental degradation are compatible goals an inverted u shaped relationship between economic performance and environmental pollution suggests that empirically an economy is associated with smaller levels of pollution after some threshold income point one potential explanation for the empirical evidence of an ekc is increasing returns to pollution abatement where the abatement efficiency rises with an increase in the scale of abatement doubling the clean up efforts more than doubles the abatement of pollution as this efficiency gain makes abatement less expensive pollution might fall as more abatement is undertaken this study tests the hypothesis that there are increasing returns to abating pollution empirical evidence on environmental risks in the us agricultural sector since 1970 support the existence of increasing returns in addition i estimate the productivity of pollution abatement using refined empirical productivity measurement methods and explicitly control the level of technology the results show the importance of including an environmental productivity variable in the ekc framework

a household level environmental kuznets curve abstract richer households may create more vehicle emissions because they own more vehicles and drive more poorer households may pollute more because they use high polluting vintages and maintain them less well this paper uses 1993 california vehicle microdata to show that there is a kuznets u shaped hydrocarbon emissions relation

distance and private information in lending we study the effects of physical distance on the acquisition and use of private information in informationally opaque credit markets using a unique data set of all loan applications by small firms to a large bank we show that borrower proximity facilitates the collection of soft information leading to a trade off in the availability and pricing of credit which is more readily accessible to nearby firms albeit at higher interest rates ceteris paribus analyzing loan rates and firms decision to switch lenders provides further evidence for banks strategic use of private information however distance erodes our lender s ability to collect proprietary intelligence and to carve out local captive markets suggesting that the requisite soft information is primarily local the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

bank interest rates and credit relationships in italy abstract when evaluating the performance of a financial system in supporting the investment activity of the corporate sector a distinction is usually drawn between banking economies and market economies the former being characterized by long term relations between banks and the industrial sector although theoretical studies and empirical results seem to agree that lending relationships increase the available quantity of capital to firms they have little to say on the cost of bank credit it is not clear whether a close relationship with a main bank would allow the borrower to pay a lower interest rate or expose him to a monopolistic rent using a unique data set reporting detailed information on the evolution over time of individual bank borrower relationships in italy we show evidence that a main bank provides credit at a lower cost and that some competition helps to reinforce the commitment between the borrower and the bank

how to solve the price puzzle a meta analysis the short run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy constitutes a frequently reported puzzle yet the puzzle is surprisingly easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed we collect about 1 000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles using vector autoregressive models and present a simple method of research synthesis for graphical results our ndings indicate publication selection in favor of the intuitive response of prices to a tightening the estimates depend systematically on study design when misspecications are

bank capital and lending relationships this paper investigates the mechanisms behind the matching of banks and firms in the loan market and the implications of this matching for lending relationships bank capital and the provision of credit i find that bank dependent firms borrow from well capitalized banks while firms with access to the bond market borrow from banks with less capital this matching of bank dependent firms with stable banks smooths cyclicality in aggregate credit provision and mitigates the effects of bank shocks on the real economy

globalization and the gender wage gap there are several theoretical reasons why globalization will have a narrowing as well as widening effect on the gender wage gap but little is known about the actual impact except for a number of country studies the author provides a cross country study of the impact of globalization on the occupational gender wage gap based on the rarely used but most far ranging survey of wages around the world the international labour organization s october inquiry this annual survey was started in 1924 and contains a wealth of information on wages and the gender wage gap for the period 1983 99 there is information on the gender wage gap in 161 narrowly defined occupations in more than 80 countries around the world the author finds the following i the occupational gender wage gap appears to be narrowing with increases in gdp per capita ii there is a significantly narrowing impact of trade and foreign direct investment fdi net inflows on the occupational gender wage gap for low skill occupations both in poorer and richer countries and for high skill occupations in richer countries iii there is no evidence of a narrowing impact of trade but there is evidence of a widening impact of fdi net inflows on the high skill occupational gender wage gap in poorer countries iv wage setting institutions have a strong impact on the occupational gender wage gap in richer countries

asymmetric information and imperfect competition in lending markets we study the effects of asymmetric information and imperfect competition in the market for small business lines of credit we estimate a structural model of credit demand loan use pricing and firm default using matched firm bank data from italy we find evidence of adverse selection in the form of a positive correlation between the unobserved determinants of demand for credit and default our counterfactual experiments show that while increases in adverse selection increase prices and defaults on average reducing credit supply banks market power can mitigate these negative effects

a language theory of discrimination any advanced industrial society is composed of a number of speech communities with different verbal and nonverbal languages in particular in the united states blacks and whites and men and women have sharply differing methods of speaking and listening this paper develops a model in which people can only work together if they speak the same language and in which it is costly to learn a second language the competitive market will tend to minimize communication through segregation but if interaction is required the cost will be borne by the minority a number of nontrivial predictions are derived from the model

the employment effects of credit market disruptions firm level evidence from the 2008 9 financial crisis this article investigates the effect of bank lending frictions on employment outcomes i construct a new data set that combines information on banking relationships and employment at 2 000 nonfinancial firms during the 2008 9 crisis the article first verifies empirically the importance of banking relationships which imply a cost to borrowers who switch lenders i then use the dispersion in lender health following the lehman crisis as a source of exogenous variation in the availability of credit to borrowers i find that credit matters firms that had precrisis relationships with less healthy lenders had a lower likelihood of obtaining a loan following the lehman bankruptcy paid a higher interest rate if they did borrow and reduced employment by more compared to precrisis clients of healthier lenders consistent with frictions deriving from asymmetric information the effects vary by firm type lender health has an economically and statistically significant effect on employment at small and medium firms but the data cannot reject the hypothesis of no effect at the largest or most transparent firms abstracting from general equilibrium effects i find that the withdrawal of credit accounts for between one third and one half of the employment decline at small and medium firms in the sample in the year

two sides of the same coin u s residual inequality and the gender gap abstract we show that the narrowing gender gap and the growth in earnings inequality are consistent with a simple model in which skills are heterogeneous and the growth in skill prices has been particularly strong for skills with which women are well endowed empirical analysis of dot cps and nlsy79 data finds evidence to support this model a large increase in the prices of cognitive and people skills skills with which women are well endowed and a decline in the price of motor skills account for up to 40 percent of the rising inequality and 20 percent of the narrowing gender gap

contract pricing in consumer credit markets we analyze subprime consumer lending and the role played by down payment requirements in screening high risk borrowers and limiting defaults to do this we develop an empirical model of the demand for financed purchases that incorporates both adverse selection and repayment incentives we estimate the model using detailed transaction level data on subprime auto loans we show how different elements of loan contracts affect the quality of the borrower pool and subsequent loan performance we also evaluate the returns to credit scoring that allows sellers to customize financing terms to individual applicants our approach shows how standard econometric tools for analyzing demand and supply under imperfect competition extend to settings in which firms care about the identity of their customers and their postpurchase behavior

gender segregation and wage gap an east west comparison this paper discusses the implication of recent results on the structure of gender wage gaps in transition economies for the literature on gender segregation differences in employment rates of low wage women driven by initial transition policies may be responsible for different wage penalties to predominantly female occupations new evidence presented here also suggests that the introduction of western type anti discrimination policies has had little immediate effect on the structure of female male wage differences jel j3 j7 p3

multiple versus single banking relationships theory and evidence a theory of the optimal number of banking relationships is developed and tested using matched bank firm data according to the theory relationship banks may be unable to continue funding profitable projects owing to internal problems and a firm may thus have to refinance from nonrelationship banks the latter however face an adverse selection problem as they do not know the quality of the project and may refuse to lend in these circumstances multiple banking can reduce the probability of an early liquidation of the project the empirical evidence supports the predictions of the model

fiscal federalism decentralization and economic growth a meta analysis the theoretical literature on fiscal federalism has identified several channels through which government decentralization could affect economic growth much of the literature focuses on the efficiency aspects of a decentralized provision of public services but decentralization may also increase growth by raising the ability of the political system to innovate and carry out reforms in contrast some authors argue that decentralization increases corruption and government inefficiency and thus may diminish growth given this theoretical ambiguity several studies have attempted to identify the effect of decentralization on economic growth empirically over the last two decades we review and conduct a meta analysis of this empirical literature based on our analysis we point out open questions and discuss possible ways to answer them jel h77 043 c52 i introduction building on various theoretical contributions an empirical literature analyzing the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth has emerged since the 1990s the relevant studies vary as to whether they use cross sectional time series or panel data as to whether they rely on cross country or single country samples and they vary in estimation methods decentralization measures and sample composition given the size and heterogeneity of the empirical literature it is useful to review the individual studies and summarize their main findings conducting a comprehensive search we identify 31 published and unpublished studies on the effect of fiscal decentralization on economic growth each of these studies estimates several models resulting in over 400 individual estimates while we first review these studies in a traditional manner our main aim is to analyze these estimates quantitatively specifically the main contribution of this article is to offer a meta analysis of the empirical findings on fiscal decentralization and economic growth a meta analysis is a useful methodology in our context as it is difficult to obtain clear cut conclusions with only a traditional survey of empirical literature the individual studies vary substantially in their characteristics and correspondingly in the findings they report by conducting a meta analysis however we can identify how the idiosyncratic characteristics of a particular study relate to its findings the meta analysis approach thus addresses model uncertainty with regard to each individual estimate in addition it can also serve as a partial response to the methodological critique of empirical research on fiscal decentralization by rodden 2004 as it helps to clarify the quantitative effects of different decentralization measures and estimation techniques finally as meta analytical techniques are rarely used in economics we also aim at contributing to the further establishment of this methodology stanley 2001 2008 the next section briefly discusses the various theoretical arguments as to why fiscal decentralization may affect economic growth we then provide a short traditional survey of the empirical studies in section iii we review this literature more systematically and quantitatively in section iv in section v we report the results of meta regressions and discuss how the idiosyncratic characteristics of a given study are related to its specific findings finally section vi provides a discussion of the results and some conclusions ii how could fiscal federalism affect economic growth theoretical approaches within the framework of the solow swan model solow 1956 swan 1956 fiscal federalism may be associated with a different level of efficiency in governance than unitary systems leading to a different value of solow s a the level of technology a regime change toward federalism would then be associated with temporarily different growth rates and eventually different levels of income but not with persistent growth differences

corporate structure liquidity and investment evidence from japanese industrial groups this paper presents evidence suggesting that information and incentive problems in the capital market affect investment we come to this conclusion by examining two sets of japanese firms the first set has close financial ties to large japanese banks that serve as their primary source of external finance and are likely to be well informed about the firm the second set of firms has weaker links to a main bank and presumably faces greater problems raising capital investment is more sensitive to liquidity for the second set of firms than for the first set the analysis also highlights the role of financial intermediaries in the investment process

taking the u out of kuznets a comprehensive analysis of the ekc and environmental degradation unlike most environmental kuznets curve ekc studies which focus on narrow measures of pollution as proxies for environmental quality we test the validity of the ekc using the ecological footprint ef a more comprehensive measure of environmental degradation we find no empirical evidence of an ekc relationship between the ef and economic development and only limited support for such a relationship among the components of the ef in addition we discover that energy is largely responsible for the lack of an ekc relationship and that energy consumption levels would have to be cut by over 50 in order for a statistically significant ekc relationship to emerge from the data overall these results suggest that growth alone will not lead to sustainable development

trends in the well being of american women 1970 1995 this paper examines the trends in the well being of american women over the last 25 years a time of significant changes in the relative economic status of women and in the labor market as a whole a broad range of indicators are considered to capture changes in women s well being in the family as well as in the labor market for virtually all age and education groups substantial evidence is obtained of rising gender equality in labor market outcomes notably labor force participation wages and occupational distributions broad evidence is also found of greater gender parity within married couple families as the housework time of husbands increased relative to wives and the relative wages of wives rose compared to their husbands however parallel to the recent evidence of the declining labor market position of lower skilled men there has been a similar deterioration in the economic status of less educated women especially high school dropouts their labor force participation rates and wages have risen at a much slower pace than those of more highly educated women while their incidence of single headship has increased much more rapidly these findings for less educated women serve to underscore the widening gap between more and less skilled americans of both sexes as well as to emphasize its broad dimensions

the real effects of the bank lending channel abstract this paper studies credit booms exploiting the spanish matched credit register over 2001 2009 we extend khwaja and mian 2008 s loan level estimator by incorporating firm level general equilibrium adjustments higher ex ante bank real estate exposure increases credit supply to non real estate firms but effects are neutralized by firm level adjustments for firms with existing banking relationships however higher bank real estate exposure increases risk taking by relaxing standards of existing borrowers cheaper longer term and less collateralized credit and by expanding credit on the extensive margin to first time borrowers that default substantially more results suggest that the mechanism at work is greater liquidity via securitization of real estate assets

the benefits of lending relationships evidence from small business data this paper empirically examines how ties between a firm and its creditors affect the availability and cost of funds to the firm we analyze data collected in a survey of small firms by the small business administration the primary benefit of building close ties with an institutional creditor is that the availability of financing increases we find smaller effects on the price of credit attempts to widen the circle of relationships by borrowing from multiple lenders increases the price and reduces the availability of credit in sum relationships are valuable and appear to operate more through quantities rather than prices

the environmental kuznets curve does one size fit all abstract this paper uses a new panel data set on state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from 1929 1994 to test the appropriateness of the one size fits all reduced form regression approach commonly used in the environmental kuznets curve literature empirical results provide initial evidence that an inverted u shape characterizes the relationship between per capita emissions and per capita incomes at the state level parameter estimates suggest however that previous studies which restrict cross sections to undergo identical experiences over time may be presenting statistically biased results

family policies wage structures and gender gaps sources of earnings inequality in 20 countries this study uncovers an unexpected effect of family friendly policies on women s economic attainments using hierarchical linear models the analysis combines individual level data obtained from th

energy consumption income and carbon emissions in the united states abstract this paper investigates the effect of energy consumption and output on carbon emissions in the united states earlier research focused on testing the existence and or shape of an environmental kuznets curve without taking energy consumption into account we investigate the granger causality relationship between income energy consumption and carbon emissions including labor and gross fixed capital formation in the model we find that income does not granger cause carbon emissions in the us in the long run but energy use does hence income growth by itself may not become a solution to environmental problems

the failure of models that predict failure distance incentives and defaults statistical default models widely used to assess default risk fail to account for a change in the relations between different variables resulting from an underlying change in agent behavior we demonstrate this phenomenon using data on securitized subprime mortgages issued in the period 1997 2006 as the level of securitization increases lenders have an incentive to originate loans that rate high based on characteristics that are reported to investors even if other unreported variables imply a lower borrower quality consistent with this behavior we find that over time lenders set interest rates only on the basis of variables that are reported to investors ignoring other credit relevant information as a result among borrowers with similar reported characteristics over time the set that receives loans becomes worse along the unreported information dimension this change in lender behavior alters the data generating process by transforming the mapping from observables to loan defaults to illustrate this effect we show that the interest rate on a loan becomes a worse predictor of default as securitization increases moreover a statistical default model estimated in a low securitization period breaks down in a high securitization period in a systematic manner it underpredicts defaults among borrowers for whom soft information is more valuable regulations that rely on such models to assess default risk could therefore be undermined by the actions of market participants

swimming upstream trends in the gender wage differential in the 1980s using michigan panel study of income dynamics data for 1979 and 1988 we analyze how a falling gender wage gap occurred despite changes in wage structure unfavorable to low wage workers the decrease is traced to gender specific factors which more than counterbalanced changes in measured and unmeasured prices working against women supply shifts net of demand were unfavorable for women generally and hurt high skilled more than middle and low skilled women by analyzing wages we find support for the notion of a gender twist in supply and demand having its largest negative effect on high skilled women

estimating a wage curve for britain 1973 90 following a w phillips s 1958 original work on the united kingdom applied research on unemployment and wages has been dominated by the analysis of highly aggregated time series data sets however it has proved difficult with such methods to uncover statistically reliable models this paper adopts a different approach it uses macroeconomic data on 175 000 british workers from 1973 to 1990 to provide evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped relationship linking the level of pay to the local rate of unemployment the paper casts doubt on standard ideas in macroeconomics regional economics and labor economics copyright 1994 by royal economic society