do faculty salaries rise with job seniority abstract previous research suggests that academic salaries fall with greater job seniority using a 1988 national survey we find that the return to seniority is positive over a lengthy employment period tenure status and academic rank also affect the return to seniority

food versus fuel an updated and expanded evidence abstract this paper replicates the study of zhang et al 2010 food versus fuel what do prices tell us energy policy 38 pp 445 451 we confirm the findings of the original paper that there was only a weak relationship between ethanol and food commodities in the period between march 1989 and july 2008 in addition we extend that study and examine the cointegration relationship between biofuels and related commodities for a considerably enlarged dataset 3 vs 1 market 26 vs 8 commodities analysis up till 2017 vs 2008 weekly vs monthly data frequency focusing on the biofuel markets of brazil the eu and the usa in the three separate periods before during and after the food crisis of 2007 and 2008 we show that studying the time variation of the relationships plays an essential role in their proper understanding our results help to clarify the wide extensive discussion about the role of biofuels prices in food shortages manifested particularly during the food crises in agreement with the original study we confirm that price series data do not support strong statements about biofuels uniformly serving as main leading source of high food prices and consequently the food shortages

the consequences of minimum wage laws some new theoretical ideas economists generally agree that the effect of a binding minimum wage law is to move firms backward along the demand curve for low skill workers however this prediction of worker displacement depends critically on the assumption that the productivity of firms labor is not dependent on the wage in this paper we show that in a conventional efficiency wage model a minimum wage may increase the level of employment in low wage jobs the formal logic of our model is similar to the case of labor demand under monopsony but arises in a model with a large number of employers

competition wages and teacher sorting lessons learned from a voucher reform this paper studies how local school competition affects teacher wages at markets where wages are set via individual wage bargaining using regional variation in private school entry generated by a swedish reform which allowed private schools to enter freely and a comprehensive matched employer employee data covering all high school teachers in sweden over 16 years i analyze the effects of competition on wages as well as labor flows the results suggest that competition translates into higher wages also for teachers in public schools while the average increases are modest new teachers gain 2 percent and high ability teachers in math and science receive 4 percent higher wages in the most competitive areas compared to areas without any competition from private schools several robustness checks support a causal interpretation of the results which together highlight the potential gains from school competition through a more differentiated wage setting of teachers

sluggish price adjustments and the link between money and price the simple quantity theory of money asserts that because the velocity of money and fullemployment output are constants if the money supply doubles the price level must also double 15 this view of the quantity theory of money is also supported by the policy ineffectiveness proposition put forward by lucas 16 sargent and wallace 20 and barro 1 the policy ineffectiveness proposition asserts that real variables like output and unemployment respond only to unanticipated movements in the money supply but do not respond to anticipated money supply associated with the systematic feedback rules one of the premises essential to the validity of this proposition is the perfect flexibility of prices the corollary of the policy ineffectiveness proposition as expounded by gordon 12 in invalidating this propositin is that because output does not respond to anticipated money supply changes and remains at the natural level the price level responds contemporaneously and proportionately to the anticipated changes in the money supply this conclusion is also consistent with barro s hypothesis that perceived movements in the money stock imply equiproportionate contemporaneous movements in the price level 3 565 66 this one to one relationship between the anticipated money supply and the price level has also been shown theoretically by barro 1 and hercowitz 13 it is this conclusion that needs to be tested by accounting for the speed of adjustments of prices the purpose of this study is to explore theoretically and empirically the link between money supply and price levels by incorporating a gradual price adjustment mechanism more specifically this study examines a the one to one relationship between the log of current money stock and the log of the price level purported by barro 3 b effects of unanticipated money growth on the aggregate price and c importance of anticipated money growth in determining the price level given the current money stock and the current and lagged values of the unanticipated money growth the key element of the study is the realization that the economy is comprised of markets with differing degrees of price adjustments numerous cases of price stickiness can be identified in modern economies as enumerated in survey work by blinder 4 also for instance devadoss and choi 6 observe that the u s agricultural program s price fixing policies such as price

cut to the bone hospital takeovers and nurse employment contracts the authors examine changes in the wages employment and effort of nurses in california hospitals following takeovers by large chains in the 1990s the market for nurses has been described as a classic monopsony so that one might expect increases in firm market power to be associated with declines in wages however a basic contracting model predicts effects on effort rather than on wages which is what this analysis finds nurses experienced few declines in wages following takeovers but did see increases in the number of patients per nurse the measure of effort used here the authors show that their results are also consistent with an extended version of the monopsony model that considers effort and allows for revenue shifts following a takeover finally they find that these changes were similar in the largest for profit and non profit chains suggesting that market forces are more important than institutional form

period specific volatility spillover based connectedness between oil and other commodity prices and their portfolio implications abstract this paper analyses the changing impact of oil price shocks on a bouquet of metal and agro prices and their implications for investment decisions during different oil price regimes separated by structural breaks endogenously identifying the structural breaks we use network analysis to decipher the nature and extent of such shock transfer across different sub periods we suggest optimal portfolios based on conditional variance estimates to hedge oil shocks during each period this is the first study to analyse the portfolio decisions during specific oil price regimes the results are of significant interest to investors and policy makers

black swan events and safe havens the role of gold in globally integrated emerging markets there is evidence to suggest that gold acts as both a hedge and a safe haven for equity markets over recent years and particularly during crises periods our work extends the recent literature on

investments holdup and the form of market contracts the authors analyze incomplete contracts to induce efficient investment with exogenous switching costs fixed price contracts are efficient generate some rigidity in prices are renegotiated intermittently by possibly small amounts and when inflation is positive generate asymmetric responses to shocks all consistent with evidence on prices and wages with two sided specific investments efficiency requires prices to have sufficient escalator clauses to avoid renegotiation as observed in many long term contracts a third case with one sided specific investments can generate take or pay contracts and explain why firms sometimes pay for specific investments that appear to benefit employees directly

financialization in commodity markets a passing trend or the new normal abstract in this paper we show that large inflows into commodity investments a recent phenomenon known as financialization has changed the behavior and dependence structure between commodities and the general stock market the common perception is that the increase in comovements is the result of distressed investors selling both assets during the 2007 2009 financial crisis we show that financial distress alone cannot explain the size and persistence of comovements instead we argue that commodities have become an investment style for institutional investors given that institutional investors continue to target funds into commodities we predict spillovers between commodities and the stock market to remain high in the future

index investment and financialization of commodities the authors found that concurrent with the rapidly growing index investment in commodity markets since the early 2000s prices of non energy commodity futures in the united states have become incr

price inertia money supply and price changes price stickiness is incorporated in the partial information localizedmarket framework of rational expectation models to show that the money stock has less than an equiproportionate effect on the aggregate price and that the unanticipated monetary policy component has differing impacts on prices at the market level the empirical analysis involves estimation of generated regressor models of money forecasting and price equations using the computationally intensive parametric bootstrap method developed most recently by smith and mcaleer the results are unfavourable to the hypothesis of a one to one relationship between current money stock and prices rather they lend distinct support to conclusions of a sluggish price adjustment model that money stock has less than equiproportionate effect on prices empirical results also show that the effects of unanticipated money growth on prices vary across markets

effects of the minimum wage on the employment status of youths an update the large decline in the relative value of the minimum wage during the 1980s makes that period a valuable one for identifying the impact of variation in the minimum wage on youth employment this study produces the robust finding that when the experience of the 1980s is included a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage is estimated to reduce teen employment by less than 1 percent the lower end of the range of previous estimates because this small employment effect is offset by a labor force withdrawal effect the study finds no discernible effect on measured unemployment the study also finds no apparent effect of the minimum wage on the employment of young adults aged 20 24

estimating a market equilibrium search model from panel data on individuals from albrecht and axell 1984 and is based on workers who are homogeneous in terms of market productivity and heterogeneous in terms of nonmarket productivity and on firms which are heterogeneous in terms of productive efficiency the equilibrium model is contrasted in terms of its fit to the data with an unrestricted version of the model which is based on a mixture of negative binomial distributions the equilibrium model fails to conform to the data in exactly the dimension of its major focus namely it implies that measurement error accounts for almost all of the dispersion in observed wages the equilibrium model also does not do well in fitting the unemployment duration distribution compared to the unrestricted model the problem is that the duration distribution itself does not support the existence of significant heterogeneity as evidenced by the estimates of the unrestricted model the paper also illustrates the use of such models for policy analysis by simulating the welfare effects of a minimum wage

labor market monopsony there has been a renewed interest in monopsony in labor markets in recent years that includes both the traditional static approach to monopsony ably reviewed by boal and ransom 1997 and the new approach to monopsony with more attention paid to dynamic issues developed in detail by manning 2003 the articles presented in this supplement highlight both approaches and illustrate the range of labor market settings in which the exercise of monopsony power may be important the first use of the term monopsony in economics is widely attributed to robinson 1969 robinson conceived of monopsony as analogous to monopoly whereas monopoly refers to the case of a single seller confronted in a market by many buyers monopsony refers to the case of a single buyer confronted in a market by many sellers just as the monopolist faces a downward sloping demand curve for his product and

index investment and the financialization of commodities the authors found that concurrent with the rapidly growing index investment in commodity markets since the early 2000s prices of non energy commodity futures in the united states have become increasingly correlated with oil prices this trend has been significantly more pronounced for commodities in two popular commodity indices this finding reflects the financialization of the commodity markets and helps explain the large increase in the price volatility of non energy commodities around 2008

the effect of minimum salaries on employment of teachers a test of the monopsony model author affiliation william m boal college of business and public administration drake university des moines iowa 50311 usa e mail william boal drake edu acknowledgment this paper has benefited from helpful comments on earlier drafts by david harrington and ronald oaxaca by seminar participants at drake university and iowa state university and by anonymous referees 1 introductionthe market for schoolteachers has long been cited as an example of labor monopsony where employers that is school districts enjoy market power ehrenberg and smith 2000 hyclak johnes and thornton 2005 the reasons offered are plausible by definition school districts enjoy exclusive territories teachers have specialized training that might not be interesting to nearby nonschool employers many teachers are second earners in their families and might be unwilling to relocate in response to distant job offers there is some evidence that teachers have strong personal geographic preferences boyd et al 2005 it would appear that the set of potential employers available to a certified teacher is limited to the set of school districts within commuting distance of current residence for these reasons it is often argued that the greatest monopsony power is probably held by rural school districts because of their large geographic size an empirical literature dating back to landon and baird 1971 has tried to document monopsony in this market by regressing teacher salaries on measures of geographic concentration of school districts these studies often appear to find a negative effect of geographic concentration on teacher salaries see luizer and thornton 1986 for a survey a major difficulty with the salary concentration research strategy is that concentration is inversely related to urbanization because urban areas tend to have many school districts in close proximity and salaries for all workers tend to be higher in urban areas the apparent negative estimated effect of concentration may disappear when sufficient measures of urbanization are included ransom boal and beck 1998 moreover the urban rural difference in teacher salaries appears similar to the urban rural difference for other professionals hirsch and nottage 1998 1a second difficulty with the salary concentration research strategy is the increasing presence of teachers unions 2 a monopsonist faces or at least perceives an upward sloping supply of labor this upward slope raises marginal labor cost above the current wage causing the monopsonist to reduce employment equilibrium occurs on the labor supply curve but below the monopsonist s labor demand curve by contrast a union tries to raise the wage by moving the equilibrium above the supply curve estimates based on 1970s data show that unionized teachers enjoyed an average wage differential of roughly 10 3 in some cases a union might even move the equilibrium above the demand curve this is the prediction of the so called contract curve model for which eberts and stone 1984 1986 found some evidence among new york state school districts any test for monopsony ought to exclude unionized districts from the sample or control for unionism in some way this has not generally been done 4a recent seemingly unrelated literature has investigated the effects of legal minimum wages on employment in fast food restaurants katz and krueger 1992 card and krueger 1994 this literature has apparently documented slight increases in employment following increases in minimum wages the authors note that this result is incompatible with competitive labor markets and may be evidence for employer monopsony a modest increase in a minimum wage may increase employment in a monopsonized market because it flattens the employer s perceived labor supply curve and thereby lowers the employer s marginal labor cost curve

high yield bond and energy markets abstract high yield bonds hold a particularly unique space in the debt market from many aspects literature suggests these assets to behave more like stocks than bonds given the significant similarities between the high yield bond and stock markets it is expected for these markets to be similarly affected by certain outside factors some shocks including the ones from energy markets are known to impact the entire stock market and not just related company shares since high yield bond portfolios include some amount of energy company debt the recent volatility in energy prices has been particularly concerning to market participants however the question of whether price and volatility shocks only impact energy company bonds or the entire high yield bond market as they do with the stock market still remains unanswered this study attempts to address that question by exploring the dynamic relationships between the high yield bond and energy markets price transmission tests which account for gradual structural shifts suggest oil and ethanol markets significantly impacting the high yield bond market furthermore volatility tests find uni directional volatility transmitting from energy markets to the high yield bond market

underpaid or overpaid wage analysis for nurses using job and worker attributes the nursing labor market presents an apparent puzzle hospitals report chronic shortages yet standard wage analysis shows that nursing wages have increased over time and greatly exceed those received by other college educated women this paper addresses this puzzle data from the current population survey cps are matched with detailed job content descriptors from the occupational information network o net nursing jobs require higher levels of skills and more difficult working conditions than do jobs for other college educated workers a standard cps only wage regression shows a registered nurse rn wage advantage of 22 log points compared to a pooled male female group of college educated workers control for o net job attributes reduces the rn gap to 08 while an arguably preferable nonparametric estimator produces a wage gap estimate close to zero we conclude that nurses receive compensation close to long run opportunity costs narrowing if not resolving the rn wage shortage puzzle

should investors include commodities in their portfolios after all new evidence abstract this paper investigates whether an investor is made better off by including commodities in a portfolio that consists of traditional asset classes first we revisit the posed question within an in sample setting by employing mean variance and non mean variance spanning tests then we form optimal portfolios by taking into account the higher order moments of the portfolio returns distribution and evaluate their out of sample performance under the in sample setting we find that commodities are beneficial only to non mean variance investors however these benefits are not preserved out of sample our findings challenge the alleged diversification benefits of commodities and are robust across a number of performance evaluation measures utility functions and datasets the results hold even when transaction costs are considered and across various sub periods not surprisingly the only exception appears over the 2005 2008 unprecedented commodity boom period

have commodities become a financial asset evidence from ten years of financialization the financialization of commodity markets over the last decade has changed the behavior of commodity prices in fundamental ways in this paper we uncover the gradual transformation of commodities from a physical to a financial asset although economic demand and supply factors continue to play an important role recent indicators associated with financialization have emerged since 2008 we show that financial variables have become the main driving factors explaining the variation in commodity returns and volatility today our findings have important implications for portfolio analysis and for the effectiveness of hedging in commodity markets

sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market in product markets with imperfect competition em

uncovering long term relationships between oil prices and the economy a time varying cointegration analysis abstract establishing the relation between oil price movements and macroeconomic performance is of great importance for firms and policymakers alike prior studies established this relation using the assumption that the long run relation is intertemporally constant however there is much recent evidence demonstrating that this assumption may not hold in practice to address this issue and go beyond the restrictive time invariant environment we employ the use of the time varying cointegration framework of bierens and martins 2010 we present evidence of the long run oil economy relation evolving over the 1974 2015 period with major events such as the gulf war and the financialisation of commodity markets proving to be driving forces across the u s european and g7 economies considered

liquidity commonality in commodities abstract we examine liquidity commonality in commodity futures markets using data from 16 agricultural energy industrial metal precious metal and livestock commodities we show there is a strong systematic liquidity factor in commodities liquidity commonality was present in 1997 2003 when commodity prices were relatively stable and during the recent boom there is some support for both supply side and demand side explanations for this commonality we find no evidence of a consistent link between stock and commodity liquidity in general energy commodities appear to provide a better hedge against equity market liquidity risk than the other commodity families

a stochastic monopsony theory of the business cycle two distinct regimes contractions and expansions are generated in a model in which goods markets clear and all individuals are optimizing strict wage and price takers have fully rational expectations and are heterogeneous in both preferences and resource endowments involuntary unemployment asymmetric monetary policy effectiveness and a changing relationship between real wages and employment over the business cycle are the result of optimizing behavior by monopsonistic wage setting and price taking firms faced with price uncertainty an upward sloped supply of employees and efficiency wage behavior disequilibrium and involuntary unemployment can occur at the level of the individual firm s labor market jel e32 e52 j41 j42 i introduction for many economists three stylized facts are central to any plausible theory of the business cycle 1 friedman and schwartz 1963 and romer and romer 1994 concluded that monetary shocks have output employment and unemployment effects at least some of the time and such effects are asymmetric with respect to the state of the economy 2 unemployment is subject to fluctuations associated with recessions and expansions and in some recessions has been very high 1 3 the relationship between real wages and employment appears to be time period sensitive as reported by abraham and haltiwanger 1995 although first proposed by keynes modern economists such as benassy 2002 argue that at least some unemployment is best characterized as involuntary and indicates a state of disequilibrium in this article we consider a plausible alternative to disequilibrium explanations of these elements of the business cycle based on goods market imperfections such as those by benassy 2002 and dixon and rankin 1995 who considered monopoly power by firms in the goods market and benassy 1995 who assumed monopoly power by unions in the labor market we assume that the goods market is characterized by competitive market clearing but firms have some monopsony power as reflected in an upward sloped or bounded supply of labor to the firm and the ability to set the optimal wage before knowing the price they will receive for their output which is assumed to be stochastic and making their employment decision these modifications are embedded in an otherwise conventional general equilibrium model in which all agents firms and consumers workers capitalists are fully optimizing and form totally rational expectations and labor may exhibit efficiency wage behavior 2 this is not a representative agent model and cannot be reduced to such individuals are heterogeneous in both their endowments and preferences firms may be heterogeneous with respect to their production technology and the interests of firm owners are distinct from those of their employees the latter is essential to generate the changing regimes that produce predictions that correspond to the stylized facts monetary shocks affect output prices employment and unemployment in an asymmetrical manner consistent with the traditional business cycle the key to understanding these effects is the labor market if the expected quantity of money is generated then the competitive market clearing real wage will result lower than expected quantities of money generate a deficiency of aggregate demand lower than expected output prices and real wages above the competitive wage real wages above the competitive wage are associated with excess supply of labor and involuntary unemployment independent of that associated with efficiency wage behavior this contractionary regime will persist as long as the low quantities of money persist even though all agents have fully rational expectations are optimizing and the goods market clears in this regime increases in the quantity of money increase prices employment and output and employment varies negatively with the real wage efficiency wage behavior may decrease effort as the real wage rate is decreased

monopsony power in the market for nurses estimates are presented of the inverse elasticity of supply of nursing services to the individual hospital a quantity which is a natural measure of employer market power the estimates corresponding to employment changes taking place over one year are quite high in the neighborhood of 0 79 and even for changes taking place over three years are substantial in the neighborhood of 0 26 the estimates do not significantly differ for hospitals in major metropolitan areas and do not depend very sensitively on the assumed form of the oligopsony equilibrium this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

differing degree of price flexibilities and the policy ineffectiveness proposition price regulations impart stickiness to prices the degree of response is analysed for three cpi subindex inflations freely determined regulated and mixed prices and of aggregate cpi inflation to anticipated and unanticipated monetary policies freely determined prices and aggregate cpi show similar responses but faster and larger adjustments than regulated prices to anticipated monetary policies the results imply that the extent to which monetary policies can influence prices depends on the degree of price inertia in various sectors for monetary authorities to control inflation effectively they need to focus on price movements in various sectors

monopsony in the low wage labor market evidence from minimum nurse staffing regulations this paper provides direct evidence on the extent of monopsony power in the low wage labor market by estimating the firm level elasticity of labor supply for nurse aides in the long term care nursing home industry using exogenous variation in hiring induced by the passage of a state minimum nurse staffing law i find that facilities initially out of compliance with the new law did not have to raise their wage offers relative to their competitors in order to hire more nurses while this is consistent with perfect competition in simple monopsony models of the labor market i discuss how the results may be more ambiguous in more complicated models

monopsony mobility and sex differences in pay missouri school teachers we examine the sex differences in the pay of school teachers in missouri in missouri school districts pay is determined by a salary schedule that maps teaching experience and education level of an individual to a salary level in spite of this apparently mechanical rule for determining pay female teachers earn less than male teachers after controlling for experience and education we explore how such a difference could arise from differential job mobility and find some evidence to support this idea however within district differences in pay are a more important source of differences in pay between men and women

the dependence structure across oil wheat and corn a wavelet based copula approach using implied volatility indexes abstract this paper examines the dependence structure between three commodities implied volatility indexes oil wheat and corn during bear normal and bull markets and at different scales for this purpose we combine wavelet and copula methods to analyse the changes of the tail dependence at different scales or investment horizons the results support evidence of time varying asymmetric tail dependence between the pair of cereals as well as between oil and the two cereals at different time horizons short term horizon medium term horizon and long term horizon suggesting that the dependence structure is sensitive to time horizons these results have important implications for the analysis of portfolio risk management

the changing effects of competition on non profit and for profit hospital pricing behavior abstract has the nature of hospital competition changed from a medical arms race in which hospitals compete for patients by offering their doctors high quality services to a price war for the patients of payors this paper uses time series cross sectional methods on california hospital discharge data from 1986 1994 to show the association of hospital prices with measures of market concentration changed steadily over this period with prices now higher in less competitive areas even for non profit hospitals regression results are used to simulate the price impact of hypothetical hospital mergers

multiple equilibria and minimum wages in labor markets with informational frictions and heterogeneous production technologies it is often argued that a mandatory minimum wage is binding only if the wage density displays a spike at it in this article we analyze a model with search frictions and heterogeneous production technologies in which imposition of a minimum wage affects wages even though after imposition the lowest wage in the market exceeds the minimum wage the model has multiple equilibria as a result of the fact that the reservation wage of the unemployed and the lowest production technology in use affect each other imposition of a minimum wage may improve social welfare

sex discrimination and product market competition the case of the banking industry this paper examines the relationship between product market competition and employment discrimination using an especially constructed data set that links microeconomic data on female employment with measures of market concentration in the banking industry the use of firm specific data drawn from this one industry allows estimation of this relationship in a manner that avoids the problems of interindustry differences that have troubled previous studies the results provide strong support for a negative relationship between market concentration and the relative employment of women further we find that individual market shares are unrelated to female employment suggesting that the relationship is due primarily to differences across markets rather than individual firms

are you hiring johnny football or johnny doe uncertain labour quality and the measurement of monopsony in college football i assess monopsony in the college football labour market as it relates to both typical and elite performers while also accounting for the uncertain performance quality of prospective players who a

compensating differentials and unmeasured ability in the labor market for nurses why do hospitals pay more nurses employed in hospitals realize a large wage advantage relative to nurses employed elsewhere this paper examines alternative sources of the hospital premium a topic of some interest given the current shifting of medical care out of hospitals whereas cross sectional estimates indicate a hospital rn wage advantage of roughly 20 percent longitudinal analysis suggests that a third to a half of the advantage is due to unmeasured worker ability the remainder is likely to reflect compensating differentials for hospital disamenities we further probe possible sources of the rn hospital premium by examining the receipt of fringe benefits differences in cognitive ability as measured by afqt test scores differences in the quality of experience the role of labor unions and rents earnings on second jobs and the magnitude of wage differentials associated with work shift

classic or new monopsony searching for evidence in nursing labor markets the market for registered nurses rns is often offered as an example of classic monopsony while a new monopsony literature emphasizes that firm labor supply is upward sloping independent of market structure using data from multiple sources we explore the relationship between nursing wages in hospitals and measures of classic and new monopsony wage level analysis fails to provide support for classic monopsony the relative wages of rns in 240 u s labor markets being largely uncorrelated with hospital system concentration longitudinal analysis shows nursing wages declining with increases in hospital concentration we interpret these results as providing support for classic monopsony effects in the short run but question whether wage effects are sustained in the long run no relationship is found between nursing wages and a new monopsony measure of mobility but support for new monopsony is found for women elsewhere in the labor market rns display greater interemployer mobility than do women or men in general two conclusions follow first upward sloping labor supply need not imply monopsonistic outcomes second absent more compelling evidence nursing should not be held up as a prototypical example of monopsony classic or new

de financialization of commodities evidence from stock crude oil and natural gas markets abstract in order to investigate whether the crude oil and natural gas market volatility is influenced by the volatility in the stock market or whether these different variables move all together we introduce the volatility threshold dynamic conditional correlations vt dcc approach to investigate the spillover effect of stock market volatility index vix vstoxx on crude oil and natural gas markets during 1999 2015 and make the correlation dynamics dependent on conditional variance values through a threshold grid search algorithm by detecting one endogenous break point in the raw series we identify two clusters one in 2008 and another in 2014 due to the financial crisis and the structural low oil prices linked to changing fundamentals respectively also the u s henry hub gas seems to be associated with the stock market volatility indexes contrary to the european nbp gas which is linked to the brent besides regarding the volatility behaviors of our series the four energy variables violate their thresholds at similar moments and the stock market vix and vstoxx exhibit logically similarities co movements are detectable as well between the vix and crude oil series when investigating the volatility extracted from the garch model in addition the block dcc estimates provide ample evidence of similarities in the correlation dynamics between the crude oil and stock volatility series it should be noted that the modeling framework proposed in this paper represents a useful tool for the study of cross market contagion

tight oil real wti prices and u s stock returns abstract following the adoption of new techniques of shale and fracking by u s oil companies a structural vector autoregression model svar complements studies on why brent and wti started to diverge around early 2011 using monthly data from 2000 to 2018 we decompose oil supply into world oil excluding u s u s conventional non tight oil and u s tight oil we examine the variance decomposition of stock returns for the aggregate market s p 500 the s p energy sector and chevron and exxon mobil oil companies and we further identify differences between two subsamples from 2000 to 2010 and 2011 to 2018 respectively we find that supply considerations especially due to tight oil become more important in the subsample after 2011 not only for individual oil companies but also for the aggregate market and energy sector supply shocks due to tight oil explain in our benchmark model between 29 s p 500 and 31 s p energy of the variance in stock returns after 24 months and between 28 and 29 for oil companies none of these are statistically significant in the pre 2011 subsample among impulse responses tight oil production responds positively to disruptions in world oil and u s stock returns respond positively to oil price shocks and respond negatively to tight oil shocks which is a further finding while being consistent with the literature copula modeling uncovers stronger tail dependences in the second subsample for the interactions during downturns and upturns among global demand crude oil prices and stock markets

information diffusion cluster formation and entropy based network dynamics in equity and commodity markets this paper investigates the dynamic causal linkages among u s equity and commodity futures markets via the utilization of complex network theory we make use of rolling estimations of extended mat

price and volatility linkages between international reits and oil markets abstract this study analyzes price and volatility transmissions between nineteen real estate investment trusts reits and the oil markets the reits data represents a variety of countries at different stages of their development and the expanded analytical approach includes accounting for structural shifts as gradual processes as opposed to strictly abrupt processes typically assumed in the literature oil prices are found to primarily predict reits prices in mature reits markets but the feedback from reits to oil prices is weak from the perspective of volatility strong evidence of bidirectional transmission in majority of the markets is observed our results are in general robust to a shorter common sample period of the various countries this study further demonstrates the importance of accounting for gradual smooth structural shifts for price transmission analysis

attaching workers through in kind payments theory and evidence from russia external shocks may cause a decline in the productivity of fixed capital in certain regions of an economy exogenous obstacles to migration make it hard for workers in those regions to reallocate to more prosperous regions in addition firms may devise attachment strategies to keep workers from moving out of a local labor market when workers are compensated in kind they find it difficult to raise the cash needed for migration this endogenous obstacle to migration has not yet been considered in the literature the article shows that the feasibility of attachment depends on the inherited structure of local labor markets attachment can exist in equilibrium only if the labor market is sufficiently concentrated attachment is beneficial for both employers and employees but hurts the unemployed and the self employed an analysis of matched household firm data from the russian federation corroborates the theory

is there monopsony in the labor market evidence from a natural experiment recent theoretical and empirical advances have renewed interest in monopsonistic models of the labor market however there is little direct empirical support for these models we use an exogenous change in wages at department of veterans affairs va hospitals as a natural experiment to investigate the extent of monopsony in the nurse labor market we estimate that labor supply to individual hospitals is quite inelastic with short run elasticity around 0 1 we also find that non va hospitals responded to the va wage change by changing their own wages

freely determined versus regulated prices implications for the measured link between money and inflation wiley author accepted manuscript can be posted 2 years after official publication date must acknowledge source link to publisher version and include following statement this is the accepted version of the following article dexter a s levi m d and nault b r freely determined versus regulated prices implications for the link between money and inflation journal of money credit and banking 25 2 may 1993 222 231 which has been published in final form at http www jstor org stable 2077838 policy http exchanges wiley com authors self archiving 361 html article deposited according to publisher s policy 05 25 2015

monopsony power and relative wages in the labor market for nurses this paper examines the thesis that monopsony power is an important determinant of wages in nursing labor markets using data from the 1985 93 current population surveys measures of relative nurse non nurse wage rates for 252 labor markets are constructed contrary to predictions from the monopsony model no positive relationship exists between relative nursing wages and hospital density or market size nor is support found for the presence of monopsony power based on evidence on union wage premiums slopes of experience profiles or the mix of rn to total hospital employment

is hospital competition socially wasteful we study the consequences of hospital competition for medicare beneficiaries heart attack care from 1985 to 1994 we examine how relatively exogenous determinants of hospital choice such as travel distances influence the competitiveness of hospital markets and how hospital competition interacts with the influence of managed care organizations to affect the key determinants of social welfare expenditures on treatment and patient health outcomes in the 1980s the welfare effects of competition were ambiguous but in the 1990s competition unambiguously improves social welfare increasing hmo enrollment over the sample period partially explains the dramatic change in the impact of hospital competition

monopsony and the lifetime relation between wages and productivity we consider the relation between wages and productivity by means of a model based on the following assumptions workers live for 2 periods firms live forever senior workers differ nontrivially from junior seniority enhances workers expected second period earnings both firms and workers recognize the prospect of promotion and the senior junior wage differential at the time of hiring and firms have monopsony power in hiring junior workers we show that senior wages are equal to the senior marginal product but junior wages are set below the junior marginal product by an amount that depends on the elasticity of the firm s labor supply

medicaid managed care effects on children s medicaid coverage and utilization abstract we use data from the national health interview surveys nhis to measure the effects of the growth of medicaid managed care on children we examine both the probability that individual children were medicaid covered and their utilization of care we find that managed care penetration has significant effects on the composition of the medicaid caseload young children are less likely to be covered while poor school age children are more likely to be covered when we examine coverage by race we find that black children are less likely to be covered where medicaid managed care organizations mmcos are more prevalent these lower medicaid enrollment rates are linked to increases in the numbers of young children who go without any doctor visits in a year these results suggest that it is important to examine the potential effects of changes in medicaid on selection into the medicaid program rather than focusing exclusively on the effects of managed care on those who are enrolled in addition among those enrolled in medicaid higher managed care penetration is associated with an increase in the number of black children with chronic conditions who go without doctor visits but with decreases in the number of hispanic children and poor teens who go without care

minimum wages for ronald mcdonald monopsonies a theory of monopsonistic competition recent empirical work on the effects of minimum wages has called into question the conventional wisdom that minimum wages invariably reduce employment we develop a model of monopsonistic competition with free entry to analyse the effects of minimum wages and our predictions fit the empirical results closely under monopsonistic competition we find that a rise in the minimum wage raises employment per firm causes firm exit and may increase or reduce industry employment minimum wages increase welfare if they raise industry employment but welfare effects are ambiguous if employment falls

no place to hide the global crisis in equity markets in 2008 2009 this paper provides a broad analysis of the effect of the current financial crisis on global equity markets and their major components we also examine the magnitude of the crisis in terms of value destruction in comparison to other market crashes in brief upon looking at return performance across an array of regions countries and sectors broad market averages are down approximately 40 on their end of 2006 levels while deterioration started in most markets in early to mid 2008 the crisis period of mid september to the end of october 2008 is responsible for the lion s share of the collapse with just about all indices falling 30 40 in this short period financial sectors have taken a bigger hit than non financials over the period though they both suffered similarly during the peak of the crisis due to larger rises in 2007 the emerging markets drop more in 2008 than developed markets but in large part end up at the same level as the other markets the global nature of the crisis is also apparent from the high correlations between markets and investment styles that further increased during the crisis as a result diversification provided little help to investors when needed most as markets dropped in tandem

modeling and predicting oil vix internet search volume versus traditional mariables abstract as a key variable in option pricing models and monetary policy decisions volatility is an important factor in valuing and hedging investments this paper models and predicts the cboe crude oil volatility index using heterogeneous autoregressive har models that include traditional macro finance variables as well as abnormal search volume from google asvi we find that a pure har model fits oil volatility remarkably well when adding asvi we discover that this variable has a significant and positive relationship with oil volatility this relationship remains statistically significant when traditional financial and macroeconomic variables are accounted for therefore asvi is not only a good proxy for traditional macro finance variables but also carries additional information more importantly out of sample predictions show that asvi has high economic value allowing traders of volatility exposed portfolios to significantly increase returns

the union impact on hospital wages and fringe benefits this paper uses 1977 data from a national probability sample of 1 200 hospitals to estimate the effect of unions on wages and fringe benefits in four occupations registered nurses practical nurses secretaries and housekeepers the results show that unionization has a significant impact on wages that increases with the length of time collective bargaining has been in effect at the individual hospital the overall wage effect of unions is about 8 percent for both types of nurses and 11 to 12 percent for secretaries and housekeepers employed in hospitals the authors also estimate an equation for hospital wide fringe benefits which shows that such benefits are positively related to the percent of full time employees in the four occupations covered by union contracts

seniority and monopsony in the academic labor market workers with high seniority usually have higher wages than workers with low seniority and the same total labor marke t experience in contrast the results of this paper indicate that higher seniority is associated with lower salaries for university professors the author documents this finding for national surveys a nd individual institutions and explains it as due to monopsonistic discrimination by employers copyright 1993 by american economic association

is food financialized yes but only when liquidity is abundant abstract in this paper we investigate whether commodity index trader cit positions help to explain the increase in the correlations between agricultural commodities and equities starting around 2008 some argue institutional investors who invest both in stock and commodity markets demolish the borders between these two seemingly unrelated markets and increase correlations a recent phenomenon known as financialization yet some others argue recently correlations have decreased back to historical levels and the increase between 2008 and 2012 was merely due to a business cycle effect our results do not support one side at the expense of the other but rather shows that both factors are important in explaining the correlations between agricultural commodities and stocks furthermore we find that cits prefer to go back to their circle of competence under scarce liquidity and thus correlations decrease back to levels absent institutions hence low liquidity is a significant obstacle inhibiting financialization to occur

monopsony in the labor market this paper surveys recent theoretical and empirical research on monopsony in labor markets broadly defined as upward sloping labor supply to an employer we compare older monopsony models based on small numbers of employers with newer models based on labor market frictions such as moving costs and search we also compare older econometric approaches that focus on static wage concentration relationships with newer approaches that focus on dynamics our review of empirical estimates suggests that monopsony power based on small numbers of employers is probably rare but occasionally large while monopsony power based on frictions is probably widespread but small on average

what is new keynesian economics this research was supported by the national science foundation i am grateful to george williams for help with the data and to steven allen laurence ball olivier j blanchard timothy bresnahan charles calomiris dennis carlton robert chirinko russell cooper stanley fischer herschel grossman r glenn hubbard david laidler john leahy assar lindbeck n gregory mankiw david romer julio rotemberg dennis snower john taylor andrew weiss and two anonymous referees for comments on one or more earlier drafts i am also indebted to michael parkin and edmund s phelps for helping to establish the etymology of the phrase new keynesian

an estimate of the rent generated by a premium college football player the national collegiate athletic association limits the payments athletes can receive for their services colleges are effectively monosony employers so players will not be paid their marginal revenue product therefore colleges capture an economic rent from players this paper measures these rents by estimating the marginal revenue product of a top college football player the empirical results suggest that a premium college player generates over 500 000 in annual revenues for his team

time frequency contained co movement of crude oil and world food prices a wavelet based analysis abstract this paper evaluates the association between crude oil prices and world food price indices first within general space and time and then within the combined time frequency sphere monthly price data spanning from january 1990 to february 2016 were used for the analysis the johansen cointegration test conducted within the time domain confirmed the statistically significant cointegrated relationship between crude oil prices and the price indices of food and its sub categories such as dairy cereals vegetable oil and sugar however frequency information was not accounted for to incorporate both the time and frequency features of the data we used a wavelet method that has shown that the world food prices along with the prices of cereals vegetable oils and sugar co move with and are led by crude oil prices results that remain relevant from the short run policy perspective the outcome of toda yamamoto causality confirmed the spillover of crude oil price changes to the world food price index also in the long run the paper ends with the policy implications of these results

implied volatility surface predictability the case of commodity markets abstract recent literature seek to forecast implied volatility derived from equity index foreign exchange and interest rate options using latent factor and parametric frameworks motivated by increased public attention borne out of the financialization of futures markets in the early 2000s we investigate if these extant models can uncover predictable patterns in the implied volatility surfaces of the most actively traded commodity options between 2006 and 2016 adopting a rolling out of sample forecasting framework that addresses the common multiple comparisons problem we establish that for energy and precious metals options explicitly modeling the term structure of implied volatility using the nelson siegel factors produces the most accurate forecasts

cross quantilogram based correlation and dependence between renewable energy stock and other asset classes abstract we study the cross quantile dependence of renewable energy re stock returns on aggregate stock returns changes in oil and gold prices and exchange rates applying a recently developed cross quantilogram approach we provide two novel findings first although prior studies show that re stock returns have a positive dependence on changes in oil prices and in the aggregate stock index we find that the relationship is not symmetric across quantiles and that this asymmetry is higher in longer lags second while the extant literature provides evidence that exchange rates and gold returns exert a positive influence on aggregate stock returns we report that this positive influence on re stock returns is observed only during extreme market conditions these results are robust i even after controlling for economic policy and equity market uncertainties as well as ii in both a time static full sample and recursive subsamples

wage bargaining and monopsony this paper identifies three possible outcomes of higher relative firm bargaining power in a unionized firm facing an upward sloping labor supply curve the conventional regime with reduced wage and higher employment corresponds to firm bargaining power below a certain critical value a supply constrained regime where increased firm bargaining power reduces both wages and employment occurs when the bargaining power is above another critical level a novel result is that we identify a third regime with firm bargaining power between these critical levels where changes in relative bargaining power does not affect wages and employment

the impact of the minimum wage on other wages in this paper i explore how changes in the minimum wage affect various occupational wages i postulate that other wages increase for two reasons first firms try to mitigate the deterioration in a worker s relative wage which would cause him to reduce his work effort and second there is an increase in the demand for nonminimum wage workers wage adjustment patterns are examined to ascertain whether wage comparisons play a role in the adjustment process the empirical work shows a short run wage compression among white collar occupations which is consistent with the wage comparison model however large standard errors make inferences weak

dynamic monopsony evidence from a french establishment panel this paper uses a panel of about 6000 french establishments to test some implications of the modern theory of dynamic monopsony or upward sloping labour supply curves for average firm wages panel estimates provide strong evidence of a much larger long run employer size wage effect eswe than found previously while controlling for worker quality and compensating differentials with lagged wages and for profitability rent sharing employment expansion also has a positive effect on wages providing further evidence for upward sloping labour supply as distinct from the effect of shocks in a perfectly competitive labour market

economies of scale in non revenue producing cost centers implications for hospital mergers this paper uses semiparametric methods to estimate the magnitude of economies of scale in 14 non revenue producing cost centers in hospitals there are substantial economies of scale in small hospitals but economies are exhausted in hospitals with over 10 000 discharges annually in recent hospital mergers challenged by federal antitrust agencies one or both hospitals had over 10 000 discharges suggesting that efficiency gains in non revenue producing cost centers will be small and could easily be offset by nominal price increases

modeling asymmetric comovements of asset returns existing time varying covariance models usually impose strong restrictions on how past shocks affect the forecasted covariance matrix in this article we compare the restrictions imposed by the four most popular multivariate garch models and introduce a set of robust conditional moment tests to detect misspecification we demonstrate that the choice of a multivariate volatility model can lead to substantially different conclusions in any application that involves forecasting dynamic covariance matrices like estimating the optimal hedge ratio or deriving the risk minimizing portfolio we therefore introduce a general model which nests these four models and their natural asymmetric extensions the new model is applied to study the dynamic relation between large and small firm returns article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

sticky prices the impact of regulation abstract this paper finds that approximately one third of the items in the cpi are governed by price regulations that can slow and add noise to the response of prices to changes in cost or demand conditions consequently regulation is a possible partial explanation of sticky prices in the overall rate of inflation and delayed response to changes in the money supply a survey is used to decompose the cpi into freely determined and regulated sub components evidence is provided that prices in the regulated sector of the economy respond approximately two quarters after prices in the freely determined sector thereby contributing a source of stickiness in overall inflation and in the response of inflation to monetary policy