evolution of the infant health production function michael grossman s seminal publication on the demand for health and health production grossman 1972 has spawned a substantial body of research focusing on the production of infant health this article provides a systematic review of the published literature to date on infant health production and how it has evolved over the past 3 4 decades as data have become more available computing has improved and econometric methods have become more sophisticated while empirical research in most fields has expanded in corresponding ways the infant health production research has become an important part of the broader and inherently multidisciplinary literature on intergenerational health the strongest and most robust findings are that policies matter for infant health particularly those affecting access to health care and that prenatal smoking and other chemical exposures substantially compromise infant health promising directions for future research include elucidating relevant pathways reconciling the largely inconsistent estimated effects of nutrition and education and exploring the roles of preconceptional and lifetime health care paternal factors social support housing complementarity and substitutability of inputs factors that modify effects of inputs and evolving medical technologies

inventories rational expectations and the business cycle abstract the simplest macroeconomic models in which markets clear instantaneously and expectations are rational preclude the existence of business cycles that is of serially correlated deviations of output from trend this paper studies one of several mechanisms that can be used to make these so called new classical models produce business cycles the mechanism is the gradual adjustment of inventory stocks two macroeconomic models of inventory holdings are formulated both imply first that current output should be a decreasing function of the stock of inventories and second that inventories once perturbed from equilibrium levels should adjust only gradually these two features are then embedded into an otherwise standard macroeconomic model in which markets clear instantaneously and expectations are rational two principal conclusions are reached first disturbances such as unanticipated changes in money will set in motion serially correlated deviations of output from trend second if desired inventories are sensitive to the real interest rate then even fully anticipated changes in money can affect real variables

portfolio serial correlation and nonsynchronous trading common stock portfolios of large heavily traded firms exhibit daily first order serial correlation in excess of what would be expected given the individual security coefficients further this correlation rises as the number of securities in the portfolio increases the direct implication of this finding is that nonsynchronous trading is not the only cause of correlation in daily market indices related implications are also discussed

violence and birth outcomes evidence from homicides in brazil abstract this paper uses microdata from brazilian vital statistics on births and deaths between 2000 and 2010 to estimate the impact of in utero exposure to local violence measured by homicide rates on birth outcomes the estimates show that exposure to violence during the first trimester of pregnancy leads to a small but precisely estimated increase in the risk of low birthweight and prematurity effects are found both in small municipalities where homicides are rare and in large municipalities where violence is endemic and are particularly pronounced among children of poorly educated mothers implying that violence compounds the disadvantage that these children already suffer as a result of their households lower socioeconomic status

does hazardous waste matter evidence from the housing market and the superfund program this paper uses the housing market to develop estimates of the local welfare impacts of superfund sponsored cleanups of hazardous waste sites we show that if consumers value the cleanups then the hedonic model predicts that they will lead to increases in local housing prices and new home construction as well as the migration of individuals that place a high value on environmental quality to the areas near the improved sites we compare housing market outcomes in the areas surrounding the first 400 hazardous waste sites chosen for superfund cleanups to the areas surrounding the 290 sites that narrowly missed qualifying for these cleanups we find that superfund cleanups are associated with economically small and statistically insignificant changes in residential property values property rental rates housing supply total population and types of individuals living near the sites these findings are robust to a series of specification checks including the application of a regression discontinuity design based on knowledge of the selection rule overall the preferred estimates suggest that the local benefits of superfund cleanups are small and appear to be substantially lower than the 43 million mean cost of superfund cleanups

friction in the trading process and the estimation of systematic risk abstract this paper considers how estimates of the market model beta parameter can be biased by friction in the trading process information decision and transaction costs that a leads to a distinction between observed and true returns b causes observed returns to be generated asynchronously for a set of interdependent securities and c thereby introduces serial cross correlation into security returns several propositions are derived from which consistent estimators of beta are obtained and the effect of differencing interval length on beta estimates is specified the formulation is contrasted with the related analyses of scholes williams 1977 and dimson 1979

superfund cleanups and infant health in 1980 outcry over the health effects of toxic waste in love canal new york resulted in the comprehensive environmental response compensation and liability act which became known as superfund superfund was intended to provide a mechanism for conducting remedial clean ups at the most dangerous hazardous waste sites over the years it became the largest and most expensive federal program to deal with toxic waste in the us given the substantial cost and slow rate of clean up there is considerable debate on whether it is in the public interest to continue the program in its current form epa 2006 while the costs of the programs are clear its benefits are not well understood indeed the policy is controversial in part because there is a paucity of reliable information on the program s benefits some previous studies find poorer birth outcomes near a site while others do not see martine vrijheid 2000 however evidence of a correlation between proximity to a site and poor birth outcomes does not necessarily represent a causal effect because populations living near hazardous waste sites are typically different from the general population and their health outcomes are likely to differ even in the absence of negative health effects from exposure for example michael greenstone and justin gallagher 2008 found that residents of areas near hazardous waste sites are more likely to be poor and have lower levels of education than others our project is the first to examine the effect of site cleanups on infant health rather than simply focusing on proximity to a site we focus on single births that occurred within 5km of a superfund site between 1989 and 2003 in five large states florida michigan new jersey pennsylvania and texas the basis of our difference in differences approach is to compare changes in birth outcomes before and after a site s clean up among births to mothers who live within 2 000 meters of the site and among those who live between 2 000 and 5 000 meters away our approach is made feasible by access to confidential vital statistics data that includes the exact street address of the mother s residence our large sample gives us statistical power to detect small effects

an econometric model of serial correlation and illiquidity in hedge fund returns the returns to hedge funds and other alternative investments are often highly serially correlated in sharp contrast to the returns of more traditional investment vehicles such as long only equity portfolios and mutual funds in this paper we explore several sources of such serial correlation and show that the most likely explanation is illiquidity exposure i e investments in securities that are not actively traded and for which market prices are not always readily available for portfolios of illiquid securities reported returns will tend to be smoother than true economic returns which will understate volatility and increase risk adjusted performance measures such as the sharpe ratio we propose an econometric model of illiquidity exposure and develop estimators for the smoothing prole as well as a smoothing adjusted sharpe ratio for a sample of 908 hedge funds drawn from the tass database we show that our estimated smoothing coecien ts vary considerably across hedge fund style categories and may be a useful proxy for quantifying illiquidity exposure

estimating and adjusting for the intervalling effect bias in beta the concept of beta as the measure of systematic risk has been widely accepted in the academic and financial community increasingly betas are being used to estimate the cost of capital for corporations despite this however biases are generally present in ordinary least squares ols estimates of beta in particular empirical estimates of beta are affected by friction in the trading process which delays the adjustment of a security s price to informational change and hence leads to an intervalling effect bias in this paper we present and empirically test two procedures for correcting this bias the first is to estimate the asymptotic value that ols beta approaches as the differencing interval is lengthened without bound the second procedure is to infer the value of beta by adjusting ols beta for cross sectional differences in the intervalling effect as a function of the depth of the market for a security as measured by its value of shares outstanding our results suggest that a substantial correction is needed to get true beta estimates from short differencing interval data

the intervalling effect bias in beta a note abstract based on a comprehensive sample of domestic securities traded on the brussels stock exchange this paper points out the intervalling effect in the estimated betas and examines the speed of convergence of these the results reveal that the estimated betas seem to converge to their asymptotic values and that their value depends on what day the differencing interval starts it also appears that the magnitude of the intervalling effect is inversely related to the market value of the firms

inequality at birth some causes and consequences recent research shows that health at birth is affected by many factors including maternal education behaviors and participation in social programs in turn endowments at birth are predictive of adult outcomes and of the outcomes of future generations exposure to environmental pollution is one potential determinant of health at birth that has received increasing attention a large literature outside of economics advocates for environmental justice and argues that poor and minority families are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards i provide new evidence on this question showing that children born to less educated and minority mothers are more likely to be exposed to pollution in utero and that white college educated mothers are particularly responsive to changes in environmental amenities i estimate that differences in exposure to toxic releases may explain 6 of the gap in incidence of low birth weight between infants of white college educated mothers and infants of black high school dropout mothers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

sluggish price adjustments and the effectiveness of monetary policy under rational expectations comment the question of the effectiveness of monetary policy has become one of the most controversial issues in macroeconomics in recent years sargent and wallace 16 demonstrated that in a model in which prices are assumed to atdjust to clear markets each period 1 output behaves according to the lucas 9 supply function and expectations are formed according to the rational expectations hypothesis any systematic monetary policy will be ineffective this proposition will be referred to in this paper as the lucas sargent proposition the lsp fischer 6 showed however that if wages are assumed to adjust sluggishly systematic monetary policy can be effective the same conclusion was also reached by phelps and taylor 15 who assumed that the prices set by the firms are based on the expected price level and are sticky the assumption of perfect price flexibility appeared to be crucial for the validity of the lsp since the empirical relevance of perfect price flexibility has long been seriously questioned 2 the practical importance of lsp seemed to be undermined thus modigliani 13 in his presidential address to the american economic association explicitly rejected the importance of the lsp and argued for an active stabilization policy mccallum 10 has introduced price level stickiness into a model similar to the one used by sargent and wallace he concluded that recognition of price level stickiness does not in and of itself negate the lucas sargent proposition in a recent paper in this jouinal mccallum 11 has attempted to establish the basic compatibility of sluggish price adjustments and the lsp in another paper he modified and extended this analysis to include the effects of oligopolistic pricing behavior on the validity of the lsp 12 he again concluded that the failure of the lsp does not result because of markup pricing and sluggish adjustments these

inventories and sticky prices note in a recent contribution to this review alan blinder provides an interesting analysis of the relationship between optimal inventory decisions and the process of price adjustment arguing that inventory permits separation of production and sale decisions and allows the firm greater flexibility in responding to anticipated demand disturbances blinder shows that the responsiveness of relative prices depends critically upon the cost of storage and the temporal structure of the demand shocks few economists would fault the intuitive substance of blinder s basic proposition and the proposition is justified with characteristic precision the analysis however is considerably less general than blinder maintains the formal argument of his paper relies upon a simple model of a monopolist capable of backlogging orders and storing unsold goods as the model is constructed order backlogs assume a role of fundamental importance in any stationary equilibrium this feature of the model vitiates blinder s extension of his result to situations in which order backlogs are prohibited the basic monopoly model developed in sections i and ii of blinder s paper places no restriction upon the sign of inventory negative inventory is interpreted as net unfilled orders while no distinction is drawn between reductions in gross inventory and additions to the order backlog as a result the cost of holding inventory is symmetric around an arbitrary minimum point the only role of inventory is to permit the time paths of production and sales to differ gross inventory allows production to antedate sales while order backlogs generate revenue before production costs are borne under these circumstances if future costs and revenues are discounted it is natural to expect any stationary equilibrium level of net inventory to be negative this can be shown to be true of blinder s model it is useful to distinguish in general between the nonstochastic stationary level of inventory n and the stochastic stationary level n the former is realized when the current expected demand disturbance eo is zero and production equals sales the latter which differs from customary usage represents the level of inventory expected to prevail when adjustment to the current nonzero expected demand disturbance is complete if the demand disturbance is not a random walk so that p 1 in blinder s 5 the two equilibria coincide relatively little attention is devoted to either stationary solution because blinder s main interest is in the optimal current solution level n1 the stochastic stationary level is crucially important however since it represents the goal toward which the current choice must provide an optimal first step to verify that both nand n are negative whenever production is strictly positive note that blinder s necessary condition 7 with the coefficient cl set equal to zero together with the definition of xa as the deviation of the shadow value of inventory q from its nonstochastic stationary value q implies

the neutrality and optimality of counter cyclical monetary policy in equilibrium models with a wealth effect a condition is offered which is both necessary and sufficient for the counter cyclical neutrality of all linear monetary feedback rules with respect to deviations in real market output in that class of stochastic macro economic models with rational expectations additive disturbances multiple markets and a wealth effect on excess commodity demand studied by barro 1976 barro and fischer 1976 king 1982 asako 1982 waldo 1982 and marini 1985 the condition has the form of a constraint on the values of the control parameters of a general monetary feedback rule that includes all other linear feedback rules in this class of models as special cases when the selection of parameters violates this constraint prospective monetary feedback can completely stabilize deviations in real market output around its natural rate without sustained inflation la neutralite et loptimalite de la politique monetaire dans des modcles d equilibre quand un effet de richesse existe on propose une condition necessaire et suffisante pour assurer la neutralite contre cyclique de toutes les regles de retroaction mon6taires lin6aires pour ce qui est des deviations dans le niveau de produit r6el dans cette classe de modeles macro economiques stochastiques avec anticipations rationnelles chocs additifs marches multiples et un effet de richesse sur la demande exc6dentaire de biens tels qu etudies par barro 1976 barro fischer 1976 king 1982 asako 1982 waldo 1982 et marini 1985 cette condition prend la forme d une contrainte sur les valeurs des parametres de controle d une regle mon6taire generale de retroaction dont toutes les autres regles mon6taires lineaires dans cette classe de modele ne sont que des cas particuliers quand la s6lection des parametres ne satisfait pas cette contrainte la retroaction mon6taire prospective peut stabiliser completement les deviations du produit reel autour de son taux naturel sans engendrer une inflation soutenue i would like to thank jim brander ed burmeister john b carlson marsha courchane mike devereux ian domowitz jim glassman craig hakkio stephen r g jones woo sik jung doug mctaggart keizo nagatani doug pearce steve poloz neil raymon stan reynolds john seater shinichi watanabe de mmn wu two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the 1986 canadian economic association meetings the 1986 north american summer meetings of the econometric society the system committee on financial canadian journal of economics revue canadienne d economique xx no 3 august aouit 1987 printed in canada imprime au canada 0008 4085 87 612 624 1 50 canadian economics association this content downloaded from 207 46 13 52 on fri 21 oct 2016 05 54 00 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms neutrality and optimality 613

using mandated speed limits to measure the value of a statistical life in 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads but not on their urban interstate roads from 55 mph to 65 mph since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours they saved more than the fatalities incurred this institutional change provides an opportunity to estimate an upper bound on the public s willingness to trade off wealth for a change in the probability of death our estimates indicate that the adoption of the 65 mph limit increased speeds by approximately 4 percent or 2 5 mph and fatality rates by roughly 35 percent together the estimates suggest that about 125 000 hours were saved per lost life when the time saved is valued at the average hourly wage the estimates imply that adopting states were willing to accept risks that resulted in a savings of 1 54 million 1997 dollars per fatality with a sampling error roughly one third this value we set out a simple model of states decisions to adop

variance minimizing monetary policies with lagged price adjustment and rational expectations abstract this paper considers a macroeconomic model with rational expectations in which prices are incompletely flexible markets therefore fall to clear in such a model monetary policy is not neutral the variance of real and nominal quantities and interest rates is sensitive to the parameters of the feedback rule that determines the money supply the monetary policy that achieves the goal of minimizing the steady state variance of real output is characterized we also examine monetary policies that are restricted in their generality and derive second best variance minimizing feedback rules

cooperative responses by public and private agents to aggregate demand and supply disturbances macroeconomic literature concerned with stabilizing aggregate employment often focuses on the monetary authority s ability to react to persistent disturbances in aggregate demand this attention reflects the keynesian emphasis on demand as the primary determinant of fluctuations in real economic activity as well as the historically greater variability of demand as compared with supply disturbances in recent years however it has become increasingly apparent that supply shocks not only disrupt the economy but can lead to movements in employment output and prices that are unlike the movements of these variables in response to demand disturbances since supply side phenomena such as crop failures oil embargoes and general increases in prices of primary materials frequently accompany demand shocks it can be difficult for either public or private economic agents to develop effective methods for stabilizing employment the public authority s response to these conditions includes the consideration and introduction of new policing strategies including wage and price guidelines tax based incomes policies and supply management fiscal programmes the purpose of this analysis is a comparison of monetary policy a wage subsidy programme and a private sector indexation strategy in a setting where observed aggregate disturbances are a composite of demand and supply shocks agents obtain information about current aggregate disturbances by observing the current price level but this information does not permit unique identification of the underlying contributors a price increase for example can result from an increase in aggregate demand a decrease in aggregate supply or a combination of these factors agents rely on information contained in the price level and their knowledge of the properties of underlying demand and supply disturbances to formulate expectations of the relative importance of each shock we initially adopt the position that while all agents form rational predictions of unobservable variables private agents expect the public authority to react via a known rule to the information contained in the price level by adjusting the money supply or by implementing short term fiscal measures this cooperative posture occurs because the public authority is able to formulate contingent rules that are not readily available to private agents a role for monetary and fiscal policy develops from a relative cost advantage of public over private agents in forming these contingent contracts we focus on a comparison of a standard form of monetary policy with one supply side fiscal programme a wage subsidy given to firms since the latter programme has recently been advocated as a way of increasing employment without first requiring an increase in the price level it seems to be a suitable tool to contrast with monetary policy particularly in response to supply side shocks as an alternative to the setting of contingent rules by the public authority we briefly consider the situation where private agents choose to index the nominal wage to changes in the price level

the analytic relationship between intervaling and nontrading effects in continuous time empirical studies in finance generally use data defined over the shortest re turn period available originally data bases such as crsp tended to have data collected over monthly periods and most analyses tended to use monthly data rather than data compounded over periods greater than a month with the implicit argument that the more data the better since the development of data bases with data collected over shorter differencing intervals there has been a growing tendency in finance to use returns data defined over increasingly shorter differ encing intervals 1 this development is desirable but is not without problems the problem with using data defined over shorter differencing intervals is that although greater estimating efficiency will be achieved 2 nontrading effects could be introduced into the analysis these will lead to biased beta estimators and biases in tests of capital market efficiency the purpose of this paper is to investi gate analytically the interrelation of the intervaling and nontrading effects both in estimating beta factors and in testing capital market efficiency levhari and levy 9 demonstrated theoretically and empirically that beta will be dependent upon the return interval length when returns are measured in discrete time in continuous time this dependency will be removed due to the additivity of the return variables in this domain however several studies carried out on u s 15 french 1 and u k data 7 16 have demonstrated that beta factors estimated in continuous time increase with the differencing interval seemingly contradicting this invariance property this paper will demonstrate analytically how this phenomenon can arise in the presence of nontrading ef fects and how this intervaling effect relates to the estimators developed by scholes and williams 14 and dimson 7 for handling the nontrading problems manchester university england the author is grateful to two anonymous referees for their

a theorem on policy neutrality this paper offers a general condition which resolves the debate over the neutrality of systematic monetary policy in linear macroeconomic models with non equilibrium prices and rational expectations as expressed in papers by gordon 1976 gordon 1977 modigliani 1977 fischer 1977 phelps and taylor 1977 fethke and policano 1979 fethke and policano 1981 mccallum 1977 mccallum 1978 mccallum 1979a mccallum 1979b mccallum 1980 and green and honkapohja 1983 the policy neutrality theorem states that a non equilibrium price function will preserve the neutrality of monetary feedback with respect to exchange in a representative macroeconomic model if and only if the difference between the conditionally expected values of the equilibrium and non equilibrium prices is independent of monetary feedback in each period the policy neutrality results of mccallum 1977 mccallum 1978 mccallum 1979b and the policy effectiveness results of fischer 1977 phelps and taylor 1977 fethke and policano 1979 fethke and policano 1981 are analyzed in terms of the theorem

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

beta changes around stock splits revisited recent papers by lamoureux and poon 1987 and brennan and copeland 1988 document a significant permanent increase in average beta subsequent to stock split ex dates this paper demonstrates that the shift in estimated beta following ex dates decays as the measurement interval is lengthened there is no statistically significant difference between pre and post split betas using the scholes williams 1977 estimator and weekly return data or using monthly returns we conclude that lamoureux and poon s and brennan and copeland s results can be attributed to a bias created by using too short a return measurement interval to estimate beta

the impact of the return interval on common factors in stock returns evidence from a thin security market abstract the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of the return interval on common factors estimated in finnish stock returns firstly common factors are identified by factor analysis using daily weekly and monthly return intervals the similarity of these factors is then studied applying transformation analysis it is discovered that the factors produced by alternative return intervals significantly differ from each other an exception is the first factor representing the market index of securities

inventories and sticky prices more on the microfoundations of macroeconomics the role of inventories in making prices sticky is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand but able to store its finished goods in inventory it is shown that in contrast to the usual presumption firms that exhibit the smallest output responses to demand fluctuations may also exhibit the smallest price fluctuations specifically firms which have very flexible inventory storage facilities or are subjected to very transitory demand shocks will rely on inventories as buffers and will change neither production nor price very much on the other hand firms which have very inflexible storage facilities or whose demand shocks are quite permanent will display large swings in both price and output the standard assumption about inventory carrying costs that has been used in the literature that they are linear is shown to imply that production is impervious to fluctuations in demand it is also established that prices may respond more strongly to positive demand shocks than to negative ones if it is impossible to hold negative inventories i e to have unfilled orders the model offers an explanation for stickiness in relative prices however under certain circumstances it may help explain the persistence of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item