the economic impact of social ties evidence from german reunification we use the fall of the berlin wall in 1989 to show that personal relationships which individuals maintain for noneconomic reasons can be an important determinant of regional economic growth we show that west german households who had social ties to east germany in 1989 experienced a persistent rise in their personal incomes after the fall of the berlin wall moreover the presence of these households significantly affects economic performance at the regional level it increases the returns to entrepreneurial activity the share of households who become entrepreneurs and the likelihood that firms based within a given west german region invest in east germany as a result west german regions that for idiosyncratic reasons have a high concentration of households with social ties to the east exhibit substantially higher growth in income per capita in the early 1990s a one standard deviation rise in the share of households with social ties to east germany in 1989 is associated with a 4 7 percentage point rise in income per capita over six years we interpret our findings as evidence of a causal link between social ties and regional economic

how efficiently is capital allocated evidence from the knitted garment industry in tirupur this paper studies the effect of community identity on investment behaviour in the knitted garment industry in the south indian town of tirupur we document very large and systematic differences in both levels of capital stock and the capital intensity of production in firms owned by people from two different community groups we argue that the differences in investment cannot be explained by productivity differences alone we suggest that the most likely explanation is that the two communities differ in their access to capital

women as policy makers evidence from a randomized policy experiment in india this paper uses political reservations for women in india to study the impact of women s leadership on policy decisions since the mid 1990 s one third of village council head positions in india have been randomly reserved for a woman in these councils only women could be elected to the position of head village councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas using a dataset we collected on 265 village councils in west bengal and rajasthan we compare the type of public goods provided in reserved and unreserved village councils we show that the reservation of a council seat affects the types of public goods provided specifically leaders invest more in infrastructure that is directly relevant to the needs of their own genders

strike three discrimination incentives and evaluation major league baseball umpires express their racial ethnic preferences when they evaluate pitchers strikes are called less often if the umpire and pitcher do not match race ethnicity but mainly where there is little scrutiny of umpires pitchers understand the incentives and throw pitches that allow umpires less subjective judgment e g fastballs over home plate when they anticipate bias these direct and indirect effects bias performance measures of minorities downward the results suggest how discrimination alters discriminated groups behavior generally they imply that biases in measured productivity must be accounted for in generating measures of wage discrimination

evidence on discrimination in mortgage lending much of the controversy about whether mortgage lenders discriminate against minorities can be explained in terms of the confusion about how to define discrimination based on the legal definition careful studies of loan denial rates such as that done by the federal reserve bank of boston represent an appropriate method for testing for discrimination by lenders based on that study it is quite clear that lenders discriminate the fact that minorities have higher default rates on average than whites is irrelevant to the interpretation of the race coefficient in such models nonetheless more research on and discussion about the relationship between the race of the applicant and delinquencies defaults and losses would be desirable

international interest rates and us monetary policy announcements evidence from hong kong and singapore this paper investigates the responses of market interest rates to us monetary policy announcements for the us and two emerging economies hong kong and singapore which are similar on many respects but have experienced opposite exchange rate regimes in the last twenty years our results based on market expectations extracted from federal fund futures rates document that fomc announcements significantly affect the term structure of interest rate in the us and both asian countries further international interest rate differentials around fomc meeting dates tend to be negative for short maturities with the impact gradually dissipating as bond maturity increases finally for the case of singapore we find that domestic interest rates react to both external and domestic monetary policy announcements with a magnitude that is larger over the full bond maturity spectrum for domestic announcements these results are robust to time varying futures risk premia and alternative measures of interest rates expectations

race and gender discrimination in bargaining for a new car more than three hundred paired audits at new car dealerships reveal that dealers quoted significantly lower prices to white males than to black or female test buyers using identical scripted bargaining strategies ancillary evidence suggests that the dealerships disparate treatment of women and blacks may be caused by dealers statistical inferences about consumers reservation prices but the data do not strongly support any single theory of discrimination copyright 1995 by american economic association

the influence of fundamentals on exchange rates findings from analyses of news effects as we survey the literature of macroeconomic news in the foreign exchange market we can by now look back on nearly 30 years of research the first studies which analysed news effects on exchange rates were established in the early 1990s see for example dornbusch almost at the same time meese and rogoff published their influential paper revealing the forecasting inferiority in exchange rates of structural models against the random walk this finding has shocked the pillars of exchange rate economics and thus cast general suspicion on research focusing on fundamentals in this field the eventual rising popularity of event studies can partly be attributed to the re establishment of the raison d etre of exchange rate economics this work focuses on systematically surveying this literature with particular respect to its primary goal i e shedding light on the analytical value of fundamental research thus its major findings are first fundamental news does matter whereas non fundamental news matters to a lesser degree second news influences exchange rates via two separated channels i e incorporating common information into prices directly or indirectly based upon order flow third with a few exceptions the impact of fundamental news on exchange rates is fairly stable over time

the effects of macroeconomic news on high frequency exchange rate behavior this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s by us ing data sampled at a five minute frequency we are able to identify significant impacts of most announcements on the exchange rate change in the 15 minutes post announcement although the significance of these effects decreases rapidly as the interval over which the post announcement change in exchange rates is increased the direction of the exchange rate response conforms in general with a reaction function interpretation whereby reac tions to macroeconomic news are driven by the likely operations of monetary authorities in domestic money markets further we detect influences of german monetary policy deci sions on the reaction of the exchange rate and also differences between u s and german announcements in the exchange rate reaction time pattern i introduction this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s specif ically we utilize exchange rate data covering the period 1 1 92 to 31 12 94 sam pled at a five minute frequency to investigate how the major monthly macroe conomic releases from these two countries impact the dem usd the infor mation contained in announcements over this three year period is extracted via a set of market expectation series supplied by money market services interna tional mms 1 our analysis improves on previous work in this area in two main respects first our study is conducted using very high frequency data whereas most earlier work has used exchange rate data sampled at a frequency of a number of hours or more this allows us to construct a very precise characterization of

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

what defines news in foreign exchange markets abstract this paper examines whether the traditional sets of macro surprises that most of the literature considers are the only sorts of news that can explain exchange rate movements we examine the intra daily influence of a broad set of news reports including variables which are not typically considered fundamentals in the context of standard models of exchange rate determination and ask whether they too help predict exchange rate behavior we also examine whether news not only impacts exchange rates directly but also influences exchange rates via order flow signed trade volume our results indicate that along with the standard fundamentals both non fundamental news and order flow matter suggesting that future models of exchange rate determination ought to include all three types of explanatory variables

what s in a picture evidence of discrimination from prosper com abstract we find evidence of significant racial disparities in a new type of credit market known as peer to peer lending loan listings with blacks in the attached picture are 25 to 35 percent less likely to receive funding than those of whites with similar credit profiles despite the higher average interest rates charged to blacks lenders making such loans earn a lower net return compared to loans made to whites with similar credit profiles because blacks have higher relative default rates these results provide insight into whether the discrimination we find is taste based or statistical

public information arrival we develop a measure of public information flow to financial markets and use it to document the patterns of information arrival with an emphasis on the intraday flows the measure is the number of news releases by reuter s news service per unit of time we find that public information arrival is nonconstant displaying seasonalities and distinct intraday patterns next we relate our measure of public information to aggregate measures of intraday market activity our results suggest a positive moderate relationship between public information and trading volume but an insignificant relationship with price volatility

stock prices and economic news this paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply inflation real economic activity and the discountrate except for the discount rate survey data on market participants expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected component of the announcements in order to test the efficient markets hypothesis that only the unexpected part of any announcement the surprise moves stock prices the empirical results support this hypothesis and indicate further that surprises related to monetary policy significantly affect stock prices there is only limited evidence of an impact from inflation surprises and no evidence of an impact from real activity surprises on the announcement days there is also only weak evidence of stock price responses to surprises beyond the announcement day this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the short run dynamics of the price adjustment to new information we examine how prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets adjust to the new information contained in scheduled macroeconomic news releases in the very short run using 10 second returns and tick by tick data we find that prices adjust in a series of numerous small but rapid price changes that begin within 10 seconds of the news release and are basically completed within 40 seconds of the release there is some evidence that prices overreact in the first 40 seconds but that this is corrected in the second or third minute after the release while volatility tends to be higher than normal just before the news release there is no evidence of information leakage in our analysis we correct for the biases created by bid ask spreads and tick by tick data

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

response of hourly stock prices and trading volume to economic news this paper examines hourly stock returns and trading volume response to announcements about the money supply consumer price index cpi producer price index industrial production and the unemployment rate the empirical results indicate that surprises in announcements about money supply and cpi are significantly associated with stock price changes the announcements of the other three variables do not affect stock prices significantly trading volume is not affected by any of the five economic variable announcements indicating that market participants do not differ substanti ally in the interpretations of the effects of announcements the spee d of adjustment analysis indicates that the effect of information on stock prices is reflected in a short period of one hour or so copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

domestic macroeconomic news and foreign interest rates abstract this study examines the impact of us and uk news on futures prices of us uk german and japanese government bonds we find that certain us information has a significant influence on german japanese and british interest rates while uk information has almost no effect on foreign rates second we examine the foreign term structure to investigate whether the importance of us information arises because it either signals common world wide shocks or induces an anticipated exchange rate stabilization by foreign central banks the evidence is mixed except for the us cpi surprise which appears to provide information about a common world wide shock g15

prejudice and wages an empirical assessment of becker s the economics of discrimination we test the predictions from becker s 1957 seminal work on employer prejudice and find that relative black wages a vary negatively with the prejudice of the marginal white in a state b vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state and c vary negatively with the fraction of a state that is black our estimates suggest that one quarter of the racial wage gap is due to prejudice with nontrivial consequences for black lifetime earnings

events that shook the market tick data on the standard and poor s 500 stock index s p 500 futures contract and newswire searches are used to match events to large 1 to 5 minute stock price changes sixty nine events that led to large stock price changes are identified between 1982 and 1999 53 of which are directly or indirectly related to monetary policy many large stock price changes have no events associated with them

international money and stock market contingent claims abstract we develop a unified approach with closed form solutions for pricing bonds stocks currencies and their derivatives the specification assumes a fundamental risk factor represented by a stochastic positive definite matrix following a wishart autoregressive war process by assuming a volatility in mean specification for the domestic stock returns and the relative changes of exchange rates and a domestic stochastic discount factor exponential affine with respect to the fundamental risk it is possible to derive closed form solutions for the term structures of interest rates and for the risk neutral probabilities while keeping the flexibility of the model in particular i the domestic and foreign term structures are jointly affine and correspond to wishart quadratic term structures which can ensure the positivity of interest rates ii in this framework where the stock price follows a model with stochastic volatility we obtain explicit or quasi explicit formulas for futures and forward contracts swaps and options this extends results by heston 1993 and ball and roma 1994

the impact of public information on the stock market we study the relation between the number of news announcements reported daily by dow jones company and aggregate measures of securities market activity including trading volume and market returns we find that the number of dow jones announcements and market activity are directly related and that the results are robust to the addition of factors previously found to influence financial markets such as day of the week dummy variables news importance as proxied by large new york times headlines and major macroeconomic announcements and non information sources of market activity as measured by dividend capture and triple witching trading however the observed relation between news and market activity is not particularly strong and the patterns in news announcements do not explain the day of the week seasonalities in market activity our analysis of the dow jones database confirms the difficulty of linking volume and volatility to observed measures of information

how markets process information news releases and volatility we examine the impact of scheduled macroeconomic news announcements on interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets we find these announcements are responsible for most of the observed time of day and day of the week volatility patterns in these markets while the bulk of the price adjustment to a major announcement occurs within the first minute volatility remains substantially higher than normal for roughly fifteen minutes and slightly elevated for several hours nonetheless these subsequent price adjustments are basically independent of the first minute s return we identify those announcements with the greatest impact on these markets we examine the impact on interest rate and foreign exchange markets of scheduled macroeconomic news releases such as the employment report the consumer price index cpi and the producer price index ppi many market participants believe that such announcements have a major impact on financial markets indeed a small industry devoted to predicting the figures to be released in upcoming releases has evolved in recent years with the exception of the weekly money supply figures however the impact of such announcements on financial markets has received scant attention 1 this is doubly surprising given the considerable research interest in market volatility since these news releases are a potential source of much of this volatility consider for instance figure 1 as shown there prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets are much more volatile between 8 30 and 8 35 a m eastern time et than during any other five minute trading period including

shock effects on stocks bonds and exchange rates abstract tick data and newswire searches are used to find events that led to large and rapid price changes in a stock future a bond future and three exchange rate futures knowledge of these events may be useful in future work they have the advantages that they are truly surprises and that the sign of their effect on each financial instrument is known the events are used in this study to analyze the effects of three types of events monetary price and real on the five instruments

discrimination in the small business credit market we use data from the 1993 and 1998 national surveys of small business finances to examine the existence of racial discrimination in the small business credit market we conduct an econometric analysis of loan outcomes by race and find that black owned small businesses are about twice as likely to be denied credit even after controlling for differences in creditworthiness and other factors a series of specification checks indicates that this gap is unlikely to be explained by omitted variable bias these results indicate that the racial disparity in credit availability is likely caused by discrimination

nutritional adaptations of linear programming for planning rural development linear programming can help plan rural development if the income maximization and least cost diet models are integrated within the resource and management limitations of small scale representative farms seven modifications adapt linear programming to subsistence households caveats in this context include risk level of nutritional awareness production scale and result sensitivity through six model formulations for a representative nepalese farm linear programming identifies the most nutritious and profitable production patterns trade offs between nutrition and income and the costs of constraints relating to levels of credit market availability and human capital development

will affirmative action policies eliminate negative stereotypes a key question concerning affirmative action is whether the labor market gains it brings to minorities can continue without it becoming a permanent fixture in the labor market the authors argue that this depends on how the policy affects employers beliefs about the productivity of minority workers they study the joint determination of employer beliefs and worker productivity in a model of statistical discrimination in job assignments the authors prove that even when identifiable groups are equally endowed ex ante affirmative action can bring about a situation in which employers correctly perceive the groups to be unequally productive ex post copyright 1993 by american economic association

once in a generation yen volatility in 1998 fundamentals intervention and order flow abstract the dramatic yen dollar volatility of 1998 has been popularly ascribed to order flow driven by changing tastes for risk and hedge fund herding on unwinding yen carry trade positions rather than fundamentals high frequency evidence of shifting fundamentals is provided by a comprehensive list of macroeconomic announcements news is found to have significant effects on volatility but order flow may play a more important role since portfolio shifts are revealed to the market through trading the results are consistent with order flow playing a significant role in the revelation of private information and associated exchange rate shifts

ethnicity and credit in african manufacturing abstract this paper investigates whether market interaction can by itself perpetuate the lack of ethnic diversity that is observed in the business communities of many developing countries using case study data on manufacturing firms in kenya and zimbabwe we find no evidence that blacks or women are disadvantaged in the attribution of bank credit once we control for firm size and other observable characteristics in contrast an ethnic and gender bias is noticeable in the attribution of supplier credit although we cannot rule out the presence of discrimination the bulk of the evidence indicates that network effects play an important role in explaining this bias

an investigation of transactions data for nyse stocks using transactions data the behavior of returns and characteristics of trades at the micro level is examined a minute by minute market return series is formed and tested for normality and autocorrelation evidence of differences in return distributions is found among overnight trades trades during the first 30 minutes following the market opening trades at the close and trades during the remainder of the day the latter distribution is found to be normal unusually high returns and standard deviations of returns are found at the beginning and the end of the trading day when the beginningand end of the day effects are omitted autocorrelation in the market return series is reduced substantially a number of patterns in trading are reported this paper empirically investigates the nature of the return generating process and the characteristics of trade size price changes trading frequency and trading interval at the level of individual trades for a large sample of nyse stocks previous studies of market indices have used daily weekly or monthly

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

volatility in an era of reduced uncertainty lessons from pax britannica abstract although it has been well established that financial volatility is related to news and macroeconomic shocks less emphasis has been placed on the importance of underlying economic and political stability in this paper we study the behavior of consol returns since 1729 and identify a greater than 50 decline in volatility from the end of the napoleonic wars in 1815 until the first world war news events and macroeconomic variables cannot account for this extended period of reduced volatility underlying political stability under pax britannica seems to be a more likely explanation

why development fails the evaluation gap in nepal s subsistence agriculture abstract the rationality of farmer decision making within traditional environments is widely accepted this paper introduces a conceptual model for delineating interactions among income employment and nutrition that explain in large part the living standards in a developing agricultural economy given farmer rationality any development effort requires intervention to remove barriers among these components of the standard of living a case study of nepal shows that promotion of horticultural crops and government investment in infrastructure and education could dramatically improve living standards even under traditional agricultural production technology however the government did not correctly identify barriers to the long run realization of these goals until recently the study concludes that the rationality of government programmes themselves must be subjected to additional scrutiny

an analytical framework for making long term projections of undernourishment a case study for agriculture in mali abstract a framework is developed for projecting the effects of policy technological and environmental change on the prevalence of undernourishment in a country this is done by integrating the food and agriculture organization fao methodology for estimating the proportion of undernourished population in a country into a stochastic economic agricultural sector modeling framework the resultant framework considers the implications of climatic fluctuations resource limitations and degradation demographic pressure market dynamics adoption of improved cultivars and cropland expansion such a unified framework provides a rich accounting of the factors surrounding macro level food supply and undernourishment as well as results on the regional distribution of undernourishment in face of climatic risk and regional characteristics the framework is applied to mali evaluating a number of alternative options for reducing undernourishment we find that the malian agriculture does have a significant potential for reducing undernourishment by 2015

too much investment a problem of asymmetric information this paper shows that under plausible assumptions the inability of lenders to discover all of the relevant characteristics of borrowers results in investment in excess of the socially efficient level raising the rate of interest above the free market level will restore optimality this conflicts with generally held views and is contrasted with the stiglitz weiss model it is shown that the assumptions which yield overinvestment support debt as the equilibrium method of finance however under the stiglitz weiss assumptions used to derive an underinvestment result equity is shown to be the equilibrium method of finance

imperfect information screening and the costs of informal lending a study of a rural credit market in pakistan many governments have perceived the rural moneylender as usurious this article takes a first step toward directly testing the validity of this view in a study of services costs and charges of fourteen informal market moneylenders and their clients in chambar pakistan the article examines whether the high implicit interest rates charged reflect the actual costs of operating in that market estimates of the resource costs incurred by informal lenders for screening pursuing delinquent loans overhead and cost of capital including unrecoverable loans suggest that lenders charges are equal to their average cost of lending but exceed their marginal cost this finding is consistent with the view that the informal credit market is characterized by excess capacity and monopolistic competition in the presence of imperfect information

orchestrating impartiality the impact of blind auditions on female musicians a change in the audition procedures of symphony orchestras adoption of blind auditions with a screen to conceal the candidate s identity from the jury provides a test for sex biased hiring using data from actual auditions in an individual fixed effects framework we find that the screen increases the probability a woman will be advanced and hired although some of our estimates have large standard errors and there is one persistent effect in the opposite direction the weight of the evidence suggests that the blind audition procedure fostered impartiality in hiring and increased the proportion women in symphony orchestras

the adjustment of stock prices to information about inflation this paper analyzes the reaction of stock prices to the new information about inflation based on daily returns to the standard and poor s composite portfolio from 1953 78 it seems that the stock market reacts negatively to the announcement of unexpected inflation in the consumer price index c p i although the magnitude of the reaction is small it is interesting to note that the stock market seems to react at the time of announcement of the c p i approximately one month after the price data are collected by the bureau of labor statistics

biotechnology for rural nutrition abstract this article evaluates the introduction of algal biotechnology as a nutrition intervention in rural south india in terms of its benefits costs and acceptability to the tastes and income of rural households data were collected from a whole village study and developments in the theory of the economics of tastes are used to analyse the socioeconomic acceptance of algal supplements among the study households the results indicate that the algal food supplement is highly cost effective in providing adequate protein and other micronutrients however the absolute deviation between actual and optimal intake of algal food increased with higher income class several policy implications for food and nutrition interventions in developing countries are derived

economic news and equity market linkages between the u s and u k abstract the source of equity market linkages between the u s and u k is investigated by focusing on intraday price movements of stock index futures contracts we document heightened u k return volatility at 11 30 a m and 1 30 p m gmt which corresponds to regular macroeconomic releases in the u k and u s respectively the response of u k equities in the half hour surrounding the u s announcements is significant and similar to price movements for u s equities to the same announcements these results support the hypothesis that the documented international equity market linkages are attributable to reactions of foreign traders to public information originating from the u s

the reaction of asset markets to swiss national bank communication abstract in this paper we analyze high frequency movements in swiss asset markets in reaction to real time communication by the swiss national bank our analysis of central bank communication encompasses monetary policy announcements speeches and interviews we examine the reactions of the currency market the bond market and the stock exchange the evidence suggests that speeches and interviews along with monetary policy announcements engender a significant price reaction this paper sheds light on the relevance of communications other than monetary policy announcements

impacts of capital and land constraints on the economics of new livestock technology in western kenya abstract the introduction of new forages and milk marketing improvements was projected to permit even the smallest modeled farms in a western kenya region to adopt dual purpose goats and thereby improve family income and nutrition expanded credit permitted modeled medium and large farms especially to vigorously exploit these innovations credit also expanded income more than did goat management improvements because credit extension assistance marketing improvements and new forages will leave projected incomes of small farmers below those of medium and large farmers in the study region development of off farm jobs may still be necessary to supplement the incomes of this fast growing group the marginal value of capital for medium and large farmers with new livestock technology was high this suggests that government subsidized credit might be unnecessary with proper infrastructural and legal support private capital markets might develop as new livestock technology and marketing improvements expand the demand for borrowing

segregation rent control and riots the economics of religious conflict in an indian city religious conflict is an important problem in many ethnically diverse countries horowitz 1985 a growing literature in economics suggests that conflict over resources is frequently at the root of such violence see for instance esteban and ray 2007 a number of recent empirical papers provide evidence that negative economic shocks to a community and the consequent struggle for control over resources can help explain the eruption of historic tensions into acts of violence miguel et al 2004 oster 2004 and miguel 2005 we explore this link further by studying the relationship between hindu muslim violence and living arrangements in particular residential segregation within cities in india that is conditional on city level demographics and the overall degree of ethnic tension what are the characteristics of specific locations within a city where communal violence tends to emerge and what can this tell us about why some neighborhoods erupt in this manner at certain points in time communal violence at the neighborhood level

racial discrimination among nba referees the nba provides an intriguing place to assess discrimination referees and players are involved in repeated interactions in a high pressure setting with referees making split second decisions that might allow implicit racial biases to become evident we find that more personal fouls are awarded against players when they are officiated by an opposite race officiating crew than when they are officiated by an own race refereeing crew these biases are sufficiently large so that they affect the outcome of an appreciable number of games our results do not distinguish whether the bias stems from the actions of white or black referees

traveling agents political change and bureaucratic turnover in india abstract we develop a framework to empirically examine how politicians with electoral pressures control bureaucrats with career concerns and the consequent implications for bureaucrats career investments unique microlevel data on indian bureaucrats support our key predictions politicians use frequent reassignments transfers across posts of varying importance to control bureaucrats high skilled bureaucrats face less frequent political transfers and lower variability in the importance of their posts we find evidence of two alternative paths to career success officers of higher initial ability are more likely to invest in skill but caste affinity to the politician s party base also helps secure important positions

cultural proximity and loan outcomes we present evidence that shared codes religious beliefs ethnicity cultural proximity between lenders and borrowers improves the efficiency of credit allocation we identify in group preferential treatment using dyadic data on the religion and caste of bank officers and borrowers from a bank in india and a rotation policy that induces exogenous matching between officers and borrowers cultural proximity increases lending on both intensive and extensive margins and improves repayment performance even after the in group officer is replaced by an out group one further cultural proximity increases loan dispersion and reduces loan to collateral ratios our results imply that cultural proximity mitigates informational problems that adversely affect lending which in turn relaxes financial constraints and improves access to finance

a transaction data study of weekly and intradaily patterns in stock returns abstract weekly and intradaily patterns in common stock prices are examined using transaction data for large firms negative monday close to close returns accrue between the friday close and the monday open for smaller firms they accrue primarily during the monday trading day for all firms significant weekday differences in intraday returns accrue during the first 45 minutes after the market opens on monday mornings prices drop while on the other weekday mornings they rise otherwise the pattern of intraday returns is similar on all weekdays most notable is an increase in prices on the last trade of the day

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

it pays to have friends abstract currently a director is classified as independent if he or she has neither financial nor familial ties to the ceo or to the firm we add another dimension social ties using a unique data set we find that 87 of boards are conventionally independent but that only 62 are conventionally and socially independent furthermore firms whose boards are conventionally and socially independent award a significantly lower level of compensation exhibit stronger pay performance sensitivity and exhibit stronger turnover performance sensitivity than firms whose boards are only conventionally independent our results suggest that social ties do matter and that consequently a considerable percentage of the conventionally independent boards are substantively not

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell