the term structure of interest rates in the new and prospective eu countries this article uses cointegration and common trends techniques to investigate empirically the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates for the 10 new eu countries along with bulgaria and romania the empirical results support the expectations theory of the term structure for all countries except malta by decomposing each term structure into its transitory and permanent components we also analyse short run and long run interdependence among the term structures of interest rates in these countries our results indicate only weak linkages among the term structures of the 10 new eu countries and strong linkages between bulgaria and romania joined the eu in 2007

the effect of financial education training on the financial literacy of spanish students in pisa the aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of financial education training on spanish secondary students to do this we rely on data from pisa 2012 this included an assessment of students fi

the illusory effects of saving incentives on saving the authors evaluate research on how tax based saving incentives iras and 401 k s affect saving previous research overstates the impact of the incentives on saving by failing to account for several issues households with saving incentives have stronger tastes for saving than others saving incentives have interacted with debt nonfinancial assets financial markets and pensions and saving incentives represent pretax balances whereas taxable accounts represent posttax balances accounting for these issues essentially eliminates the impact of saving incentives on saving the authors conclude that little if any of the contributions to existing saving incentives have raised saving

testing the expectations hypothesis in the brazilian term structure of interest rates a cointegration analysis in this article the expectations hypothesis eh is tested using cointegration techniques for maturities ranging from 1 to 12 months for the brazilian market we found evidence suggesting that for the period 1995 2006 the cointegration implication generally seems to hold we also found strong evidence supporting causality from short to long rates and also in the opposite direction empirical evidence supports the expectations theory of the term structure of interest rates

how retirement saving programs increase saving this paper summarizes the authors work on the effect of ira and 401 k contributions on net personal saving they consider many different nonparametric approaches to controlling for heterogeneity in individual saving behavior and conclude that the weight of the available evidence suggests that contributions to both iras and 401 k s largely represent new saving the authors devote particular attention to reconciling their results with the findings in other studies that reach different conclusions sometimes using the same databases that the authors analyze methodological limitations that undermine the reliability of results in other studies explain many of these disparities

how teachers unions affect education production this study helps to explain why measured school inputs appear to have little effect on student outcomes particularly for cohorts educated since 1960 teachers unionization can explain how public schools simultaneously can have more generous inputs and worse student performance using panel data on united states school districts i identify the effect of teachers unionization through differences in the timing of collective bargaining especially timing determined by the passage of state laws that facilitate teachers unionization i find that teachers unions increase school inputs but reduce productivity sufficiently to have a negative overall effect on student performance union effects are magnified where schools have market power

macroeconomics and the term structure this paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance the topic is important to investors and also to policymakers who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations from longer term interest rates and take actions to influence those rates the simplest model of the term structure is the expectations hypothesis which posits that long term interest rates are expectations of future aver age short term rates in this paper we show that many features of the configuration of interest rates are puzzling from the perspective of the expectations hypothesis we review models that explain these anomalies using time varying risk premia although the quest for the fundamental macroeconomic explanations of these risk premia is ongoing inflation uncertainty seems to play a large role finally while modern finance theory prices bonds and other assets in a single unified framework we also consider an earlier approach based on segmented markets market segmentation seems important to understand the term structure of interest rates during the recent financial crisis jel e31 e43 e52 e58

persistent inequality an explanation based on limited parental altruism abstract this paper proposes an alternative theory for the observed persistence in income inequality across households a theory based on limited parental altruism we argue that the degree of parental altruism is limited by the economic status of the parent a poor parent not only has less ability but also has less willingness to invest in children s human capital formation this generates a non linearity in such investment expenditures as a result initial income differences may perpetuate over time even with convex technology and convex preferences in this context we also compare the efficacy of the public vis a vis the private education system from the perspective of long run growth

split sample instrumental variables estimates of the return to schooling this article reevaluates recent instrumental variables iv estimates of the returns to schooling in light of the fact that two stage least squares is biased in the same direction as ordinary least squares ols even in very large samples we propose a split sample instrumental variables ssiv estimator that is not biased toward ols ssiv uses one half of a sample to estimate parameters of the first stage equation estimated first stage parameters are then used to construct fitted values and second stage parameter estimates in the other half sample ssiv is biased toward 0 but this bias can be corrected the splt sample estimators confirm and reinforce some previous findings on the returns to schooling but fail to confirm others

five steps to planning success experimental evidence from us households while financial knowledge has been linked to improved financial behaviour there is lit tle consensus on the value of financial education in part because rigorous evaluation of various programmes has yielded mixed results however given the heterogeneity of financial education pro grammes in the literature focusing on generic financial education can be inappropriate and even mis leading lusardi 2009 and others argue that pedagogy and delivery matter significantly in this paper we design and field a low cost easily replicable financial education programme called five steps covering five basic financial planning concepts that relate to retirement we conduct a field experiment to evaluate the overall impact of five steps on a probability sample of the american population in different treatment arms we quantify the relative impact of delivering the programme through video and narrative formats our results show that short videos and narratives each takes about 3 minutes have sizeable short run effects on objective measures of respondent knowledge moreover keeping informational content relatively constant format has significant effects on other psychological levers of behavioural change effects on self efficacy are significantly higher when videos are used which ultimately influences knowledge acquisition follow up tests of respondents knowledge approximately 8 months after the interventions suggest that between one quarter and one third of the knowledge gain and about one fifth of the self efficacy gain persist thus this simple programme has effects both in the short run and medium run

the term structure spread and future changes in long and short rates in the g7 countries abstract according to the expectations hypothesis when the spread between long and short rates widens next quarter s long rate should rise in the united states however long rates decline instead of rising this anomaly is also present in canada the uk germany and japan four of the additional six g7 countries nevertheless in contrast to the us where long rates appear to overreact to expected future developments the anomalous short run movement of long rates in these other g7 countries is caused by an additive white noise error on long rates that does not materially affect the information in their term structure

term structure of interest rates and the expectation hypothesis the euro area abstract this paper investigates the informational content of the yield curve in the european market using data on the italian term structures according to the expectation hypothesis theory eht the current forward rate equals the future short rate plus a constant risk premium that is time invariant but maturity dependent this theory has been widely tested in the empirical literature providing various findings according to the country where it has been applied and to the segment of the yield curve examined or the period under study the standard approach to test the eht uses the regression techniques assuming data on spot rates and their first differences to be stationary recently an increasing number of studies evidenced the non stationarity of interest rates time series and some tests of the eht are formulated using term spread and forward spot spread which are stationary a new strand of literature suggests to investigate the eht using a restricted var framework in this paper following jondeau e ricart r 1999 the expectations hypothesis of the term structure tests on us german french and uk euro rates journal of international money and finance 18 725 750 ghazali n a low s w 2002 the expectations hypothesis in emerging financial markets the case of malaysia applied economics 34 1147 1156 and seo b 2003 non linear mean reversion in the term structure of interest rates journal of economic dynamics and control 27 2243 2265 we test if the expectation hypothesis holds using cointegration and error correction analysis for the period under study results suggest that the long and short term interest rates are cointegrated and therefore subject to a long equilibrium path providing evidence that the eht holds for the italian and the european market

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

the effects of financial education in the workplace evidence from a survey of employers we examine the effects of education on financial decision making skills by identifying an interesting source of variation in pertinent training during the 1990s an increasing number of individuals were exposed to programs of financial education provided by their employers if as some have argued low saving frequently results from a failure to appreciate economic vulnerabilities then education of this form could prove to have a powerful effect on behavior the current paper undertakes an analysis of these programs using a previously unexploited survey of employers we find that both participation in and contributions to voluntary savings plans are significantly higher when employers offer retirement seminars the effect is typically much stronger for non highly compensated employees than for highly compensated employees the frequency of seminars emerges as a particularly important correlate of behavior we are unable to detect any effects of written materials such as newsletters and summary plan descriptions regardless of frequency we also present evidence on other determinants of plan activity

does compulsory school attendance affect schooling and earnings we establish that season of birth is related to educational attainment because of school start age policy and compulsory school attendance laws individuals born in the beginning of the year start school at an older age and can therefore drop out after completing less schooling than individuals born near the end of the year roughly 25 percent of potential dropouts remain in school because of compulsory schooling laws we estimate the impact of compulsory schooling on earnings by using quarter of birth as an instrument for education the instrumental variables estimate of the return to education is close to the ordinary least squares estimate suggesting that there is little bias in conventional estimates every developed country in the world has a compulsory schooling requirement yet little is known about the effect these laws have on educational attainment and earnings 1 this paper exploits an unusual natural experiment to estimate the impact of compulsory schooling laws in the united states the experiment stems from the fact that children born in different months of the year start school at different ages while compulsory schooling laws generally require students to remain in school until their sixteenth or seventeenth birthday in effect the interaction of school entry requirements and compulsory schooling laws compel students born

the information content of the term structure of interest rates this paper presents the results of an alternative test of the rational expectations theory of the term structure of interest rates other researchers have also examined the validity of the expectations hypothesis of term structure while there is more often rejection of the expectations hypothesis no other theory data consistent with the entire yield curve provides an empirically adequate explanation of this phenomenon the study considers postwar us pure discount zero coupons bond yields with various maturities from one month to 60 months based on the ex post formation of rational expectations the expectations error is quantified and the level of truth of the expectations hypothesis tested that is the strength of the departure of the yield curve from the expectations theory the results suggest that a significant amount of information available at no cost to market agents is not incorporated in forming people s expectations

market expectations in the uk before and after the erm crisis the british pound left the erm on 16 september 1992 after a period of turbulence uk monetary policy soon shifted to lower short interest rates and an inflation target was announced this paper uses daily option prices to estimate how the market s probability distribution of the future marks pound exchange rate and uk and german interest rates changed over the summer and autumn of 1992 the results show among other things how various policy decisions affected the market s assessment of the probabilities of realignments and lending rate cuts

testing the expectations hypothesis in eurodeposits abstract analyzing data on euro rates for 1978 1998 we find some consistent evidence in favor of the expectations hypothesis eh of the term structure a interest rates offered on deposits in a given currency form a cointegrated system b the restrictions of the eh on the cointegrating relationships are not rejected c forward rates contain significant explanatory power on future interest rates unbiasedness being an acceptable hypothesis as a cointegrating relationship between forward rates and the appropriate future value of the corresponding short term interest rate however we also provide evidence that past rates contain information additional to that in forward rates to predict future short term rates against the rational expectations version of the eh and market efficiency

a multicountry comparison of term structure forecasts at long horizons abstract this paper extends previous work on the information in the u s term structure at longer maturities to britain west germany and switzerland we find strong evidence that the term structure does have significant ability to forecast changes in inflation particularly at long maturities on the other hand the ability of the term structure to forecast changes in one year interest rates is somewhat weaker only at the very longest horizon five years is there significant forecasting ability for interest rate changes

time variation in term premia international survey based evidence using a large previously unexplored data set of survey based interest rate forecasts that covers a broad range of countries this paper re examines the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates we find that survey based interest rate forecasts outperform not only a random walk forecast but also outperform forecasts from forward rates when using these superior survey based forecasts in a modified expectations hypothesis test the expectations hypothesis is rejected for fewer countries at lower significance levels and has greater explanatory power than when using a traditional forward rates based test we furthermore document strong time variation in the term premia which is an important reason why the traditional expectations hypothesis test is rejected so frequently this time variation seems to arise from the changing attitudes towards risk among market participants and as a compensation for the change in liquidity in the term structure finally we find that generalizing findings from earlier u s studies to other countries may lead to bias in the true economic relationships in these countries

the expectations hypothesis of the term structure tests on us german french and uk euro rates abstract this paper tests the expectations hypothesis of the term structure on us german french and uk euro rates three tests are examined the first is based on forward rates and the other two are based on the interest rates spread first we show that the sign puzzle highlighted by campbell and shiller campbell j y shiller r j 1991 yield spreads and interest rate movements a bird s eye view review of economic studies 58 495 514 for us data does not arise in the cases of french and uk short term rates second we propose tests for the expectations hypothesis based on error correction models with these tests the sign puzzle disappears but the country puzzle remains

misunderstanding savings growth implications for retirement savings behavior abstract people systematically underestimate exponential growth this article illustrates this phenomenon its implications and some potential interventions in the context of saving for retirement where savings grow exponentially over long periods of time experiment 1 shows that a majority of participants expect savings over 40 years to grow linearly rather than exponentially leading them to grossly underestimate their account balance at retirement experiment 2 demonstrates that this misunderstanding leads to underestimates of the cost of waiting to save which makes putting off saving more attractive than it should be finally experiments 3 5 show that highlighting the exponential growth of savings motivates both college students and employees to save more for retirement making clear to employees the exponential growth of savings before they make crucial decisions about how much to save may be a simple and effective means of increasing retirement savings

restoring rational choice the challenge of consumer financial regulation abstract this lecture considers the case for consumer financial regulation in an environment where many households lack the knowledge to manage their financial affairs effectively the lecture argu

assessing the effectiveness of saving incentives concluding that iras and 401 k s do increase saving this text provides a fresh cost benefit approach for analyzing the success of savings incentives it compares the new savings to the government tax revenue lost through contributions to iras and 401 k s

the term structure of euro rates some evidence in support of the expectations hypothesis abstract this paper studies 1 3 6 and 12 month euro rates for 17 countries using between 10 and 30 years of data term spreads contain information about future short term rates in all 51 regressions that we estimate moreover in 35 cases we are unable to reject the expectations hypothesis using cross sectional regressions we estimate the variance of the term premium and the correlation of the term premium and the expected change in short rates we conclude that despite evidence of a time varying term premium for many countries the expectations hypothesis is broadly compatible with the data

term structure anomalies term premium or peso problem abstract the goal of this paper is to develop a test for the relative importance of the time varying term premium and the peso problem for rejection of the expectation hypothesis of the term structure ehts our reasoning is based on a term structure model that allows for both phenomena simultaneously if we assume that only one regime is observed ex post we can estimate all the information we need to evaluate distortions generated by both hypotheses we can also test the presence of a peso problem firstly we find that a peso problem might explain rejection of the ehts in germany and the united kingdom after the european exchange rate crisis secondly we show that this explanation appears inappropriate to explain the ehts failure in the united states

the term structure of commercial paper rates this paper tests the expectations hypothesis in the market for commercial paper our main dataset which is new to the literature consists of daily indexes constructed from the actual market yields for nearly all commercial paper issued by u s corporations between january 1998 and august 2003 we show that the term premia built into commercial paper yields rise dramatically at year end causing the expectations hypothesis to be rejected however once we control for these predictable year end eects we nd the reverse that commercial paper yields largely conform with the expectations hypothesis