public insurance expansions and the health of immigrant and native children abstract the costs of public insurance expansions are ordinarily justified by the claim that increased eligibility causes gains in insurance coverage which translate into improved health care and health this paper studies dramatic changes in public health insurance eligibility for immigrant and native children from 1998 to 2009 and finds that children s nativity status is crucial to understanding the impacts of recent eligibility expansions i document a significantly higher degree of take up and less crowding out of private insurance among first and second generation immigrant children than among children of u s natives eligibility expansions increased immigrant children s use of preventive and ambulatory care and decreased emergency care in hospitals while estimated effects for children of natives are negligible my results also suggest improvements in some health measures that would be expected to respond to preventive and ambulatory care

balance of payment crises in emerging markets how early were the early warning signals although many papers have already proposed empirical models of currency crises the timing of such crises has received relatively little attention so far most papers use indeed a static specification and impose the same lag structure across all explanatory variables this by construction prevents from specifically timing the crisis signals sent by the leading indicators the objective here is to fill this gap by considering a set of dynamic discrete choice models the first contribution is to identify how early in advance each explanatory variable sends a warning signal some indicators are found to signal a crisis in the very short run while others signal a crisis at more distant horizons the second contribution is to show that state dependence matters albeit mostly in the short run the results have important implications for crisis prevention in terms of the timeliness and usefulness of the envisaged policy response

the effect of expanding medicaid eligibility on the distribution of children s health insurance coverage federal legislation passed in the late 1980s greatly expanded the medicaid program to include children in families with incomes at and above the poverty threshold regardless of family structure using march current population survey data the author evaluates how the expansions affected private and public insurance coverage levels across the income distribution estimates of the extent of take up of public coverage and substitution of private coverage are used to generate distributions of coverage under two counterfactual situations absence of expansions and absence of substitution the results indicate that the expansions had an equalizing effect on coverage levels across the lower five deciles of the income distribution between 1988 and 1995 in their absence coverage would have fallen significantly in the third through fifth income deciles also if all of the increased medicaid enrollment had come from the uninsured population inequality in coverage levels would have decreased even further

is welfare reform responsible for low skilled women s declining health insurance coverage in the 1990s we use data from the 1989 2001 march supplements to the current population survey to determine whether welfare reform contributed to declines in health insurance coverage experienced by low skilled women between 1988 and 2000 women with less than a high school education experienced an 8 0 percentage point decline in the probability of having health insurance against this backdrop of large declines welfare waivers and tanf are associated with modest increases in coverage for low skilled women of 2 3 and 3 6 percentage points respectively overall our findings suggest that welfare reform did not contribute to declines in coverage but rather offset them somewhat

does public insurance crowd out private insurance the cost of expanding public sector health programs depends critically on the extent to which public eligibility will cover just the uninsured or will crowd out existing private insurance coverage we estimate the extent of crowd out arising from the expansions of medicaid to pregnant women and children over the 1987 1992 period we estimate that approximately 50 percent of the increase in medicaid coverage was associated with a reduction in private insurance coverage this occurred largely because employees took up employer based insurance less frequently there is also some evidence that employers contributed less for insurance and that workers dropped coverage of dependents

an empirical model of labor supply in a life cycle setting this paper formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labor supply using theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behavior a two step empirical analysis yields estimates of intertemporal and uncompensated substitution effects which provide the information needed to predict the response of hours of work to life cycle wage growth and shifts in the lifetime wage path

institutional sources of boundary spanning structures the establishment of investor relations departments in the fortune 500 industrials the authors analyze the coercive and mimetic conditions leading to the establishment of investor relations departments among fortune 500 industrial firms during the 1984 1994 period the results show that antimanagement resolutions brought to a vote by social movement activists significantly contributed to the establishment of investor relations departments intense scrutiny by financial analysts also impelled firms to create such departments whereas social movement activists framed shareholder rights as a problem and compelled organizations to uphold them professional analysts subtly coerced organizations to signal their commitment to investor rights by creating boundary spanning structures that solution was transmitted through board interlocks to other organizations

can leading indicators assess country vulnerability evidence from the 2008 09 global financial crisis abstract we investigate whether leading indicators can help explain the cross country incidence of the 2008 09 financial crisis rather than looking for indicators with specific relevance to the recent crisis the selection of variables is driven by an extensive review of more than eighty papers from the previous literature on early warning indicators our motivation is to address suspicions that indicators found to be useful predictors in one round of crises are typically not useful to predict the next round the review suggests that central bank reserves and past movements in the real exchange rate were the two leading indicators that had proven the most useful in explaining crisis incidence across different countries and episodes in the past for the 2008 09 crisis we use six different variables to measure crisis incidence drops in gdp and industrial production currency depreciation stock market performance reserve losses and participation in an imf program we find that the level of reserves in 2007 appears as a consistent and statistically significant leading indicator of who got hit by the 2008 09 crisis in line with the conclusions of the pre 2008 literature in addition to reserves recent real appreciation is a statistically significant predictor of devaluation and of a measure of exchange market pressure during the current crisis we define the period of the global financial shock as running from late 2008 to early 2009 which probably explains why we find stronger results than earlier papers such as obstfeld et al 2009 2010 and rose and spiegel 2009a b 2010 2011 which use annual data

the effect of medicaid expansions for low income children on medicaid participation and private insurance coverage evidence from the sipp abstract we examine medicaid enrollment and private coverage loss following expansions of medicaid eligibility we attempt to replicate cutler and gruber s q j econ 111 1996 391 results using the survey of income and program participation sipp and find smaller rates of take up and little evidence of crowding out we find that some of the difference in results can be attributed to different samples and recall periods in the data sets used extending the previous literature we find that take up is slightly increased if a child s siblings are eligible and with time spent eligible focusing on children whose eligibility status changes during the sample we estimate smaller take up effects we find little evidence of crowding out in any of our extensions

shareholder value stakeholder management and social issues what s the bottom line we test the relationship between shareholder value stakeholder management and social issue participation building better relations with primary stakeholders like employees customers suppliers and communities could lead to increased shareholder wealth by helping firms develop intangible valuable assets which can be sources of competitive advantage on the other hand using corporate resources for social issues not related to primary stakeholders may not create value for shareholders we test these propositions with data from s p 500 firms and find evidence that stakeholder management leads to improved shareholder value while social issue participation is negatively associated with shareholder value copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

participation and crowd out assessing the effects of parental medicaid expansions abstract in this paper we examine the effects of recent parental medicaid eligibility expansions on medicaid participation and private insurance coverage we present a new approach for estimating these policy effects that explicitly models the particular policy instrument over which legislators have control income eligibility thresholds our approach circumvents estimation problems stemming from misclassification or measurement error moreover it allows us to assess how the policy effects may vary at different initial threshold levels using data from the survey of income and program participation we find three main results first the eligibility expansions result in significant increases in medicaid participation a typical expansion increases medicaid participation by about four percent of baseline coverage rates second the participation effect is larger for lower initial thresholds and the effect decreases as medicaid thresholds increase third we find no statistically significant evidence of crowd out regardless of initial threshold level

the effectiveness of bank governance reforms in the wake of the financial crisis a stakeholder approach this study examines the impact of bank corporate governance reforms in the wake of the financial crisis these reforms correspond to criticism of shareholder focused agency based corporate governance practices and a renewed focus on the stakeholder impact of corporate governance lapses in the financial sector this study differs from previous studies of corporate governance in the financial sector in using performance indicators that proxy the interests of customers and the community drawing on data from 134 countries over an eight year period from 2004 to 2011 we find that the post crisis corporate governance reforms in the banking sector appear to be effective in promoting greater bank attention to non shareholder stakeholders interests this study provides a means to conceptualize measures of bank performance from a stakeholder perspective in order to test emerging ideas about governance effectiveness in the financial sector

employee ownership and the drive to do business responsibly a study of the john lewis partnership as a means towards revealing both the strategic and the day to day operational practicalities of managing a responsible business this paper reports on research conducted over an extended period in the john lewis partnership jlp this is a major retail organization based in the uk which operates at scale 90 000 employees and annual sales of 11bn it has sustained itself as an employee owned enterprise for nearly a century and it makes explicit claims to conduct itself in a responsible manner which differs markedly from the notions of responsibility maintained by many conventional businesses but what do these commitments mean in practice and what compromises if any do they entail or require and crucially how are these tensions managed we find that there are many lessons that conventional organizations could learn from this case and yet we also show that the process of managing in this responsible way is a practical accomplishment that requires considerable conceptual and applied skills

financial crises and balance of payments crises a simple model of the southern cone experience abstract this paper starts from a simple model of the domestic banking sector and develops the potentially destabilizing macroeconomic consequences of its role in intermediating foreign capital inflows both financial and balance of payments crises may result reminiscent of the southern cone experience

financial crises after financial liberalisation exceptional circumstances or structural weakness in this article i argue that emerging economies are systematically becoming more susceptible to both currency and banking crises after financial liberalisation fl using data for 27 emerging economies from 1973 to 1998 univariate and multivariate analyses indicate that the likelihood of currency crises and banking crises increase after fl in particular liberalisation allows more liquidity to enter an emerging economy which finds its way into productive and speculative projects what is common to both types of crises is a significant increase in speculative financing thereby increasing the chance for borrower default thus the outflow of international capital becomes more likely the chance of a crisis occurring in response to changes in short term loans is greater after fl than before similarly the chance of a currency crisis occurring following a currency overvaluation is larger after fl than before in comparison the likelihood of a banking crisis occurring in response to an overvalued curre

good bye financial repression hello financial crash some unintended consequences of financial liberalization in latin america are analyzed in this paper intrinsic imperfectious in financial markets and the policy dilemmas they pose are reviewed first the stylized facts of southern cone experiments in financial liberization are then presented alternative ways of organlzing domestic capital markets under latin american conditions are discussed and an eclectic reform mongering program is proposed

currency crashes in emerging markets an empirical treatment we use a panel of annual data for over 100 developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes we define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation we examine the composition of the debt as well as its level and a variety of other macroeconomic factors external and foreign crashes tend to occur when output growth is low the growth of domestic credit is high and the level of foreign interest rates are high a low ratio of fdi to debt is consistently associated with a high likelihood of a crash

did expanding medicaid affect welfare participation in a widely cited 1995 paper aaron yelowitz concluded that medicaid eligibility expansions for children were associated with increased labor force participation and reduced welfare participation among single mothers the authors of the present study using data from the 1988 96 current population surveys re examine the evidence presented by yelowitz they find that yelowitz s results resulted from two factors he imposed a restriction on the parameter estimates not predicted by theory and rejected in the data and he used only one of two income tests that families must pass to be eligible for welfare the authors conclude that there is no evidence detectable in the cps data of a relationship between welfare or labor force participation and the medicaid income limits

when do firms invest in corporate social responsibility a real option framework in this paper the process for firms to decide whether or not to invest in corporate social responsibility is treated from a real option perspective we extend the husted j bus ethics 60 175 183 2005 framework with an important extra parameter that allows us to understand the timing of csr investment and explain why some companies drag their feet over csr investments our model explicitly allows for the impact of the opportunity cost of delaying the csr investment decision providing firms with tools to determine the optimal moment of exercising the csr investment option we illustrate our timing model through a case study and analyze governmental support strategies for csr from a real options perspective

estimating heterogeneous takeup and crowd out responses to existing medicaid income limits and their nonmarginal expansions we use a switching probit model and the income limit based structure of medicaid eligibility for children to estimate treatment effects of nonmarginal medicaid expansions on medicaid takeup private insurance coverage and crowd out as well as crowd out for those eligible for medicaid under rules already in place many of these estimates are not found in existing work on public insurance and cannot be calculated with the linear probability model used by previous work in this literature we provide an estimation approach that is straightforward to implement yet yields precise treatment effects

medicaid expansions for the working age disabled revisiting the crowd out of private health insurance disabled individuals under 65 years old account for 15 of medicaid recipients but half of all medicaid spending despite their large cost few studies have investigated the effects of medicaid expansions for disabled individuals on insurance coverage and crowd out of private insurance using an eligibility expansion that allowed states to provide medicaid to disabled individuals with incomes less than 100 of the federal poverty level i address these issues crowd out estimates range from 49 using an ordinary least squares procedure to 100 using two stage least squares analysis this potentially large degree of crowd out could have fiscal implications for the affordable care act which has greatly expanded medicaid eligibility in 2014

crisis and responses the federal reserve in the early stages of the financial crisis in summer 2007 u s and global financial markets found themselves facing a potential financial crisis and the u s federal reserve found itself in a difficult situation it was becoming clear that banks and other financial institutions would ultimately lose tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars from their exposure to subprime mortgage market loans bank lending is closely tied to bank capital or net worth specifically bank regulators require that loans not exceed a certain multiple of capital thus the federal reserve faced the danger of a sharp contraction in credit and bank lending in a way that threatened a deep recession or worse when this kind of event happens the job of the central bank is to assure that financial institutions have the necessary funds to conduct their daily business that they have the liquidity they need to make timely payments and transfers modern financial institutions need to replenish their funding every day in the united states alone literally trillions of dollars are transferred between banks each day to support the 50 trillion credit outstanding in the economy as a whole commercial banks require funds to initiate the mortgages auto loans and credit card debt they then sell into financial markets while investment banks finance much of their activity with daily borrowing in the early stages of the crisis the situation often arose in which a wellcapitalized bank was forced to make sudden large loans based on previously committed lines of credit in this circumstance central bank actions can ease

the employment dynamics of disadvantaged women evidence from the sipp understanding the employment dynamics of disadvantaged families is increasingly important we estimate duration models describing these dynamics for disadvantaged single mothers and use them to conduct a rich set of counterfactual analyses we use a misreporting model to correct for seam bias the problem that too many transitions are reported between reference periods in panel data we find effects of demographics minimum wages unemployment rates and maximum welfare benefits but not policy changes introduced through state welfare waivers on employment dynamics we find that two commonly used ad hoc methods of addressing seam bias perform substantially worse than our approach

the mexican peso crisis sudden death or death foretold abstract we argue that allowing for the possibility of a self fulfilling panic helps to understand several features of the recent mexican crisis self fulfilling expectations became decisive in generating a panic only after the government ran down gross reserves and ran up short term dollar debt we present a simple model to explain how and why multiple equilibria can occur for some levels of reserves or debt but not for others lastly we argue that the imperfect credibility of mexican exchange rate policy made it advisable to follow more contractionary fiscal and monetary policies in 1994 our model formalizes the reasons why this is so

snap expansions and participation in government safety net programs this paper investigates the interactions between health and nutritional assistance programs such as medicaid snap wic and school lunch programs exploiting variation in snap eligibility across states and over time i find strong evidence of program interactions when a state moves from the federal rule to the most extensive snap eligibility rule enrollment in free school lunch and wic increases by 4 1 and 7 9 percentage points respectively i estimate that the federal government spends an additional 74 cents on the school lunch program and wic for each dollar spent on snap due to the expansion

institutional causes macroeconomic symptoms volatility crises and growth countries that have pursued distortionary macroeconomic policies including high inflation large budget deficits and misaligned exchange rates appear to have suffered more macroeconomic volatility and also grown more slowly during the postwar period does this reflect the causal effect of these macroeconomic policies on economic outcomes one reason to suspect that the answer may be no is that countries pursuing poor macroeconomic policies also have weak institutions including political institutions that do not constrain politicians and political elites ineffective enforcement of property rights for investors widespread corruption and a high degree of political instability this paper documents that countries that inherited more extractive institutions from their colonial past were more likely to experience high volatility and economic crises during the postwar period more specifically societies where european colonists faced high mortality rates more than 100 years ago are much more volatile and prone to crises based on our previous work we interpret this relationship as due to the causal effect of institutions on economic outcomes europeans did not settle and were more likely to set up extractive institutions in areas where they faced high mortality once we control for the effect of institutions macroeconomic policies appear to have only a minor impact on volatility and crises this suggests that distortionary macroeconomic policies are more likely to be symptoms of underlying institutional problems rather than the main causes of economic

long term impacts of childhood medicaid expansions on outcomes in adulthood we use administrative data from the internal revenue service to examine long term impacts of childhood medicaid eligibility expansions on outcomes in adulthood at each age from 19 to 28 greater medicaid eligibility increases college enrolment and decreases fertility especially through age 21 starting at age 23 females have higher contemporaneous wage income although male increases are imprecise together both genders have lower mortality these adults collect less from the earned income tax credit and pay more in taxes cumulatively from ages 19 to 28 at a 3 discount rate the federal government recoups 58 cents of each dollar of its investment in childhood medicaid

volatility spillovers and connectedness among credit default swap sector indexes this article studies volatility spill over effects and market connectedness using daily data of credit default swap spreads for u s companies over a period from 2007 to 2012 we quantify volatilit

morals or economics institutional investor preferences for corporate social responsibility this article presents the results of a study that analysed whether social responsibility had any bearing on the decision making of institutional investors being that institutional investors prefer socially aligned organizations this study explored to what extent the corporate actions and or social environmental investments influenced their decisions our results suggest that there are specific variables that affect the perceived value of the organization leading to decisions to not only invest but whether to hold or sell the shares and therefore having a consequential impact on the capital market s valuation

leading indicators of fiscal distress evidence from extreme bounds analysis early warning systems ewss are widely used to assess a country s vulnerability to fiscal distress a fiscal distress episode is identified as a period when government experiences extreme funding

the impact of a public option in the u s health insurance market we develop a game theoretical framework to examine the implications of the introduction of a nonprofit public option in the u s health insurance market in this model heterogeneous consumers have to choose between two competing insurance plans one plan is offered by a profit maximizing private insurer the other by social welfare maximizing public option in equilibrium the distinct objectives of the two insurers induce adverse selection in consumer choice the public option covers the less healthy consumers yielding the more profitable segment of market to the private insurer however our empirical results suggest that both insurers will capture significant parts of the health insurance market jel i11 l10 l21 l32

towards a new early warning system of financial crises abstract this paper develops a new early warning system ews model based on a multinomial logit model for predicting financial crises it is shown that commonly used ews approaches which use binomial discrete dependent variable models are subject to what we call a post crisis bias this bias arises when no distinction is made between tranquil periods when economic fundamentals are largely sound and sustainable and crisis post crisis periods when economic variables go through an adjustment process before reaching a more sustainable level or growth path we show that applying a multinomial logit model which allows distinguishing between more than two states is a valid way of solving this problem and constitutes a substantial improvement in the ability to forecast financial crises the empirical results reveal that for a set of 20 open emerging markets for the period 1993 2001 the model would have correctly predicted a large majority of crises in emerging markets

embedding corporate social responsibility in corporate governance a stakeholder systems approach current research on corporate social responsibility csr illustrates the growing sense of discord surrounding the business of doing good dobers and springett corp soc responsib environ manage 17 2 63 69 2010 central to these concerns is that csr risks becoming an over simplified and peripheral part of corporate strategy rather than transforming the dominant corporate discourse it is argued that csr and related concepts are limited to emancipatory rhetoric defined by narrow business interests and serve to curtail interests of external stakeholders banerjee crit sociol 34 1 52 2008 the paper addresses gaps in the literature and challenges current thinking on corporate governance and csr by offering a new conceptual framework that responds to the concerns of researchers and practitioners the limited focus of existing analyses is extended by a holistic approach to corporate governance and social responsibility that integrates company shareholder and wider stakeholder concerns a defensive stance is avoided by delineating key stages of the governance process and aligning profit centred and social responsibility concerns to produce a business based rationale for minimising risk and mainstreaming csr

exchange rate regimes and the cross country distribution of the 1997 financial crisis robin m grier we study variations in the severity of the 1997 financial crisis in a sample of 25 developing countries we use both currency depreciation and stock market returns as crisis measures our key findings are that countries that started 1997 with an exchange rate peg experienced significantly greater currency depreciation and significantly lower stock returns than would be predicted from the levels of various macroeconomic indicators jel f3 f4 i introduction the asian financial crisis of 1997 is still a very hot topic a recent search of econlit turned up 243 articles in the system with asian crisis in the subject field 1 several recent articles attempt to explain variations in the severity of the crisis across developing countries using macroeconomic and financial variables and show that the distribution of the crisis is somewhat predictable our article extends this literature in two directions first we examine whether the initial exchange rate regime in place at the beginning of 1997 had any effect on the distribution of the financial crisis once the relevant macro and financial indicators are included in the model second given that a real crisis followed on the heels of the financial one we study the relationship between exchange rate regime currency depreciation and stock market performance in 1997 our sample consists of 25 developing countries in 1997 2 though a cross sectional approach limits the generality of our results we believe we can ask and answer two interesting questions about the average performance of different exchange rate regimes in 1997 the first question is controlling for economic indicators what was the average effect of having an initially pegged exchange rate on currency depreciation there are theoretical arguments presented in section ii that can justify either positive negative or zero effects we find that on average countries with a pegged regime at the beginning of the year experienced more depreciation than what was predicted by their macro indicators the second question we study is what was the average effect of currency depreciation on stock market performance in 1997 again there are arguments presented in section iii supporting either a positive negative or neutral relationship we find that on average depreciation has a marginally significant negative impact on stock returns however in the 12 countries that began 1997 with a floating exchange rate currency depreciation had a significantly positive effect on stock returns whereas the effect of depreciation on stock returns was negative and significant for the 13 countries that started the year with a pegged currency this relationship holds for stock returns measured either in u s dollars or in local currencies the papers most similar to ours in the literature are tornell and velasco 1995 edwards 1993 corsetti et al 1999 hereafter cpr and tornell 1999 tornell and velasco and edwards study whether or not the choice of exchange rate regime affects economic outcomes 3 cpr and tornell study the asian financial crisis of 1997 in the broader context of developing country performance they create a crisis index and estimate several regressions using macro and financial indicators to predict the extent of the crisis in a sample of developing countries our article applies the idea that the choice of exchange rate regime can affect macroeconomic and financial outcomes to the study of the determinants of the severity of the 1997 crisis in a model similar to those of cpr and tornell in what follows below section ii studies the relationship between macro and financial indicators the initial exchange rate regime and currency depreciation in 1997 section iii considers the depreciation exchange rate regime stock market connection in 1997 section iv presents our conclusions ii macro indicators currency depreciation and exchange rate regime in 1997 the question of what exactly determines the value of the exchange rate is an important unsolved issue in open economy macroeconomics and we are not going to settle it here

start up sustainability an insurmountable cost or a life giving investment abstract an outstanding question in the entrepreneurship literature reigns given recent emphases on sustainable business practices and corporate social responsibility if small start ups are generally stretched for time and resources does it enhance their chances for survival and success to be sustainable and socially responsible new firms can aid in rectifying pressing environmental and social issues by being more sustainable while many entrepreneurs like a sustainable business model and or mission investment may not follow so willingly this paper examines a sample of 300 start ups across thirty cities around the world to consider whether sustainability is rewarded by investors investors signal confidence in start ups when they infuse life extending investments into them this analysis also considers whether a more sustainable national context affects investor confidence and whether a sustainable firm within a sustainable national context gains more investor attention and investment results show that investors avoid sustainable firms particularly those that are environmentally sustainable moreover investors enjoy national contexts that are socially responsible but pay no attention to those that are environmentally conscious in addition firms that are sustainable in a sustainable national context are not better off for attracting investment insights for policy are that mainstream investors are attracted by national social policies but these investors are unlikely to be the main force behind sustainable venture growth under today s conditions

predicting currency crises abstract in recent years a number of researchers have claimed success in systematically predicting which countries are more likely to suffer currency crises most notably kaminsky lizondo and reinhart 1998 this paper evaluates the klr approach to anticipating currency crises and develops and tests an alternative first we try to answer the question if we had been using the klr model in late 1996 how well armed would we have been to predict the asia crisis second we analyze a more general probit based model of predicting currency crises in the process we test several basic assumptions underlying the indicators approach

exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks exchange market mayhem the antecedents and aftermath of speculative attacks this paper evaluates the causes and consequences of episodes of turbulence in foreign exchange markets using data from 1959 through 1993 for twenty oecd countries we consider the antecedents and aftermath of devaluations and revaluations flotations fixings and speculative attacks which may not be successful we find that realignments of fixed exchange rates are alike devaluations are preceded by political instability budget and current account deficits and fast growth of money and prices revaluations are mirror images of devaluations speculative attacks resemble devaluations but money growth and inflation are more endemic and there is no last minute attempt to tighten monetary policy in contrast few consistent correlations link regime transitions like flotations or fixings to macroeconomic or political variables transitions between exchange rate regimes are largely idiosyncratic and are neither consistently provoked ex ante by systematic imbalances nor typically justified ex post by subsequent changes in policy we conclude that there are no clear early warning signals of many speculative attacks and no easy solutions for policy makers barry eichengreen andrew k rose and charles wyplosz

cross country causes and consequences of the crisis an update abstract we update rose and spiegel forthcoming rose and spiegel 2010 and search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the great recession of 2008 09 we use a cross country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis intensity by other scholars we check a number of different indicators of crisis intensity and a variety of different country samples while countries with higher income and looser credit market regulation seemed to suffer worse crises we find few clear reliable indicators in the pre crisis data of the incidence of the great recession countries with current account surpluses seemed better insulated from slowdowns

are currency crises predictable abstract this paper studies whether exchange rate expectations and overvaluations are predictors of currency crises the results suggest that overvaluation has predictive power in explaining the crises however although expected depreciation obtained from survey data partially takes different exchange rate misalignment measures into consideration expectations fail to anticipate currency crises

nonlinear manifold learning for early warnings in financial markets abstract a financial market is a complex dynamic system with an underlying governing manifold this study introduces an early warning method for financial markets based on manifold learning first we restructure the phase space of a financial system using financial time series data then we propose an information metric based manifold learning imml algorithm to extract the intrinsic manifold of a dynamic financial system early warning ranges for critical transitions of financial markets can be detected from the underlying manifold we deduce the intrinsic geometric properties of the manifold to detect impending crises experimental results show that our imml algorithm accurately describes the attractor manifold of the financial dynamic system and contributes to inform investors about the state of financial markets

did established early warning signals predict the 2008 crises abstract over the past 60 years a voluminous literature has painstakingly developed crises theories and their associated early warning signals the hallmark of this literature is the consistency with which selected early warning signals such as the level of reserves and exchange rate appreciations are presumed to predict different types of crises across countries and time the diversity of crises theories that motivate early warning signals presents however a challenge to empirical implementations given that the true model of early warning signals is unknown omitted variable bias contaminates estimates and confidence levels when the uncertainty surrounding a particular theory has been ignored after addressing model uncertainty in early warning signal regressions using an extended version of frankel and saravelos 2012 j int econ 87 216 231 dataset we do not find a single early warning signal that alerts to all dimensions of the 2008 crisis instead distinct sets of early warning signals identify different dimensions of the crisis banking balance of payments exchange rate pressure and recession

financial instability reserves and central bank swap lines in the panic of 2008 in this paper we connect the events of the last twelve months the panic of 2008 as it has been called to the demand for international reserves in previous work we have shown that international reserve demand can be rationalized by a central bank s desire to backstop the broad money supply to avert the possibility of an internal external double drain a bank run combined with capital flight thus simply looking at trade or short term debt as motivations for reserve holdings is insufficient one must also consider the size of the banking system m2 here we show that a country s reserve holdings just before the current crisis relative to their predicted holdings based on these financial motives can significantly predict exchange rate movements of both emerging and advanced countries in 2008 countries with large war chests did not depreciate and some appreciated meanwhile those who held insufficient reserves based on our metric were likely to depreciate current account balances and short term debt levels are not statistically significant predictors of depreciation once reserve levels are taken into account our model s typically high predicted reserve levels provide important context for the unprecedented u s dollar swap lines recently provided to many countries by the federal reserve this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

health insurance eligibility utilization of medical care and child health two economists applied data from the current population survey and the national health interview survey and state level data on child mortality to a simulation model of utilization of medical care that varies only with the states legislative environment to examine the utilization of medical care and health effects of medicaid eligibility on low income children the models took into consideration the recent expansions of medicaid to low income children 38 of those ineligible for medicaid in 1984 who became eligible due to changes during 1984 1992 were uninsured between 1984 and 1992 expansions of the medicaid program increased the proportion of children eligible for medicaid almost two fold 16 1 vs 31 2 yet coverage rates were always lower than eligibility rates 13 2 vs 16 1 in 1984 and 20 3 vs 31 2 in 1992 and the increase in coverage rates was only about 50 of the increase in eligibility rates during 1984 1992 the probability that a child was eligible for medicaid increased the probability of health insurance coverage by 29 77 when the model considered bias in variables e g a recession in a state the take up rate was only 22 73 nevertheless medicaid markedly increased use of medical care for example eligibility for medicaid increased the likelihood of making a visit to a physicians office in the last two weeks by about 50 it also increased the probability of a child visiting the hospital suggesting inefficiency in the way that providers deliver care to medicaid enrollees medicaid eligibility had a significant effect on reducing child mortality the 15 1 percentage point increase in eligibility during 1984 1992 reduced child mortality by 4 5 when the researchers examined parent assessed subjective health measures medicaid eligibility had no effect on child health medicaid eligibility reduced race and education based disparities in the number of visits and racial differences in mortality yet it may actually intensify current disparities in health care delivery site

an empirical examination of institutional investor preferences for corporate social performance this study investigates the pattern of institutional shareholding in the u k and its relationship with socially responsible behavior by companies within a sample of over 500 uk companies we estimate a set of ownership models that distinguish between long and short term investors and their largest components and which incorporate both aggregated and disaggregated measures of corporate social performance csp the results suggest that long term institutional investment is positively related to csp providing further support for earlier studies by johnson and greening 1999 academy of management journal 42 564 576 and graves and waddock 1994 academy of management journal 37 1034 1046 disaggregation of csp into its constituent components suggests that the pattern of institutional investment is also related to the form which csp takes investigation of the impact of investment screens on the selection of stocks suggests that long term institutional investors select primarily through exclusion rejecting those firms which have the worst csp