canadian city housing prices and urban market segmentation the authors provide a detailed empirical analysis of canadian city housing prices they examine the long run relationship between city house prices in canada from 1981 to 2005 as well as idiosyncratic relations between city prices and city specific variables

investment spikes new facts and a general equilibrium exploration abstract using plant level data from chile and the u s we show that investment spikes are highly pro cyclical so much so that changes in the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes the extensive margin account for the bulk of variation in aggregate investment the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes also has independent predictive power for aggregate investment even controlling for past investment and sales we re calibrate the thomas 2002 is lumpy investment relevant for the business cycle journal of political economy cx 508 534 model that includes fixed costs of investing so that it assigns a prominent role to extensive adjustment the recalibrated model has different properties than the standard rbc model for some shocks

monetary policy housing and heterogeneous regional markets we quantify the importance of heterogeneity for monetary policy using a new heterogeneous agent var havar model that integrates national monetary financial markets with regional housing markets via the mortgage rate although the havar model has linear regional vars its aggregate impulse responses exhibit two nonlinearities 1 time variation stemming from aggregation over heterogeneous regions and 2 state dependence on initial economic conditions in regions thus monetary policy has long and variable lags because monetary transmission depends on the extent and nature of regional heterogeneity which both vary over time the model is estimated with data for u s regions from 1986 to 1996 and simulated to show how coastal housing booms might influence the efficacy of monetary policy

the role of personality traits in pension decisions findings and policy recommendations many countries need to stimulate pension participation and contribution to ensure their citizens are prepared adequately for retirement identifying at risk groups with tendencies of not joining pe

regional house price dynamics and voting behavior in the fomc i introduction interest rate decisions by the federal open market committee fomc are not always made unanimously different individual views about the appropriate monetary policy stance may lead to the result that members cast dissenting interest rate votes in fomc meetings that is they opt for a higher or lower interest rate than proposed by the chairman of the fomc several studies find that fomc members have different views about the appropriate monetary policy when casting interest rate votes belden 1989 chappell and mcgregor 2000 chappell mcgregor and vermilyea 2005 2008 2012 gildea 1990 1992 havrilesky and gildea 1991 1995 havrilesky and schweitzer 1990 meade and sheets 2005 meade 2010 tootell 1991 1996 an important source of such dissenting votes may be the regional bias of the fomc member which is constituted by its regional affiliation several studies have examined the impact of the regional unemployment rate on the interest rate votes of fomc members while gildea 1992 meade and sheets 2005 and chappell mcgregor and vermilyea 2008 find that a higher regional unemployment rate relative to the national rate increases decreases fomc members preference for monetary easing tightening tootell 1991 finds no significant evidence 1 in this article we analyze whether fomc members align their interest rate voting behavior with house price developments of the federal reserve district they represent in addition to the regional unemployment rate studied so far in this way we can test whether regional house prices and or regional unemployment rates have a significant impact on the voting behavior of fomc members and we examine whether there are systematic differences between regional bank presidents and board members various studies have examined the link between monetary policy and asset price developments according to gilchrist and leahy 2002 there are some good reasons why central banks should align their monetary policies with asset prices first the consumer price index cpi or gross domestic product gdp deflator are incomplete measures since they only signal information on the prices of goods consumed today whereas a more complete measure would also signal future cost of living such as the information contained in asset prices alchian and klein 1973 second asset prices may be useful in forecasting inflation goodhart and hofmann 2000 third asset prices may directly affect real economic activity and inflation since for example wealthier consumers spend more which may affect price developments carroll otsuka and slacalek 2011 whether central banks should react to asset prices is however debated in the literature the traditional view is that central banks should only react to asset prices to the extent that they feed back into the conventional monetary policy goals inflation and output bernanke and gertler 1999 2001 on the contrary cecchetti et al 2000 conclude that it may be reasonable for central banks to react to asset prices in particular house prices in order to avoid the buildup of asset price bubbles as the burst of asset price bubbles may lead to financial crises reinhart and rogoff 2009 leaning against the buildup of extreme asset price changes may therefore be a reasonable choice for central banks as a part of their mission to manage systemic risk allen and carletti 2009 bordo and jeanne 2002 another rationale that central banks should take asset prices particularly house prices into account is that house prices have been shown to be suitable early warning indicators for the outbreak of the recent financial crisis kemme and roy 2012 several empirical papers analyze the impact of asset prices on interest rate setting rigobon and sack 2003 and dupor and conley 2004 find evidence that fomc interest rate decisions are influenced by equity prices on the contrary fuhrer and tootell 2008 find that fomc interest rate decisions are not a direct response to equity price movements and are an indirect response only to the extent that equity prices helped forecast the conventional monetary policy goals

the role of credit in the great moderation a multivariate garch approach abstract during the great moderation financial innovation in the us increased the size and scope of credit flows supporting the growth of wealth we hypothesize that spending out of wealth came to finance a wider range of gdp components such that it smoothed gdp both these trends combined would be consistent with a decrease in the volatility of output we suggest testable implications in terms of both growth of credit and output and volatility of growth in a multivariate garch framework we test this view for home mortgages and residential investment we observe unidirectional causality in variance from total output residential investment and non residential output to mortgage lending before but not during the great moderation these findings are consistent with a role for credit dynamics in explaining the great moderation

financial crises and liquidity shocks a bank run perspective abstract in contrast with the financial multiplier literature this note explores a case in which the shock triggering a financial crisis stems from the financial sector itself it is not a shock stemming from the real sector which gets amplified by say agency problems the basic intuition is provided by the bank run literature of the diamond and dybvig 1983 variety financial development is modeled as a mechanism that endows real assets e g land and capital with liquidity however liquidity can be impaired by shocks that are equivalent to a bank run liquidity creation enhances real asset prices while a liquidity crunch generates asset price collapse this bubble looking episode is not driven by standard fundamentals although it is fully in line with rationality in this context devoid of other frictions like price stickiness the note examines the effect of monetary policy in the absence of nominal rigidities it shows that preventing price deflation is not enough to offset relative to output asset price meltdown but lower policy interest rates increase relative asset prices and steady state output moreover in the neighborhood of a first best capital allocation an increase in the liquidity of capital may lower the welfare of the representative individual even if the higher liquidity of capital is sustainable and hence not destroyed by future crash illustrating the possibility of excessive financial innovation an extension of the basic model supports the conjecture that low policy interest rates may have given further incentives to the development of shadow banking

booms and busts in the uk housing market the often volatile behaviour of uk house prices between 1957 and 1994 is analysed in an annual econometric model theory suggests that financial liberalisation of mortgage markets in the 1980s should have led to notable shifts in house price behaviour the evidence supports the predictions of theory suggesting shifts took place in wealth effects as in the consumption function and that real interest rates and income expectations became more important the presence of transactions costs suggests important nonlinearities in house price dynamics the paper also contains an explicit econometric treatment of expectations demography supply spillovers from the rented sector and of composition biases in the official house price index

a cautious note on the use of panel models to predict financial crises abstract panel data framework has often been used to build early warning systems for financial crises this paper questions the implicit assumption that crises are homogenously caused by identical factors it suggests a preliminary step aiming at forming optimal country clusters

house prices consumption and the role of non mortgage debt this paper examines the relationship between house prices and consumption through the use of debt using unique canadian household level data that reports the uses of debt we begin by looking at the relationship between house prices and debt

riskiness endogenous productivity dispersion and business cycles abstract in the data cross sectional productivity dispersion is countercyclical at both the plant level and the firm level see e g bloom 2009 i incorporate a firm s choice of risk level into a model of firm dynamics with real business cycle features to explain this empirical finding both qualitatively and quantitatively in the model in every period each firm chooses the investment amount and the risk level associated with a production project every period all projects available to each firm have the same expected flow return determined by the aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks to the firm s productivity and differ from one another only in their risk the endogenous option of exiting the market and the limited funding for new investment jointly play an important role in motivating firms risk taking behavior the model predicts that in each period relatively small firms are more likely to take risk and hence exhibit a higher exit rate and that the cross sectional productivity dispersion measured as the standard deviation of the realized individual component of productivity is larger in recessions

the uncertainty multiplier and business cycles abstract i study a business cycle model where agents learn about the fundamentals by accumulating capital during recessions agents invest less and this generates noisier estimates of macroeconomic conditions and an increase in uncertainty the endogenous increase in aggregate uncertainty further reduces economic activity and thus gives rise to a multiplier effect that amplifies aggregate fluctuations to discipline learning dynamics i parametrize the model so that it matches not only standard business cycle moments but also survey data on macroeconomic forecasts i find that the uncertainty multiplier amplifies output standard deviation by 16

cross sectoral variation in the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks we estimate the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks in u s manufacturing we measure the variation in revenue total factor productivity not explained by either industry or economy wide factors or by establishments characteristics we find that idiosyncratic shocks are much larger than aggregate shocks accounting for about 80 of the overall uncertainty faced by plants plants in the most volatile sector are subject to about six times as much idiosyncratic uncertainty as plants in the least volatile we provide evidence suggesting that idiosyncratic risk is higher in industries where the extent of creative destruction is likely to be greater

which is a better investment choice in the hong kong residential property market a big or small property the relationship between property size and property investment yield is an interesting issue in the real estate market previous studies usually use the mean variance criterion to compare the return risk profiles of the yields of different property sizes in the united states however this criterion has a few shortcomings this article provides the first attempt to use a stochastic dominance approach to analyse this issue we adopt two powerful stochastic dominance tests to compare the yields of five property size classes in the hong kong residential property market in our study we analyse two possible investment outcomes 1 investors could not rent out their properties and thus they would gain lose from the appreciation depreciation of residential property prices 2 investors could also gain from rental incomes our empirical results provide strong evidence to show that the yields of smaller property classes stochastically dominate the yields of bigger property classes suggesting that buying smal

the cross sectional dynamics of the us business cycle 1950 1999 abstract modern interest in business cycles has focussed on the co movements and correlations in the major macroeconomic aggregates in this paper we offer another dimension to business cycle analysis which looks at the time series of cross sectional distributions of the growth rates of sales by us quoted companies from 1950 to 1999 we detect correlations between aggregate business cycle fluctuations and the higher moments of the cross sectional distribution we find a significant negative correlation between the rate of growth of gdp and the cross sectional variance and skewness of growth rates of sales on the other hand there is positive correlation at business cycle frequencies with kurtosis in order to explore this further we turn to the dynamic evolution of firms and analyse the sensitivity of growth rates to aggregate shocks conditioning on firm size the results suggest that despite considerable heterogeneity macroeconomic shocks have pervasive effects that are however more pronounced for firms in the middle range of growth this has implications for both macro and industrial economics

planning and financial literacy how do women fare many older us households have done little or no planning for retirement and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement of particular concern is the relative position of older women who are more vulnerable to old age poverty due to their longer longevity this paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 health and retirement study it shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole in addition women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan for retirement and be successful planners these findings have important implications for policy and for programs aimed at fostering financial security at older ages

is the 2007 u s sub prime financial crisis so different an international historical comparison the first major financial crisis of the twentyfirst century involves esoteric instruments unaware regulators and skittish investors it also follows a well trodden path laid down by centuries of financial folly is the special prob lem of sub prime mortgages really different our examination of the longer historical record which is part of a larger effort on cur rency and debt crises finds stunning qualitative and quantitative parallels across a number of standard financial crisis indicators to name a few the run up in us equity and housing prices that graciela l kaminsky and reinhart 1999 find to be the best leading indicators of crisis in countries experiencing large capital inflows closely tracks the average of the previous 18 post world war ii banking crises in industrial countries so too does the inverted v shape of real growth in the years prior to the crisis despite widespread concern about the effects on national debt of the tax cuts of the early 2000s the run up in us public debt is actually some what below the average of other crisis episodes in contrast the pattern of us current account deficits is markedly worse at this juncture the book is still open on how the current dislocations in the united states will play out the precedent found in the aftermath of other episodes suggests that the strains can be quite severe depending especially on the initial degree of trauma to the financial system and to some extent the policy response the average drop in real per capita output growth is over 2 percent and it typically takes two years to return to trend for the five most catastrophic cases which include episodes in finland japan

learning asymmetries in real business cycles when a boom ends the downturn is generally sharp and short when growth resumes the boom is more gradual our explanation rests on learning about productivity when agents believe productivity is high they work invest and produce more more production generates higher precision information when the boom ends precise estimates of the slowdown prompt decisive reactions investment and labor fall sharply when growth resumes low production yields noisy estimates of recovery noise impedes learning slows recovery and makes booms more gradual than downturns a calibrated model generates growth rate asymmetry similar to macroeconomic aggregates fluctuations in agents forecast precision match observed countercyclical errors of forecasters

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

the u s and irish credit crises their distinctive differences and common features although the 2007 2008 us credit crisis precipitated it the subsequent irish credit crisis is an identifiably separate one which might have occurred in the absence of the u s crash the distinctive differences between them are notable many of the apparent causal factors of the u s crisis are missing in the irish case and the same applies vice versa at a deeper level we identify four common features of the two credit crises capital bonanzas asset price bubbles regulatory imprudence and moral hazard the particular manifestations of these four deep common features are quite different in the two cases

the effects of financial education in the workplace evidence from a survey of households abstract we use a novel household survey to investigate the effects of employer based financial education on personal saving we explore cross sectional relations between the availability of employer based financial education and various measures of asset accumulation and we interpret these patterns in light of various potentially confounding factors our findings favor the hypothesis that employer based financial education stimulates saving both in general and for retirement

search liquidity and the dynamics of house prices and construction the dynamics of house prices sales construction and population growth in response to city specific income shocks are characterized for 106 us cities a dynamic model of search in the housing market in which construction the entry of buyers house prices and sales are determined in equilibrium is then developed the theory generates dynamics qualitatively consistent with the observations and a version calibrated to match key features of the us housing market offers a substantial quantitative improvement over models without search in particular variation in the time it takes to sell induces transaction prices to exhibit serially correlated growth jel d83 r21 r23 r31 we explore the consequences of time consuming search and matching for the dynamics of house prices sales and construction at the city level first we char acterize the impact of city specific income shocks on the short run dynamics of average house prices home sales construction and population growth for a panel of us cities we then develop a model in which the entry of new buyers and the construction of new houses in response to such shocks are endogenously determined our theory generates serial correlation in the growth rates of house prices and construction even if income is strictly mean reverting following shocks 1 when calibrated to data on us cities our model accounts for over 80 percent of the variance of house price movements driven by city specific income shocks and nearly half of the observed autocorrelation of house price growth in our empirical analysis we estimate a structural panel vector autoregressive var model using city level observations on the variables listed above we focus

the economic importance of financial literacy theory and evidence this paper undertakes an assessment of a rapidly growing body of economic research on financial literacy we start with an overview of theoretical research which casts financial knowledge as a form of investment in human capital endogenizing financial knowledge has important implications for welfare as well as policies intended to enhance levels of financial knowledge in the larger population next we draw on recent surveys to establish how much or how little people know and identify the least financially savvy population subgroups this is followed by an examination of the impact of financial literacy on economic decision making in the united states and elsewhere while the literature is still young conclusions may be drawn about the effects and consequences of financial illiteracy and what works to remedy these gaps a final section offers thoughts on what remains to be learned if researchers are to better inform theoretical and empirical models as well as public policy jel a20 d14 g11 i20 j26

financial crises in asia and latin america then and now in this paper we analyze the extent to which past financial crises share common characteristics in latin america asia europe and the middle east we examine the recent crises in asia and in latin america in particular their severity to assess whether the considerable historical differences that we have documented for the earlier sample have eroded we conclude that in a deregulated world the well behaved asian financia1 crises are a relic of the past

employee financial literacy and retirement plan behavior a case study this article uses administrative data on all active employees of the federal reserve fr system to examine participation in and contributions to the thrift saving plan the system s defined contribution dc plan we link to administrative records a unique employee survey of economic demographic factors including a set of financial literacy questions not surprisingly fr employees are substantially more financially literate than the population at large most importantly financially savvy employees are also most likely to participate in their dc plan sophisticated workers contribute three percentage points more of their earnings to the dc plan than do the less knowledgeable and they hold more equity in their pension accounts we examine changes in employee plan behavior 1 year after employees completed a learning module about retirement planning and we compare it to baseline patterns we find that those employees who completed the learning module were more likely to start contributing and less likely to have stopped contributing to the dc plan postsurvey in sum employer provided learning programs are shown to significantly impact employee retirement saving decisions and consistent with a lot of other research higher levels of financial literacy are found to have a beneficial impact on retirement saving patterns jel j3 h7

the role of financial literacy in determining retirement plans nber working paper seriesthe role of financial literacy in determining retirement plansrobert clarkmelinda sandler morrillsteven g allenworking paper 16612http www nber org papers w16612national bureau of economic research1050 massachusetts avenuecambridge ma 02138december 2010this research is funded in part by a grant from finra investor education foundation we wouldlike to thank jennifer maki mehtab randhawa and evan rogers for their research assistance theresearch could not have been accomplished without the cooperation of the companies that partneredwith us we would also like to thank nicholas horsewood annamaria lusardi olivia mitchell andtwo anonymous referees for useful comments all remaining errors are our own the views expressedherein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national bureau of economicresearch finra investor education foundation or any of its affiliated companies 2010 by robert clark melinda sandler morrill and steven g allen all rights reserved shortsections of text not to exceed two paragraphs may be quoted without explicit permission providedthat full credit including notice is given to the source

can simple informational nudges increase employee participation in a 401 k plan we report results from a field experiment in which a randomized subset of newly hired workers at a large financial institution received a flyer containing information about the employer s 401 k plan and the value of contributions compounding over a career younger workers who received the flyer were significantly more likely to begin contributing to the plan relative to their peers in the control group many workers do not participate in their employers supplemental retirement savings programs even though these programs offer substantial tax advantages and immediate returns due to matching contributions from a survey of new hires we find that many workers choose not to contribute to the plan because they have other financial priorities however some nonparticipants lack the financial literacy to appreciate the benefit these findings indicate that simple informational interventions can nudge workers to participate in retirement saving plans and enhance individual well being and retirement income security

inflation real returns and capital investment we find evidence for the hypothesis of mundell 1963 and tobin 1965 that the expected real return component of interest rates is negatively related to the expected inflation component in the mundell tobin model the variation in expected real returns is caused by the variation in expected inflation our evidence suggests however that the variation in expected real returns is more fundamentally an outcome of the capital expenditures process equilibrium expected real returns vary directly with capital expenditures in order to induce equilibrium allocations of resources between consumption and investment this positive relation between expected real returns and real activity which comes out of the real sector combines with a negative relation between expected inflation and real activity which is traced to the monetary sector thus inducing the negative relation between expected inflation and expected real returns predicted by mundell and tobin but explained in terms of a model much different from theirs

effectiveness of employer provided financial information hiring to retiring in order to maximize lifetime utility workers must make choices throughout their careers to plan and save for retirement with the aging of the baby boomers and increasing life expectancies it is more important than ever for individuals to ensure they have adequate savings and resources for retirement to make optimal choices individuals need sufficient knowledge of how both national and employer provided retirement plans work and what benefits they should expect further they must have adequate financial literacy to navigate complex financial instruments and to understand the importance of various plan characteristics traditional models of life cycle earnings and consumption are based on the assumption that workers are aware of investment options understand the benefits they will receive from various retirement plans and have the ability to assess the impact of their saving decisions

did the recent housing boom signal the global financial crisis author affiliation david m kemme dmkemme memphis edusaktinil roy saktinil athabascau ca1 introductionshiller 2005 pp xiii iv argued that the rapid surges of real home prices in the united states and other countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s signaled the potential for widespread personal and institutional bankruptcies and a worldwide recession probably as deep and lasting as japan s lost decade 1 of course as we know today this was one of few highly accurate predictions of events that unfolded after the u s subprime market collapse of 2007 2008 2 given the prevailing regulatory conditions and implied financial liberalization the housing boom was a bubble phenomenon driven primarily by the over optimism of a new era in which home prices would only rise historically financial booms around the world which were similarly associated with wishful thinking of unending future increases in asset prices also imploded and led to recession in similar ways indeed thorough observation of these historical episodes and of the contemporary sudden changes in the housing markets was the basis of shiller s 2005 pp xiii iv chapters 2 7 prescience regarding the potential magnitude and impact of the current turmoil nevertheless the emerging literature on the current episode has not yet provided an empirical framework with which to confirm these observations and prescience could the insights that followed from historical and contemporary evidence but that were not so obvious to most researchers policy makers and market participants be produced with appropriate data and standard statistical procedures specifically following shiller s 2005 pp xiii iv chapters 2 7 observations and insights shouldn t the rapid rise since 1998 of real house prices alone provide enough information to foretell the current state of the housing and banking sectors and the implications for the whole economy this article employs standard statistical models and examines this simple proposition we follow a two step procedure answering two different but related questions first we provide a statistical confirmation of the observation made by shiller 2005 chapter 2 2008 chapter 2 that the drastic increase in real house prices in the united states since 1998 was mainly unexplained by changes in economic fundamentals such as income population building costs and long term interest rates we find that although these fundamentals largely explain real house prices in the united states over the period from 1950 through 1997 our out of sample forecasts indicate that the same fundamentals fail to account for a sudden large rise of real house prices during 1998 2005 next in line with shiller s observation 2005 chapter 7 that similar historical financial booms imploded in similar ways we examine the predictability of the recent global crisis based on historical house price data associated with other post war bank centered crisis episodes we fit panel probit and logit models to a cross country panel of data for real house prices for advanced economies that experienced banking crises in the post war period and conclude that a housing boom is a good predictor of financial crisis we then ask if the recent global crisis specifically the systemic banking crises in the united states britain ireland and spain which also had prior housing bubbles can be predicted out of sample the finding is that this is indeed possible credible alarms can be generated for the banking crises of all four countries three years in advance in section 2 we present shiller s 2005 chapter 2 argument for an unsustainable housing boom in the united states during 1998 2005 and substantiate it statistically in section 3 we investigate the observation by shiller 2005 chapter 7 inter alia that prior speculative bubbles are quite common to financial crises around the world so that the housing booms in the united states and other countries in the early 2000s signaled a global recession

time varying business volatility and the price setting of firms abstract does time varying business uncertainty volatility affect the price setting of firms and in what way we estimate from the micro data of the german ifo business climate survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the extensive margin of firm level price setting behavior heightened uncertainty increases the probability of a price change suggesting that for price setting the volatility effect dominates the wait and see effect in a second step we use structural vector autoregressions to estimate the effects of uncertainty on the intensive pricing margin higher uncertainty leads to an increase in price dispersion and to larger price adjustments

the credit crisis conjectures about causes and remedies what caused the financial crisis that is sweeping across the world what keeps asset prices and lending depressed what can be done to remedy matters while it is too early to arrive at definite answers to these questions it is certainly time to offer informed conjectures and these are the focus of this paper this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the stochastic city abstract this paper analyzes a simple model of an urban area with growth and uncertainty household income rents and prices for land follow stochastic processes even though investors are risk neutral uncertainty affects both land rents and land prices in equilibrium because the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use is irreversible growth on the other hand affects urban and agricultural land prices but not the level of rents we show that uncertainty i delays the conversion of land from agricultural to urban use ii imparts an option value to agricultural land iii causes land at the boundary to sell for more than its opportunity cost in other uses and iv reduces equilibrium city size

entry and exit of manufacturing plants over the business cycle abstract this paper analyzes the plant level entry and exit over the business cycle we document basic patterns of entry and exit of u s manufacturing plants between 1972 and 1997 we find that the entry rate is more cyclical than the exit rate we also find that the differences in productivity and employment between booms and recessions are particularly larger for entering plants than for exiting plants our new finding suggests that the selection at the entry margin may be more important than the selection at the exit margin in understanding the plant level dynamics over the business cycle

inflation hedging properties of regional chinese real estate market evidence from 35 cities in china the housing markets in china have been gaining considerable interest from investors but the inflation hedging characteristics of housing remain ambiguous based on chinese city level data this study evaluates different inflation hedging properties in eastern middle and western real estate markets using panel vector autoregressive pvar models findings suggest middle real estate markets afford the best hedging opportunities for expected inflation which is robust considering housing market heterogeneity financial crisis and the 2010 purchase restriction order moreover hedging efficacy of anticipated inflation differs between markets with low and high supply demand ratio

housing price variability national and local impacts this article examines the influence of national and local forces on housing prices in 20 local us real estate markets during the recent housing price run up and decline we use reduced form panel data fixed effects models with robust ses to determine the impact of national and local effects on housing prices in 20 us cities across time a national home price index and mortgage rate are used to measure national impacts on the local markets a mix of socio economic variables estimates local impacts we find no results indicating that national trends lack relevance in local markets however we find wide support for the additional inclusion of local socio economic factors in all markets the findings are consistent with an environment in which national polices and trends influence all markets however local policymakers and investors can continue to expect geographic differences in market outcomes

discounting cognition and financial awareness new evidence from a change in the military retirement system the choice given military personnel between an immediate cash payment of 30 000 or a more generous retirement pension permits us to estimate individuals personal discount rates pdrs the resulting pdrs about 7 for enlisted personnel and 2 4 3 for officers are precise and are correlated with a variety of other financial behaviors the pdr is negatively related to educational attainment and the armed forces qualification test but cognition seems to operate through channels other than being better informed better informed individuals were not always measured to be more patient jel d91 d14

surprise surprise measuring firm level investment innovations abstract using the ifo investment survey for the german manufacturing sector we construct a forty year panel of firm level investment innovations surprises we document the cross sectional and time series properties of this panel and our main findings are the cross sectional dispersion of investment surprises is countercyclical as is their average within firm time series volatility and both are highly correlated this justifies in part strategies in the literature to use cross sectional moments for the calibration of heteroscedasticity at the same time the cross sectional dispersion of investment is procyclical suggesting a nonsmooth capital adjustment friction at the micro level there is substantial dispersion in within firm volatility a feature consistent with a recent literature on information frictions at the firm level finally the aforementioned second moments of investment innovations are granger caused by recessions but not vice versa rendering simple exogenous uncertainty shocks less plausible as drivers of business cycles

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

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

the fundamentals of land prices and urban growth abstract in a very simple model in which capital is durable and landowners have perfect foresight the price of urban land has four additive components the value of agricultural land rent the cost of conversion the value of accessibility and the value of expected future rent increases a growth premium in rapidly growing cities the growth premium may easily account for half of the average price of land and may create a large gap between the price of land at the boundary minus conversion cost and the value of agricultural land rent

the contribution of large and small employers to job creation in times of high and low unemployment we document a negative correlation at business cycle frequencies between the net job creation rate of large employers and the level of aggregate unemployment that is much stronger than for small employers the differential growth rate of employment between initially large and small employers has an unconditional correlation of 0 5 with the unemployment rate and varies by about 5 percent over the business cycle we exploit several datasets from the united states denmark and france both repeated cross sections and job flows with employer longitudinal information spanning the last four decades and several business cycles we discuss implications for theories of factor demand jel d22 e23 e32 j23 l25

uncertainty shocks and balance sheet recessions this paper investigates the origin and propagation of balance sheet recessions i first show that in standard models driven by tfp shocks the balance sheet channel disappears when agents can write contracts on the aggregate state of the economy optimal contracts sever the link between leverage and aggregate risk sharing eliminating the concentration of aggregate risk that drives balance sheet recessions i then show that uncertainty shocks can help explain this concentration of aggregate risk and drive balance sheet recessions even with contracts on aggregate shocks the mechanism is quantitatively important and i explore implications for financial regulation

firm level entry and exit dynamics over the business cycles abstract this paper presents a set of facts on the cyclicality of firm births and deaths in the u s during the period 1979 2013 asymmetry in the cyclicality between firm birth and firm death is observed aggregate firm birth is generally significantly procyclical while the counter cyclicality in firm death is ambiguous and sensitive to the choice of cyclical indicator such a pattern exists within the majority of sectors as well and is mainly driven by small firms young firms are the main contributors to the findings on firm death activity further examination along the time dimension discovers a reason for the contemporaneous cyclicality or lack thereof which can be documented as a new fact firm births positively lead the usual business cycle measures and firm deaths positively lag them moreover cyclicality in business openings and closings differs from establishment level to firm level due to the internal adjustment of continuing firms

self exciting effects of house prices on unit prices in australian capital cities this paper examines the long and short run relationship between australian house and unit prices across all capital cities over the period december 1995 to june 2015 we find that house and unit prices are cointegrated and based on the results of granger causality and generalised impulse responses that house prices significantly influence unit prices across all cities however bi directional causality responses exists only for major capital cities with the exception of brisbane we also for the first time apply self excited threshold models to explore the complex interplay between house and unit prices in australia we find that when the market for units is self excited or bullish the positive effects of house prices on unit prices are noticeably larger than otherwise there is a varying degree of herd mentality in the australian property market with sydney and darwin being the most and least excitable capital cities respectively

cross sectoral variation in the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks we estimate the volatility of plant level idiosyncratic shocks in u s manufacturing we measure the variation in revenue total factor productivity not explained by either industry or economy wide factors or by establishments characteristics we find that idiosyncratic shocks are much larger than aggregate shocks accounting for about 80 of the overall uncertainty faced by plants plants in the most volatile sector are subject to about six times as much idiosyncratic uncertainty as plants in the least volatile we provide evidence suggesting that idiosyncratic risk is higher in industries where the extent of creative destruction is likely to be greater

synchronisation and commonalities in metropolitan housing market cycles this paper examines the degree of commonalities present in the cyclical behaviour of the eight largest metropolitan housing markets in australia using two techniques originally proposed in the business cycle literature we firstly consider the degree of synchronisation present and secondly decompose the series into their permanent and cyclical components both empirical approaches reveal similar results sydney and melbourne are closely related to each other and are relatively segmented from the smaller metropolitan areas in contrast there is substantial evidence of commonalities in the cyclical behaviour of the remaining cities especially those on the eastern and southern coasts of australia

the business cycle macroeconomic shocks and the cross section the growth of uk quoted companies we bring to light a significant aspect of firm level heterogeneity over the business cycle analysing the responsiveness of firm growth quoted uk companies to aggregate shocks we find that the effects of aggregate shocks are more pronounced for firms in the middle range of growth rapidly growing and rapidly declining firms are less sensitive to aggregate shocks than firms in the interior of the growth range this is consistent with the fact that the higher moments of the distribution of firm growth rates have significant cyclical patterns these findings throw new light on growth of firms as well as on business cycle dynamics

the disintegrating canadian labour market the extent of the market then and now analysis of real wages for three occupations in 13 canadian cities for 1901 50 suggests canada had a national labour market at least until 1950 however analysis of real wages for 10 canadian cities for 1971 2000 yields little evidence favouring integration of canada s regional labour markets the apparent lack of labour market integration reflects a weakness of an approach that assumes markets are in equilibrium unemployment rates after 1970 suggest that some regional markets may be characterized by excess labour supply analysis of relative provincial unemployment rates yields evidence consistent with local labour force adjustment to changing labour market conditions jel classification e24 j61 le marche du travail en desintegration au canada l etendue du marche alors et maintenant les auteurs analysent les salaires reels pour trois occupations dans 13 villes canadiennes au cours de la periode 1901 50 et suggerent que le canada a joui d un marche du travail qui etait national tout au moins jusqu a 1950 toutefois l analyse des salaires reels dans 10 villes canadiennes au cours de la periode 1971 2000 ne fournit pas de resultats supportant l idee d integration des marches regionaux du travail on suggere que le manque apparent d integration du marche du travail est l effet d echo d une approche qui presume que les marches sont en equilibre la periode de l apres 1970 en est une ou les taux de chomage suggerent plutot que certains marches regionaux peuvent etre raisonnablement caracterises comme definis par une offre excedentaire de travail une analyse des taux de chomage provinciaux relatifs revele que la force de travail locale s ajuste aux conditions changeantes du marche du travail

financial fragility in the great moderation abstract a nascent literature explores the measurement of financial fragility this paper considers evidence for rising financial fragility during the 1984 2007 great moderation in the u s the literature suggests that macroeconomic stability combined with strong growth of credit to asset markets in asset prices and in credit relative to output are all indicators of rising financial fragility we show each of these trends in the great moderation we derive the testable implication that in the great moderation credit growth is driven more by past credit growth and less by output growth allen and gale 2000 relative to pre great moderation years results from a var model estimated on quarterly data for 1955 2007 are consistent with the hypothesis this invites a reinterpretation of the great moderation our methodology may help understand when a credit boom turns into a credit bubble and contributes to the development of methods of measuring financial fragility

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