comments on hodrick and srivastava in their paper the covariation of risk premiums and expected future spot exchange rates robert hodrick and sanjay srivastava provided a useful analysis of one of the key questions that have occupied the center stage of research in exchange rate economics in recent years various attempts have been made to account for the determinants and the statistical properties of the discrepancies between forward exchange rates and expected future spot rates a discrepancy which is frequently referred to as the risk premium in an earlier work e fama 1984 found that the covariance between the risk premium and the expected rate of change of the exchange rate was negative in their own contribution hodrick and srivastava clarify the theoretical circumstances under which the finding of the negative covariance can be rationalized and they demonstrate by means of alternative econometric techniques that fama s findings are robust in my subsequent comments i discuss some of the theoretical issues underlying the analysis as well as additional aspects concerning the empirical work

cross hedging and forward contract pricing of electricity we consider the problem of an electric power marketer offering a fixed price forward contract to provide electricity that it purchases from a potentially volatile and unpredictable fledgling spot energy market one option for the risk averse marketer who wants to hedge against the spot price volatility is to engage in cross hedging to reduce the contract s profit variance and to determine the forward contract price as a risk adjusted price the sum of a baseline price and a risk premium we show how the marketer can estimate the spot price relationship between two wholesale energy markets for the purpose of cross hedging as well as the optimal hedge and the forward contract s baseline price and risk premium

the role of information on retirement planning evidence from a field study i introduction modern financial planning is dominated by discussions of one topic retirement savings retirement planning behaviors are widely studied yet population data show perplexing patterns of savings especially among households who reasonably should expect to live long and healthy lives after separating from the workforce savings choices are increasingly focused on the decisions of individuals rather than on public plans or employer mandated pensions poterba 2014 however policymakers attempts to stimulate more individual level savings have not shown strong effects duflo et al 2007 one problem appears to be related to people failing to fully plan ahead for retirement and neglecting longer run financial management in general ameriks caplin and leahy 2003 according to the employee benefit research institute 2015 more than one in four workers have less than 1 000 in retirement savings fewer employees today have access to defined benefit pensions than they did in the past and instead rely on employer based 401 k savings accounts and nonemployer based individual retirement accounts iras munnell 2006 however participation rates remain low 43 of private sector workers of age 25 64 take part in retirement savings programs calabrese 2011 even among active savers there are concerns about how well people are able to manage their retirement accounts in ways that reflect optimal planning horizons several policies have been designed to increase participation in retirement plans first firm level programs requiring employees to opt out vs opt in to a 401 k plan have increased participation in retirement savings plans madrian and shea 2001 however as choi laibson and madrian 2011 highlight because individuals have heterogeneous savings preferences these default options may be costly to individuals as some might save more in the absence of the default and others might prefer to save less second government designed tax breaks for individuals investing in retirement accounts and increases in maximum income deferral limits for these accounts could increase retirement savings however income tax deductions and credits can be costly tax expenditures and individuals especially lower and middle income savers may not respond to these incentives engen gale and scholz 1996 third firms can try to help people better understand their savings options and make plans for retirement effectively lowering the costs of information with workshops and or counseling retirement planning requires information in order to form expectations about lifetime income years of work expected investment returns adjusted for risk and consumption levels in retirement people who lack information about these issues may fail to make a plan or proceed to design a plan based on incomplete information educational programs targeted to workers hold promise to help people recalibrate their expectations and shift their savings behavior well targeted financial education might facilitate people to pursue their individual retirement saving preferences in ways that default rules or incentives alone cannot this article studies the effect of financial education on retirement savings offered to employees in an online format online information offers several advantages over traditional seminars for example online courses can be delivered to a large audience and at a lower cost per participant than classroom delivery it also poses relatively low marginal costs to the employee because of the flexibility and convenience of the mode of delivery it may serve employees who would not attend in person sessions while participants in online education do not benefit from group interactions online delivery provides participants privacy to explore financial issues that they might shy away from in more public settings several studies document that employer based education is associated with improvements in employees financial knowledge clark and d ambrosio 2002 holland goodman and stich 2008 skimmyhorn forthcoming

testing for the absence of expected real profits from forward market speculation abstract this paper tests for the absence of expected real profits from forward market speculation it contrasts with the literature that has considered opportunities for expected nominal profit from speculation that is profits denominated in one of the currencies these studies assume money illusion on the part of market participants but this paper does not empirical results fail to find evidence of unexploited real profit opportunities

a feasible reform for the electricity supply industry in hong kong with the current scheme of control regulation for the hong kong electricity supply industry expiring in 2008 the government has sent out a consultation paper seeking views from the general public on its reform and possible future development this paper investigates the characteristics of the current agreement and the rationale for feasible reform of the hong kong esi it leads to a discussion on a proposed feasible reform using performance based regulation approach modeling and the associated implementation issues related to price capping risk analysis performance indices quality monitoring and governance

the british model in britain failing slowly in 1990 britain reorganised its electricity industry to run on competitive lines the british reforms are widely regarded as successful and the model used provides the basis for reforms of electricity industries worldwide the main reason for this perception of success is major reductions in the real price of electricity with no reduction in service quality this paper examines whether the reputation of the british reforms is justified it concludes that the reputation is not justified and that serious fundamental problems are beginning to emerge the central question is have the british reforms resulted in the creation of efficient wholesale and retail markets on this criterion the reforms have failed the wholesale market is dominated by obscure long term contracts privileged access to the market and self dealing within integrated generator retailers leaving the spot markets with minimal liquidity and unreliable prices the failure to develop an efficient wholesale market places the onus on consumers to impose competitive forces on electricity companies by switching regularly small consumers will not do this and they are paying too much for their power for the future there is a serious risk that the electricity industry will become a weakly regulated oligopoly with a veneer of competition

saving incentives for low and middle income families evidence from a field experiment with h r block this paper analyzes the effects of a large randomized field experiment carried out with h r block offering matching incentives for ira contributions at the time of tax preparation about 15 000 h r block clients in 60 offices in predominantly low and middle income neighborhoods in st louis were randomly offered a 20 percent match on ira contributions a 50 percent match or no match the control group brookings institute

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

merging electricity and environment politics of hong kong identifying the barriers from the ways that sustainability is defined abstract the present paper presents a study of the electricity policy of hong kong in an environmental political context through a critical review of the policy structure and rationale it identifies the barriers to developing a truly sustainable electricity policy system and is expected to shed light on the forthcoming electricity market reform in the territory the barriers stem from the path dependent institutional set ups that restrict a timely transformation of the roles of the actors and this is coupled with the government s treatment that does not look beyond these structural constraints overly appreciating scientific and economic rationalities than communicative actions the author is of the view that these are intensified by the sharp changes in the local political economy positive signs of change are dampened by the minimal progress in democratic development in the near future and the extension of the power companies monopolist status that will ruin the trust between the stakeholders compounding the guilt of those rigid regulatory constraints

the speculative efficiency hypothesis the hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets this paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact the term speculative efficiency is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis if a market is subject to efficient speculation the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price the expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

interest rates and currency prices in a two country world abstract this paper is a theoretical study of the determination of prices interest rates and currency exchange rates set in an infinitely lived two country world which is subject both to stochastic endowment shocks and to monetary instability formulas are obtained for pricing all equity claims nominally denominated bonds and currencies and these formulas are related to earlier closely related results in the theories of money finance international trade

the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement choices evidence from oregon abstract we use administrative data from oregon s public employees retirement system pers to study the effect of pension design on employer costs and employee retirement timing decisions during our 1990 2003 sample period pers calculates each member s retirement benefit using up to three different formulas defined benefit db defined contribution dc and a combination of db and dc and pers pays the maximum benefit for which the member is eligible we show that this maximum benefit calculation results in average ex post retirement benefits that are 54 higher than if they had been calculated using only the db formula and that employees receiving dc benefits are significantly more likely than employees receiving db benefits to retire before the plan s normal retirement age monte carlo simulations verify that the higher costs could have been predicted at the start of our sample period exploiting exogenous plan changes we show that employees respond to within year variation in their retirement incentives and consistent with peer effects that they respond more strongly to these incentives when more of their coworkers face similar incentives finally consistent with the emerging literature on financial mistakes by households we show that a small but noteworthy fraction of retirees would have benefited from shifting their retirements by as little as one month

the pricing of forward contracts for foreign exchange this paper investigates the nature of observed deviations from the unbiased expectations hypothesis in the forward foreign exchange market if these deviations are due to risk premia then the same premia should be observed in nominal bonds denominated in different currencies this condition imposes testable restrictions on the parameters of a multivariate regression model the empirical results are consistent with a world in which time varying risk premia cause the observed deviations from unbiased expectations

in search of the exchange risk premium a six currency test assuming mean variance optimization abstract a number of authors examining deviations of actual rates of currency depreciation from forward discounts have claimed to find evidence of risk premiums if these deviations are indeed partly due to risk premiums rather than being entirely due to expectational errors then they should be systematically related to those variables on which risk premiums are thought to depend finance theory tells us that if investors optimize with respect to mean and variance the risk premium depends in a specific way on 1 the supplies of assets denominated in the various currencies 2 the variance covariance matrix of the rates of return and 3 the coefficient of risk aversion the null hypothesis of this paper is that the coefficient of risk aversion is zero countries assets are perfect substitutes and risk premiums are nonexistent the alternative hypothesis is that rates of return are systematically related to asset supplies by a macroeconomic portfolio balance function the maximum likelihood technique used dominates previous attempts to find such a relationship in that the parameters of the portfolio balance function are constrained to depend on the variance covariance matrix as the finance theory says they should on the other hand the technique also dominates previous applications of the finance theory in that the expected returns are allowed to vary over time as the macroeconomic portfolio balance theory says they should the paper s finding is a statistical inability to reject the null hypothesis for a portfolio of six currencies although this could be due to low power in the test

financial knowledge and financial literacy at the household level there is evidence of a relation between numeracy and wealth held outside of pensions and social security with pensions and social security accounting for half of wealth at retirement and evidence that those with pensions save more in other forms one would expect to find knowledge of pensions and social security influencing retirement saving yet we find no evidence that knowledge of pensions and social security is related to nonpension non social security wealth to numeracy or that it plays an intermediate role in the numeracy wealth relation our findings raise questions about policies that would enhance numeracy to increase retirement saving

cost benefit analysis of reforming israel s electricity industry abstract in june 2003 the israeli government decided to reform the israeli electricity industry which is currently dominated by israel electric corporation iec a government owned vertically integrated electric utility the first step of the planned reform will be taken in 2006 when iec will be functionally separated into generation transmission local distribution and customer services immediately thereafter will be the second step which by 2012 will result in the deregulation and privatization of the wholesale generation and customer services transmission and distribution t and d services will remain regulated but will be available to all t and d users under mandatory open access this paper summarizes a cost benefit analysis of the government s reform plan relative to a regulated regime the government s plan even if carried out flawlessly may only yield a small net benefit however it entails a large increase in electricity producer profit and government tax receipt at the expense of electricity consumers a less than perfect transition to competition can easily wipe out the potential gain of the government plan market reform experience to date shows that electricity market reform can easily fail and the factors for success do not exist in israel since the outcome of a failing reform can be disastrous it will be imprudent to implement the government s plan in 2006 when the current electricity law expires hence we recommend performance based regulation for the period of 2006 2010 subject to an updated cost benefit analysis possible decentralization privatization and competition may follow

defined benefit pension plan distribution decisions by public sector employees abstract studies examining pension distribution choices have found that the tendency of private sector workers is to select lump sum distributions instead of life annuities resulting in leakage of retirement savings in the public sector defined benefit pensions usually offer lump sum distributions equal to employee contributions not the present value of the annuity thus for terminating employees that are younger or have shorter tenures the lump sum distribution amount may exceed the present value of the annuity we discuss the factors that may influence the choice to withdraw funds or not in this environment using administrative data from the north carolina state and local government retirement systems we find that over two thirds of public sector workers under age 50 separating prior to retirement from public plans in north carolina left their accounts open and did not request a cash distribution from the pension system within one year of separation furthermore the evidence suggests many separating workers particularly those with short tenure may be forgoing substantial monetary benefits due to lack of knowledge understanding or accessibility of benefits we find no evidence of a bias toward cash distributions for public employees in north carolina

a reexamination of the uncovered interest rate parity hypothesis abstract it is now widely known that the uncovered interest rate parity uip hypothesis which states that forward exchange rates are unbiased predictors of future spot exchange rates is generally rejected by empirical evidence we show in this paper by means of a cox et al 1985 model extended to a two country economy that a careful examination of the no arbitrage principle leads to a different formulation for this hypothesis roughly speaking this new formulation states that the expected future spot exchange rate is equal to the forward exchange rate multiplied by a term premium whose closed form expression can be derived moreover this multiplicative term premium reduces to 1 i e the standard uip hypothesis holds if and only if conditional variances are deterministic in short we show that rejection of the standard uip hypothesis is not surprising as long as arch effects have been evidenced in exchange rate data as a by product we provide a parametric and tractable specification for the so called risk premium i e the component of the expected exchange rate in excess of the forward exchange rate

the effects of perceived and actual financial literacy on financial behaviors a combined measure of financial literacy that includes both a test score of actual financial literacy and a self rating of overall financial literacy is used in this study we find that the combined measure appears to provide greater understanding about how financial literacy affects financial behaviors a large national survey of u s adults and households n 28 146 was used to investigate how this overall financial literacy is likely to change financial behaviors across five financial topics credit cards investments loans insurance and financial advice for each topic we include 4 5 financial behaviors 22 in total to demonstrate the consistency of the findings within and across topics although we are unable to identify a causal relationship the results from the probit analysis show that both actual and perceived financial literacy appear to influence financial behaviors and that perceived financial literacy may be as important as actual financial literacy jel d14 g00

the forward bias in the ecu peso risks vs fads and fashions abstract forward rates of european currencies against the private and official ecu exhibit a bias similar to the one found in other data the cumby obstfeld fama cof regression coefficients are systematically below unity and two thirds of them are negative we use the discount of the private ecu relative to the official ecu as a measure of market scepticism or mistrust in one view this sentiment is based on peso risk fears of realignments and possibly also the risk of a meltdown of the private ecu relative to the official one alternatively the discount just reflects fads and fashions dichotomizing the data on the basis of the size of the discount in the private ecu we find that the cof beta strongly depends on the degree of mistrust and that the negative cof coefficients are generated by typically less than 20 of the data but the pattern fits the fads and fashion view better than the peso theory if the sentiment factor contains a conventional risk premium at all then this risk premium is definitely not the one predicted by bansal bansal r 1997 an exploration of the forward premium puzzle in currency markets review of financial studies 10 369 403 nor is the sentiment factor proxying for huisman et al s huisman r koedijk k kool c nissen f 1998 extreme support for uncovered interest parity journal of international money and finance 17 211 228 transaction cost effects

post bretton woods deviations from purchasing power parity in g7 exchange rates an empirical exploration abstract exchange rates have deviated substantially and idiosyncratically from purchasing power parity ppp since the breakdown of bretton woods in this paper a model incorporating both traditional ppp and financial market variables is constructed and tested on the us dollar s six g7 exchange rates during the floating rate era empirical tests show that the model s common set of variables with consistent signs can explain the divergent behavior of g7 exchange rates during 1973 2 90 2 idiosyncracies are reflected in different subsets of the model s variables entering significantly into each exchange rate s regression the existence of stable relationships is demonstrated by the equations co integration

the covariation of risk premiums and expected future spot exchange rates abstract eugene fama 1984 analyzed the variability and the covariation of risk premiums and expected rates of depreciation we employ three statistical techniques that do not suffer from a potential bias in fama s analysis but we nevertheless conffirms his findings in contrast to his interpretation the results are not necessarily at variance with the predictions of a theoretical model of the risk premium increases in expected rates of depreciation of the dollar relative to five foreign currencies are positively correlated with increases in the expected profitability of purchasing these currencies in the forward market and risk premiums have larger variancies than expected rates of depreciation

retirement security in an aging population abstract elderly individuals exhibit wide disparities in their sources of income for those in the bottom half of the income distribution social security is the most important source of support program changes would directly affect their well being income from private pensions assets and earnings are relatively more important for higher income elderly individuals who have more diverse income sources the trend from private sector defined benefit to defined contribution pension plans has shifted responsibility for retirement security to individuals a significant subset of the population is unlikely to be able to sustain their standard of living in retirement without higher pre retirement saving

beating the foreign exchange market filter rule profits found in foreign exchange markets in the early days of the current managed float persist in later periods as shown by statistical tests developed and implemented here the test is consistent with but independent of a wide variety of asset pricing models the profits found cannot be explained by risk if risk premia are constant over time inclusion of the home foreign interest rate differential in computing profits has little effect on the comparison of filter returns to those of buy and hold in the early years of the generalized managed floating that began in march 1973 filter rule profits in excess of buy and hold were found for many countries logue sweeney and willett 18 dooley and shafer 6 cornell and dietrich 5 it was unclear however whether such profits indicated inefficiencies first it was not clear that risk was adequately handled in such tests and often risk was ignored second there was no evidence such profits would be available postsample and third there was no statistical test of the significance of these profits this paper uses the logic of risk return tradeoffs to analyze the role of risk in such tests and illustrates the logic in a discussion using the sharpe lintner capital asset pricing model capm although a breeden consumption based capm a merton intertemporal capm or an arbitrage pricing model apm could easily be used the paper develops a test of statistical significance appropriate to foreign exchange markets section i analyzing the rate of return on foreign exchange speculation less the foreign domestic interest rate differential the test explicitly assumes that risk premia are constant over the sample the excess rates of return observable in using filters in going from a risk free dollar asset to a risk free deutsche mark dm asset persist into the 1980 s section ii and this is true even when taking account of transactions costs it turns out that these results for the dm case do not depend very much on the interestrate differential but primarily on exchange rate behavior this is useful to know because it is often quite difficult to find matching interest rate data of high quality for a sample of nine other currencies using only exchange rates section iii shows that the excess returns made in the first 610 days of the float persist in the next 1 220 days into the 1980 s dooley and shafer 7 find similar persistence in experiments that do not use buy and hold and have no significance tests when filter rule profits have been found in spot exchange markets it has often been argued that the profits are due to risk this paper uses the capm to analyze rates of return both to buy and hold and to filter strategies it turns out that the claremont mckenna college and claremont graduate school arthur d warga douglas joines and thomas d willett offered helpful comments and ning ning koo provided research assistance

arbitrage cointegration and testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in financial markets we use a no arbitrage cost of carry asset pricing model to show that the existence of coin tegration between spot and forward futures prices depends on the time series properties of the cost of carry we argue that the conditions for cointegration are more likely to hold in currency markets than in commodity markets explaining many of the empirical results in the literature we also use this model to demonstrate why the forward rate forecast error the basis and the forward premium are serially correlated and to develop econometric tests ofthe unbiasedness hypothesis sometimes called the simple efficiency hypothesis in various financial markets the unbiasedness hypothesis is so prevalent in the finance liter ature that many tests for it have been developed we examine four of the common tests and and use our cointegration results to demonstrate why each of these tests should reject the null hypothesis of unbiasedness we find strong support for our hypothesis in the existing empirical literature

optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital abstract this paper is concerned with the structure and time consistency of optimal fiscal and monetary policy in an economy without capital in a dynamic context optimal taxation means distributing tax distortions over time in a welfare maximizing way for a barter economy our main finding is that with debt commitments of sufficiently rich maturity structure an optimal policy if one exists is time consistent in a monetary economy the idea of optimal taxation must be broadened to include an inflation tax and we find that time consistency does not carry over an optimal inflation tax requires commitment by rules in a sense that has no counterpart in the dynamic theory of ordinary excise taxes the reason time consistency fails in a monetary economy is that nominal assets should from a welfare maximizing point of view always be taxed away via an immediate inflation in a kind of capital levy this emerges as a new possibility when money is introduced into an economy without capital

money and asset prices in a cash in advance economy an asset pricing model with money introduced via a cash in advance constraint is presented the monetary velocity is variable hence money demand does not obey the trivial quantity equation the effects of disturbances in output and money growth on real balances the price level and interest rates are examined monetary policy has effects on real asset prices the fisher relation and the premium on nominal bonds are discussed the precise role of the timing of information and transactions for properties of price levels and interest rates are clarified

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

tests of rational expectations and no risk premium in forward exchange markets abstract this paper tests the simple efficiency hypothesis i e that traders have rational expectations and charge no risk premium in the forward exchange market it uses a statistical procedure which is consistent under a large class of heteroscedasticity and a set of data which takes into account the institutional features of the forward exchange market the results show that this procedure leads to stronger rejections of the simple efficiency hypothesis than do procedures using the standard assumption of homoscedasticity

baby boomer retirement security the roles of planning financial literacy and housing wealth abstract we compare wealth holdings across two cohorts of the health and retirement study the early baby boomers in 2004 and individuals in the same age group in 1992 levels and patterns of total net worth have changed relatively little over time though boomers rely more on housing equity than their predecessors most important planners in both cohorts arrive close to retirement with much higher wealth levels and display higher financial literacy than non planners instrumental variables estimates show that planning behavior can explain the differences in savings and why some people arrive close to retirement with very little or no wealth

electricity market reform failures uk norway alberta and california an analysis of electricity market reforms already taken place in the uk norway alberta canada and california usa leads to our overall conclusion that the introduction of a competitive generation market of itself has failed to deliver reliable service at low and stable prices the market reform failures are attributed to market power abuse by few dominant sellers especially at times of transmission congestion poor market design that invites strategic bidding by suppliers the lack of customer response to price spikes capacity shortage caused by demand growth not matched by new capacity and thin trading of forward and futures contracts that are critical for price discovery and risk management the paper then explains why an electricity market reform can easily fail to deliver the promised gains of better service at lower and more stable prices the policy implication is that an electric market reform can be extremely risky and may lead to a disastrous outcome thus it is imprudent to implement such a reform in countries with limited sites for newgeneration and no indigenous fuels e g israel and hong kong these countries should therefore consider introducing performance based regulation that can immediately benefit electricity consumers in terms of lower prices more stable prices improved reliability more choices while encouraging the electric sector to pursue efficient operation and investment r 2003 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

service quality in the electricity industry the role of privatization and managerial behavior abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between privatization and service quality in the electricity industry and tests the hypothesis that managerial behavior is a significant intervening factor the sample includes 31 italian distributors over the period 1998 2004 their quality performance is represented by continuity of supply an aspect of quality that is both contractible and regulated results of the empirical analysis suggest that the transfer of shareholdings to private investors does not lead to quality degradation the results also suggest that managerial dominance translates into a reduction in supply quality this effect is likely to be particularly strong for public sector utilities

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

the welfare economics of default options in 401 k plans default contribution rates for 401 k pension plans powerfully influence choices potential causes include opt out costs procrastination inattention and psychological anchoring using realistically parameterized models we show how the optimal default the magnitude of the welfare effects and the degree of normative ambiguity depend on the behavioral model the scope of the choice domain deemed welfare relevant the use of penalties for passive choice and other 401 k plan features while results are theory specific our analysis provides reasonably robust justifications for setting the default either at the highest contribution rate matched by the employer or contrary to common wisdom at zero jel d14 d91 j26 j32

the role of information and social interactions in retirement plan decisions evidence from a randomized experiment this paper analyzes a randomized experiment to shed light on the role of information and social interactions in employees decisions to enroll in a tax deferred account tda retirement plan within a large university the experiment encouraged a random sample of employees in a subset of departments to attend a benee ts information fair organized by the university by promising a monetary reward for attendance the experiment multiplied by more than e ve the attendance rate of these treated individuals relative to controls and tripled that of untreated individuals within departments where some individuals were treated tda enrollment e ve and eleven months after the fair was signie cantly higher in departments where some individuals were treated than in departments where nobody was treated however the effect on tda enrollment is almost as large for individuals in treated departments who did not receive the encouragement as for those who did we provide three interpretations differential treatment effects social network effects and motivational reward effects to account for these results

forward foreign exchange rates expected spot rates and premia a signal extraction approach in this paper we implement a methodology to identify and measure premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange that involves application of signal extraction techniques from the engineering literature diagnostic tests indicate that these methods are quite successful in capturing the essence of the time series properties of premium terms the estimated premium models indicate that premia show a certain degree of persistence over time and that more than half the variance in the forecast error that results from the use of current forward rates as predictors of future spot rates is accounted for by variation in premium terms the methodology can be applied straightforwardly to the measurement of unobservables in other financial markets there exists a growing body of empirical research on premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange conditional on the hypothesis that the foreign exchange market is efficient or rational the existence of time varying premia has been documented in the literature by fama 6 hansen and hodrick 10 11 hodrick and srivastava 15 16 hsieh 171 and korajczyk 20 frankel 9 fails to identify such premia and domowitz and hakkio 51 obtain different results for different currencies

exchange rate risk premiums abstract a state space model which allows for the covariation of risk premiums and unexpected rates of depreciation is used to study exchange rate risk premiums we find that exchange rate risk premiums have a high degree of persistence and the covariance of risk premiums and unexpected rates of depreciation is negative regressions of the estimated risk premium on its determinants implied by the equilibrium model of lucas 1982 show limited support for the model jel f31

financial literacy financial education and downstream financial behaviors policy makers have embraced financial education as a necessary antidote to the increasing complexity of consumers financial decisions over the last generation we conduct a meta analysis of the relationship of financial literacy and of financial education to financial behaviors in 168 papers covering 201 prior studies we find that interventions to improve financial literacy explain only 0 1 of the variance in financial behaviors studied with weaker effects in low income samples like other education financial education decays over time even large interventions with many hours of instruction have negligible effects on behavior 20 months or more from the time of intervention correlational studies that measure financial literacy find stronger associations with financial behaviors we conduct three empirical studies and we find that the partial effects of financial literacy diminish dramatically when one controls for psychological traits that have been omitted in prior research or when one uses an instrument for financial literacy to control for omitted variables financial education as studied to date has serious limitations that have been masked by the apparently larger effects in correlational studies we envisage a reduced role for financial education that is not elaborated or acted upon soon afterward we suggest a real but narrower role for just in time financial education tied to specific behaviors it intends to help we conclude with a discussion of the characteristics of behaviors that might affect the policy maker s mix of financial education choice architecture and regulation as tools to help consumer financial behavior this paper was accepted by uri gneezy behavioral economics

wealth accumulation and the propensity to plan why do similar households end up with very different levels of wealth we show that differences in the attitudes and skills with which they approach e nancial planning are a signie cant factor we use new and unique survey data to assess these differences and to measure each household s propensity to plan we show that those with a higher such propensity spend more time developing e nancial plans and that this shift in planning is associated with increased wealth these e ndings are consistent with broad psychological evidence concerning the benee cial impacts of planning on goal pursuit those with a high propensity to plan may be better able to control their spending and thereby achieve their goal of wealth accumulation we e nd direct evidence supporting this effortful self control channel in the very strong relationship we uncover between the propensity to plan and budgeting behavior

savings incentives for low and moderate income families in the united states why is the saver s credit not more effective this paper uses data from the largest tax preparer in the united states to estimate the impact of the saver s credit a us federal program providing financial incentives to encourage retirement savings on the decision to contribute to an ira it finds significant but very modest effects this is contrasted with results from a field experiment showing much larger impacts of clearly presented matching incentives various explanations are discussed for why the saver s credit is not more effective jel h00 h31 c93 d14

why do individuals choose defined contribution plans evidence from participants in a large public plan abstract we examine individual choices between a defined contribution dc and a defined benefit db retirement plan at a large public employer we find sensible patterns with regard to standard economic and demographic factors the probability of choosing the dc plan decreases with the relative financial generosity of the db plans versus the dc plan and rises with education and income using a survey of participants we find that the ability to control for beliefs preferences and other variables not easily obtainable from administrative or standard household surveys increases the explanatory power over seven fold among the important factors in the db dc pension choice are respondent attitudes about risk return tradeoffs financial literacy return expectations and political risk we also find that individuals make sensible choices based on what they believe to be true about the plans but that these beliefs about plan parameters are often wrong thus leading to possibly sub optimal decisions finally we provide evidence that individuals preferences over plan attributes e g the degree of control provided are even more important determinants of the db dc decision than expected outcomes e g the relative generosity of the plans

a further assessment of the hong kong government s proposed post 2008 regulatory regime for local electricity utilities abstract the current regulatory contract between the hong kong government and the two local power suppliers will expire in 2008 to elicit constructive ways to refine this regulatory contract upon its expiration in two years the hong kong government recently issued a public consultation paper an earlier viewpoint by woo horowitz and tishler 2006 warns that if the proposals provided in this consultation paper are fully adopted it will do more harm than benefiting the industry while its concern is valid that viewpoint has not suggested specific improvements of the existing arrangement and how incumbent firms incentives to invest will not be harmed under the new arrangement hence this viewpoint contributes to hong kong electricity policy debate by filling this gap with the hope of aiding the regulator to better regulate the market in the years after the current contract s expiration

worker retirement responses to pension incentives do they respond to pension wealth abstract pension enhancements generate pension wealth spikes at the eligibility milestones i analyze two major enhancements that generated different gains in pension wealth for eligible workers the responsiveness of retirement behavior to these enhancements depends on how well workers understand their pension incentives to test the retirement response to pension wealth i use administrative data from missouri teachers and leverage variation in enhancement impacts on teacher pension wealth owing to differences in teachers entering ages i find that retirements respond strongly to pension enhancements but the strength of the response does not align with their pecuniary value my findings contribute to a growing body of research showing that workers have imperfect knowledge of their pension benefits and they use imprecise information to make retirement timing decisions

bilateral exchange rates and risk premia abstract the paper develops a theoretical model of the risk premium in a bilateral exchange rate representative agents in both countries are assumed to hold open positions in foreign exchange together with risky assets denominated in their own currencies also past surpluses in the current account of the balance of payments lead to net foreign asset positions which may partially be covered in the forward markets our two period mean variance model for optimizing investors is combined with standard assumption about the behavior of real exchange rates to give a reduced form equation for the discrepancies between spot rates and lagged forward rates the model is tested for the dollar dm dollar sterling and dollar yen exchange rates using monthly data for the period 1976 86 the null hypothesis of no risk premium is rejected for each of the currencies reported

common stochastic trends between forward and spot exchange rates abstract the common trend analyses between the forward rate f t and the corresponding future spot rate of the same currency s t 1 have raised several issues notably the sensitivity of the cointegrating relation to a constant term and lag lengths and the non stationarity of the risk premium this paper addresses these issues more rigorously using the daily exchange rate of the pound sterling vis a vis five major currencies viz the canadian dollar french franc german mark japanese yen and us dollar the appropriate deterministic term in the cointegrating space is identified through empirical tests a robust cointegrating relation is found between f t and s t 1 however the hypothesis of unbiasedness of forward rate could not be sustained an alternative measure of risk premium is suggested and its stationarity is confirmed

a critical assessment of the hong kong government s proposed post 2008 regulatory regime for local electricity utilities abstract in december 2005 the hong kong government issued a consultation paper on future development of the electricity markets in hong kong stage ii consultation proposing a post 2008 regulatory regime upon the expiration of the existing regulatory contract between the hong kong government and each of the two local electricity utilities we assess the proposal using the criteria of safe reliable and environmentally friendly service at the lowest rates that will allow the utilities reasonable returns on their investments we caution that if fully adopted the highly risky proposal may lead to less reliable service without the compensating benefits to the environment

electricity tariffs in hong kong what went wrong and what can we do about it the hong kong economy has undergone radical changes over the past two decades and as a result profoundly affected the electricity supply industry the level of excess capacity maintained by the two vertically integrated utilities and the tariffs they charged are both one of the highest among all developed countries and they are the adverse results of the scheme of control regulation what happened in the local electricity market has drawn much criticism among researchers and consumer groups and major reform of the entire market is being suggested this paper outlines the structure of the electricity supply industry and its regulatory arrangement in hong kong and discusses the problems and inefficiencies caused by the specific type of regulation without compromising efficiency a number of policy alternatives are proposed with a view to rectify the current problems

an analysis of intertemporal pricing for forward foreign exchange contracts an asset pricing model with an unobservable time varying risk premium is used to price forward foreign exchange contracts specifically the term spectrum of forward foreign exchange contracts is examined in order to focus on country specific and maturityspecific information the testable restrictions imposed by the model are consistent with both cross country and cross maturity forward contracts except at the short end of the maturity spectrum for cross country forward exchange rates this indicates that the intertemporal model is relatively robust in valuing forward contracts of different maturities and for different exchange rates but that it may fail when there are significant short term country specific shocks theoretical and empirical studies have demonstrated that the forward exchange rate incorporates a time varying risk premium in addition to an expected future spot exchange rate recent works by fama 9 and hodrick and srivastava 21 reveal the importance of the risk premium by showing that the variability in risk premiums exceeds the variability in expected change in spot exchange rates these results are very general in that they are based on the definition that equates the forward exchange rate to the expected future spot exchange rate and a risk premium term a logical but more demanding next step is to model and conduct specification tests of the risk premium itself the purpose of this paper is to use an intertemporal latent variable assetpricing model ilvm to examine the risk return characteristics of the term structure of forward foreign exchange contracts more specifically the ilvm is used to price various bilateral dollar forward exchange contracts for each maturity as well as the different maturities for each bilateral forward exchange contract the ilvm was first utilized by hansen and hodrick 16 and hodrick and srivastava 20 to examine forward exchange risk premiums the two studies are however confined to just one month forward exchange contracts in addition the studies yield conflicting results the application of the ilvm to other

100 bills on the sidewalk suboptimal investment in 401 k plans we identify employees at seven companies whose 401 k investment choices are dominated because they are contributing less than the employer matching contribution threshold despite being vested in their match and being able to make penalty free 401 k withdrawals for any reason because they are older than 59 at the average firm 36 of match eligible employees over 59 forego arbitrage profits that average 1 6 of their annual pay or 507 a survey educating employees about the free lunch they are foregoing raised contribution rates by a statistically insignificant 0 67 percent of income among those completing the survey

multiple maturities and time varying risk premia in forward exchange markets abstract this paper derives the necessary conditions for an intertemporal optimization problem faced by an international investor who can enter forward contracts of several maturity dates and simultaneously borrow in domestic money markets the model parameters are estimated and the overidentifying restrictions are tested using hansen s proposed gmm technique the restrictions are strongly rejected when forward premia are used as instruments the risk neutral specification is rejected when expenditures on non durables and services are used as the consumption measure possible explanations for these rejections are provided

premia in forward foreign exchange as unobserved components a note we reconsider the signal extraction approach to measuring premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange put forward by wolff in which the difference between the forward rate and the associated future spot rate is modeled as an autoregressive moving average arma model for the risk premium buried in a white noise forecast error we point out that an arma model for the risk premium is not always identifiable from information on the difference between the forward rate and the future spot rate only we present solutions to the problem of identification and show how the model for the risk premium can be estimated in a direct way provided that the identification problem is solved for reason of comparison we use the series analyzed by wolff to estimate the models for risk premia the results confirm the earlier finding that premia in forward exchange exhibit a certain degree of persistence over time

market microstructure effects of government intervention in the foreign exchange market as asymmetric information model of the bid ask spread is developed for a foreign exchange market subject to occasional government interventions traditional tests of the unbiasedness of the forward rate as a predictor of the future spot rate are shown to be inconsistent when the rates are measured as the average of their respective bid and ask quotes larger bid ask spreads on fridays are documented reliable evidence of asymmetric bid ask spreads for all days of the week albeit more pronounced on fridays are presented the null hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate continues to be rejected the regression slope coefficients increase toward unity however indicating a less variable risk premium

conditional variance and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract we investigate the existence of a risk premium in the foreign exchange market based on the conditional variance of market forecast errors the forecast errors are assumed to follow the arch process introduced by engle 1982 estimation and diagnostic testing of the model are discussed and results are presented for the currencies of the united kingdom france germany japan and switzerland