resolving new keynesian anomalies with wealth in the utility function at the zero lower bound the new keynesian model predicts that output and inflation collapse to implausibly low levels and that government spending and forward guidance have implausibly large effects to resolve these anomalies we introduce wealth into the utility function the justification is that wealth is a marker of social status and people value status since people partly save to accrue social status the euler equation is modified as a result when the marginal utility of wealth is sufficiently large the dynamical system representing the zero lower bound equilibrium transforms from a saddle to a source which resolves all the anomalies

temptation and commitment in the laboratory temptation and self control in intertemporal choice environments are receiving increasing attention in the theoretical economics literature nevertheless there remains a scarcity of empirical evidence from controlled environments informing behavior under repeated temptations this is unfortunate in light of the fact that in many natural environments the same temptation must be repeatedly resisted this paper fills that gap by reporting data from a novel laboratory study of economic decisions under repeat temptations subjects are repeatedly offered an option with instantaneous benefit that also entails a substantial reduction to overall earnings we show that this option is tempting in the sense that a substantial fraction of our subjects incur pecuniary costs to eliminate the choice and thus commit to not choosing the tempting alternative we compare the timing and price elasticity of these commitment decisions to predictions from existing theoretical models of decision under temptation our data are broadly consistent with theory with the notable exception that commitment often occurs with delay rather than at the first opportunity moreover the timing of commitment is significantly impacted by the cost of the commitment device the patterns we report have direct implications for economic theory and are a first step toward designing mechanisms that promote prudent economic decisions under temptation

wage differentials between the public and private sectors abstract public sector employment and the tax pressure has grown very rapidly in denmark in recent years this paper discusses a new policy option for government using its role as a dominant employer to reduce relative public sector wages the paper contains an empirical analysis of wage differences between the public and the private sectors in denmark using a longitudinal data set covering the years 1976 1985 fixed effect regressions show that a wage twist policy of this type has been used in these years one of the consequences of a wage twist policy in the public sector is recruitment and retention problems for public employees

lifecycle consumption under different income profiles evidence and theory abstract we report on a series of economic decision making experiments exploring how individuals make lifecycle consumption and saving plans when they face different income profiles representing different pension replacement rates we aim to assess whether variations in pension replacement rates might aid or hinder individuals ability to make good lifecycle consumption and saving plans we find that pension replacement rates matter for subjects experimental payoffs and consumption behavior in particular our treatment with a 100 pension replacement rate yields the highest experimental payoff and more subjects in this treatment choose the status quo strategy of consuming endowments in every period we show that a model of rational inattention is useful for explaining subjects responses to different pension replacement rates

micro and macro labor supply elasticities a reassessment of conventional wisdom the response of aggregate labor supply to various changes in the economic environ ment is central to many economic issues especially the optimal design of tax policies conventional wisdom based on studies in the 1980s and 1990s has long held that the analysis of micro data leads one to conclude that aggregate labor supply elasticities are quite small in this paper we argue that this conventional wisdom does not hold up to empirically reasonable and relevant extensions of simple life cycle models that served as the basis for these conclusions in particular we show that several pieces of conventional wisdom fail in the presence of human capital accumulation or labor supply decisions that allow for adjustment along both the extensive and intensive margin we conclude that previous estimates of small labor supply elasticities based on micro data are fully consistent with large aggregate labor supply elasticities jel d91 e24 j22

job satisfaction trade unions and exit voice revisited many studies have found that unionized workers express less job satisfaction than nonunion workers the exit voice explanation of this phenomenon is that dissatisfied nonunion workers tend to qui

on the structural interpretation of the smets wouters risk premium shock this article shows that the risk premium shock in smets and wouters 2007 can be interpreted as a structural shock to the demand for safe and liquid assets such as short term u s treasury securities several implications of this interpretation are discussed

eliciting temptation and self control through menu choices a lab experiment unlike present biased individuals agents who suffer self control costs as in gul and pesendorfer 2001 may choose to restrict their choice set even when they expect to resist temptation to identify these self control types i design an experiment in which the temptation was to read a story during a tedious task the identification strategy relies on a two step procedure first i measure commitment demand by eliciting subjects preferences over menus that did or did not allow access to the story i then implement preferences using a random mechanism allowing to observe subjects who faced the choice yet preferred commitment a quarter to a third of subjects can be classified as self control types according to their menu preferences when confronted with the choice virtually all of them behaved as they anticipated and resisted temptation these findings suggest that policies restricting the availability of tempting options could have larger welfare benefits than predicted by standard models of present bias

oil indexation market fundamentals and natural gas prices an investigation of the asian premium in natural gas trade abstract a heated debate has arisen over whether the asian premium i e higher prices in asia than elsewhere in natural gas trade is due to price discrimination or different market fundamentals determining the origin of this premium can help to guide the gas industries and policy makers in asia especially when the traditional oil indexed price mechanism fades away using a new systemic time series approach this paper explores the extent to which oil prices and market fundamentals contribute to variations in gas prices in japan the united states and germany we find clear cross country differences and time varying patterns gas prices are much less affected by supply and demand factors than oil prices in japan and germany whereas these factors are more important than oil prices in the us market which has a pricing hub through rolling windows and subsample analysis we discover that oil prices were important in japan and germany but the level of importance has declined significantly in recent years though the contribution of fundamentals does not change much the results show that asian gas prices are determined more by oil prices than by the market fundamentals thus the asian premium is more likely due to this oil indexed pricing mechanism rather than market fundamentals this suggests that developing asia s benchmark prices through trading hubs with a better reflection of regional specific fundamentals can lead to a more efficient allocation of gas resources

entrepreneurship social mobility and income redistribution in south india development economists have been preoccupied with the problem of increasing the size of the gnp pie to the relative neglect of its distribution despite the recent disenchantment with the viewpoint that all classes share in the benefits of industrial growth empirical data on the distribution of income business opportunity and economic power are in short supply many of the studies on entrepreneurship and economic development when they are not apologetics for ruthless capitalist exploitation as paul baran suggests extol the achievements of the capitalist entrepreneur without examining class origins and monopoly advantage joseph schumpeter sees entrepreneurs irrespective of class origin as heroic figures with the dream and will to found a private kingdom to conquer adversity to achieve success for its own sake and to experience the joy of creation for gustav papanek 1967 the private entrepreneur who is frugal diligent far sighted remarkably able and willing to take political risks is in large part responsible for the success of pakistan in achieving rapid industrialization

the power of forward guidance revisited in recent years central banks have increasingly turned to forward guidance as a central tool of monetary policy especially as interest rates around the world have hit the zero lower bound standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance is extremely powerful promises about far future interest rates have huge effects on current economic outcomes and these effects grow with the horizon of the forward guidance we show that the power of forward guidance is highly sensitive to the assumption of complete markets if agents face uninsurable income risk and borrowing constraints a precautionary savings effect tempers their responses to changes in future interest rates as a consequence forward guidance has substantially less power to stimulate the economy in addition we show that the business cycle dynamics of our incomplete markets model differ substantially from its complete market counterpart this contrasts with the well known results of krusell and smith 1998 we present approximate representations that can easily be incorporated into standard business cycle models

forward guidance without common knowledge abstract how does the economy respond to news about future policies or future fundamentals standard practice assumes that agents have common knowledge of such news and face no uncertainty about how others will respond relaxing this assumption attenuates the general equilibrium effects of news and rationalizes a form of myopia at the aggregate level we establish these insights within a class of games which nests but is not limited to the new keynesian model our results help resolve the forward guidance puzzle offer a rationale for the front loading of fiscal stimuli and illustrate more broadly the fragility of predictions that rest on long series of forward looking feedback loops jel d82 d83 d84 e12 e23 e52 e62

a panel data model for subjective information on household income growth abstract subjective expectations about future income changes are analyzed using household panel data the models used are extensions of existing binary choice panel data models to the case of ordered response we consider static models with random and fixed individual effects we also look at a dynamic random effects model which includes a measure for permanent and transitory income we find that income change expectations strongly depend on realized income changes in the past those whose income fell are more pessimistic than others while those whose income rose are more optimistic expected income changes are also significantly affected by employment status family composition permanent income and past expectations expectations are then compared to the head of household s ex post perception of the realized income change for the same period the main finding is that rational expectations are rejected and that in particular households whose income has decreased in the past underestimate their future income growth

temptation and taxation we study optimal taxation when consumers have temptation and self control problems embedding the class of preferences developed by gul and pesendorfer into a standard macroeconomic setting we first prove in a two period model that the optimal policy is to subsidize savings when consumers are tempted by excessive impatience the savings subsidy improves welfare because it makes succumbing to temptation less attractive we then study an economy with a long but finite horizon which nests as a special case the phelps pollak laibson multiple selves model thereby providing guidance on how to evaluate welfare in this model we prove that when period utility is logarithmic the optimal savings subsidies increase over time for any finite horizon moreover as the horizon grows large the optimal policy prescribes a constant subsidy in contrast to the well known chamley judd result

temptation and self control some evidence and applications this paper studies the empirical relevance of temptation and self control using household level data from the consumer expenditure survey we construct an infinite horizon consumption savings model that allows but does not require temptation and self control in preferences in the presence of temptation a wealth consumption ratio in addition to consumption growth becomes a determinant of the asset pricing kernel and the importance of this additional pricing factor depends on the strength of temptation to identify the presence of temptation we exploit an implication of the theory that a more tempted individual should be more likely to hold commitment assets such as individual retirement account ira or 401 k accounts our estimation provides empirical support for temptation preferences based on our estimates we explore some quantitative implications of this class of preferences for capital accumulation in a neoclassical growth model and the welfare cost of the business cycle

the effect of wealth on individual and household labor supply evidence from swedish lotteries abstract we study the effect of wealth on labor supply using the randomized assignment of monetary prizes in a large sample of swedish lottery players winning a lottery prize modestly reduces earnings with the reduction being immediate persistent and quite similar by age education and sex a calibrated dynamic model implies lifetime marginal propensities to earn out of unearned income from 0 17 at age 20 to 0 04 at age 60 and labor supply elasticities in the lower range of previously reported estimates the earnings response is stronger for winners than their spouses which is inconsistent with unitary household labor supply models jel d14 j22 j31

alcohol and self control a field experiment in india this paper studies alcohol consumption among low income workers in india in a 3 week field experiment the majority of 229 cycle rickshaw drivers were willing to forgo substantial monetary payments in order to set incentives for themselves to remain sober thus exhibiting demand for commitment to sobriety randomly receiving sobriety incentives significantly reduced daytime drinking while leaving overall drinking unchanged i find no evidence of higher daytime sobriety significantly changing labor supply productivity or earnings in contrast increasing sobriety raised savings by 50 percent an effect that does not appear to be solely explained by changes in income net of alcohol expenditures

oil shocks and their impact on energy related stocks in china abstract this paper contributes to the current literature by adopting time varying conditional correlation and asset pricing models to discover how the dynamics of international oil prices affect energy related stock returns in china after conditioning for structural instability the results show a much stronger relation following the 2008 financial crisis we argue that this reflects the fact that investors in the chinese stock market especially for energy related stocks are more sensitive to the shocks in international crude oil market

a dual self model of impulse control we propose that a simple dual self model gives a unified explanation for several empirical regularities including the apparent time inconsistency that has motivated models of quasi hyperbolic discounting and rabin s paradox of risk aversion in the large and small the model also implies that self control costs imply excess delay as in the o donoghue and rabin models of quasi hyperbolic utility and it explains experimental evidence that increased cognitive load makes temptations harder to resist the base version of our model is consistent with the gul pesendorfer axioms but we argue that these axioms must be relaxed to account for the effect of cognitive load

international gas pricing in europe and asia a crisis of fundamentals abstract in continental europe and lng importing asia international gas prices reflect the market fundamentals of the 1970s 1990s when gas was replacing oil products and crude oil in energy balances by the end of the 2000s fundamentals in both these regions had changed significantly but gas price formation mechanisms had not this created major problems for buyers locked into long term contracts indexed to crude oil and oil product prices which had risen to levels far above gas market fundamentals by 2013 the transition to hub based pricing was well advanced in europe and dominant in the large markets in the north west of the continent in asia the crisis of fundamentals was only just starting to be addressed with a transition to market pricing an urgent imperative but still a distant prospect

the effect of natural gas shortages on the mexican economy abstract the mexican economy experienced a shortage of natural gas from the second quarter of 2012 through the second half of 2013 in order to deal with this problem the state owned national supplier of natural gas pemex implemented a system that restricts the amount of natural gas used by the manufacturing sector with this information we have constructed a shortage index that represents the percentage of natural gas restricted per month in each region we quantify the effect of natural gas shortages on the manufacturing sector and gdp using a panel data model with state and time fixed effects we estimate that the natural gas shortage reduced mexican gdp annual growth rate by 0 28 percentage points in the second quarter of 2013

estimating and forecasting the real prices of crude oil a data rich model using a dynamic model averaging dma approach given that oil price fluctuations have been of great interest for macroeconomics in the recent years due to its important implications for future inflation economic growth and policy making the aim of this paper is to estimate and forecast west texas intermediate wti crude oil prices using a large monthly dataset that covers the period from march 1983 to december 2011 to achieve this aim forecasting with factor models offers a usual approach that utilizes large datasets however a forecasting model which simply includes all factors in state space equation and does not allow for time varying may be not suitable with a highly volatile market such as oil market to overcome these limitations an approach that accounts both for parameter and model uncertainty is employed in particular this study uses the dynamic model averaging dma approach suggested by koop and korobilis 2012 the key element of the dma approach is that it allows both for model and parameter to vary at each point of time by doing so the dma is robust to structural breaks empirical findings show that dma approach outperforms any other alternative model used in the forecasting exercise results also show that there is model but not parameter variation in this oil price forecasting exercise finally the findings suggest that the dma approach provides a better proxy of expected spot prices than future prices

flexible contracts and subjective well being theory suggests that when workers choose between permanent and flexible contracts their utility should tend to equalize across contract types new estimates of job satisfaction show the critical role played by unmeasured worker heterogeneity they reveal that flexible contracts are a strong negative determinant of satisfaction with job security but are often a positive determinant of other dimensions of job satisfaction as a consequence flexible contracts have either a weak negative influence or no influence on overall job satisfaction moreover flexible contracts generally have no impact on overall life satisfaction of the employed these results appear broadly consistent with the presence of equalizing differences jel j28 j41

have oil and gas prices got separated abstract this paper applies vector error correction models that show that oil and natural gas prices decoupled around 2009 before 2009 us and uk gas prices had a long term equilibrium with crude prices to which gas prices always reverted after exogenous shocks both us and uk gas prices adjusted to the crude oil price individually and departure from the equilibrium gas price on one continent resulted in a similar departure on the other after an exogenous shock the adjustment between us and uk gas prices took approximately 20 weeks on average and the convergence was mediated mainly by crude oil with a necessary condition that arbitrage across the atlantic was possible after 2009 however the uk gas price has remained integrated with oil price but the us gas price decoupled from crude oil price and the european gas price as the atlantic arbitrage has halted the oversupply from shale gas production has not been mitigated by north american export as there has been no liquefying and export capacity

feature flexible forms of employment boon and bane in recent decades economic policy makers across europe have sought to increase labour market flexibility by promoting the use of temporary employment the articles in this feature provide new results on how fixed term and agency work contracts affect firm productivity and how the segments of two tier labour markets interact this article points to a possible trade off between efficiency and equity when deregulating labour markets taken together the evidence presented in this feature suggests that flexible forms of employment can be both a boon and a bane for labour markets and for society as a whole

forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures using har type models with structural breaks abstract we introduce sixteen har type volatility models with structural breaks and estimate their parameters by applying 5 min high frequency transaction data for wti crude oil futures we find significant structural breaks in the volatility of crude oil futures additionally the historical realized volatility continuous sample path variation negative realized semivariance signed jump signed semi jump and leverage components contain substantial and salient information for forecasting the volatility of crude oil futures then we use loss functions to assess the forecasting performance of these sixteen new models and finally rank these models using the promethee ii method our results indicate that different models exhibit different predictive power in forecasting the 1 day 1 week and 1 month volatility of crude oil futures of the new har type models the new har rsv model performs best at forecasting the 1 day and 1 month volatilities whereas the new har cj best forecasts the 1 week volatility

measuring self control problems a structural estimation we perform a structural estimation of the preference parameters in a buffer stock consumption model augmented with temptation disutility we adopt a two stage method of simulated moments methodology to match our simulated moments with those observed in the us survey of consumer finances to identify the parameters we use liquid and quasi liquid retirement wealth holdings at different ages as target moments we find evidence of a significantly positive degree of temptation and estimates under the unrestricted model are more precise than estimates under the restricted model with no temptation overall a model with temptation preferences explains better the observed target moments

de financialization of commodities evidence from stock crude oil and natural gas markets abstract in order to investigate whether the crude oil and natural gas market volatility is influenced by the volatility in the stock market or whether these different variables move all together we introduce the volatility threshold dynamic conditional correlations vt dcc approach to investigate the spillover effect of stock market volatility index vix vstoxx on crude oil and natural gas markets during 1999 2015 and make the correlation dynamics dependent on conditional variance values through a threshold grid search algorithm by detecting one endogenous break point in the raw series we identify two clusters one in 2008 and another in 2014 due to the financial crisis and the structural low oil prices linked to changing fundamentals respectively also the u s henry hub gas seems to be associated with the stock market volatility indexes contrary to the european nbp gas which is linked to the brent besides regarding the volatility behaviors of our series the four energy variables violate their thresholds at similar moments and the stock market vix and vstoxx exhibit logically similarities co movements are detectable as well between the vix and crude oil series when investigating the volatility extracted from the garch model in addition the block dcc estimates provide ample evidence of similarities in the correlation dynamics between the crude oil and stock volatility series it should be noted that the modeling framework proposed in this paper represents a useful tool for the study of cross market contagion

financialization fundamentals and the time varying determinants of us natural gas prices abstract increasing empirical evidence shows that natural gas prices have decoupled from oil prices yet there remains an open question as to what are the determining factors of natural gas prices following the demise of oil indexation this paper aims to address this question using a dynamic model averaging dma approach dma can help identify key important price determinants and importantly does so within a time varying framework allowing us to document how the set of determinants has evolved in response to key market changes using time series data between 2001 and 2018 we demonstrate a clear declining role of oil prices in the natural gas pricing mechanism verifying the demise of indexation market or fundamental factors such as weather demand and supply conditions have at the same time become more important in addition our results illustrate an increasing role from financial markets captured by speculation related variables providing empirical evidence to support the recent literature on commodity market financialization the rising impact of speculation to natural gas prices introduces questions over how to balance market efficiency and risk management in the post indexation regime

the impact of the shale gas revolution on the u s and japanese natural gas markets we investigated whether the increase in the us shale gas production changed the structures of the us and japanese natural gas markets using market data for the period 2002 5 2012 5 our analysis consists of a structural break test and market integration analysis the bai and perron structural break test detected a break point of natural gas prices and consumption in 2005 as well as other external shocks hurricane katrina and the lehman shock that are irrelevant to shale gas development we eliminated the impact of these shocks by separating the data set using the breaks identified in our analysis we found the breaks skewed the estimation a market linkage existed between the us and japanese markets in the original data set while it did not in the separated data the vector autoregressive var model also indicated a significant change before and after the break point the us market had a one side influence on the japanese market before 2005 but the influence disappeared after 2005 our results implied that the shale gas revolution triggered by the increase in shale gas production in 2005 caused the change in the relationship between the us and japanese natural gas markets

establishment size job satisfaction and the structure of work this paper empirically investigates a the relationship between establishment size and the degree of flexibility in the work environment and b the extent to which establishment size differences in workers satisfaction with their jobs can be accounted for by differences in their work environment the main findings are that large establishments do organize production in a less flexible fashion than do smaller establishments and that observed lower levels of job satisfaction in larger establishments net of wage and fringe benefit effects can largely be explained by the inflexibility in the work environment

a behavioral new keynesian model this paper presents a framework for analyzing how bounded rationality affects monetary and fiscal policy the model is a tractable and parsimonious enrichment of the widely used new keynesian model with one main new cognitive discounting parameter which quantifies how poorly agents understand future economic disturbances that myopia parameter in turn affects the power of monetary and fiscal policy in a microfounded general equilibrium a number of consequences emerge i fiscal stimulus or helicopter drops of money are powerful and indeed pull the economy out of the zero lower bound more generally the model allows for the joint analysis of optimal monetary and fiscal policy ii the taylor principle is strongly modified even with passive monetary policy equilibrium is determinate whereas the traditional rational model yields multiple equilibria which reduces its predictive power and generates indeterminate economies at the zero lower bound zlb iii the zlb is much less costly than in the traditional model iv the model brings a natural solution to the forward guidance puzzle the fact that in the rational model shocks to very distant rates have a very powerful impact on today s consumption and inflation because agents are partially myopic this effect is muted v optimal policy changes qualitatively the optimal commitment policy with rational agents demands nominal gdp targeting this is not the case with behavioral firms as the benefits of commitment are less strong with myopic firms vi the model is neo fisherian in the long run but keynesian in the short run a permanent rise in the interest rate decreases inflation in the short run but increases it in the long run the non standard behavioral features of the model seem warranted by extant empirical evidence

social security reform with self control preferences abstract this paper analyzes a fully funded social security system under the assumption that agents face temptation issues agents are required to save through individually managed personal security accounts without and with mandatory annuitization when the analysis is restricted to crra preferences our results are congruent with the literature in indicating that the complete elimination of social security is among the reform scenarios that maximize welfare however when self control preferences are introduced and as the intensity of self control becomes progressively more severe the social security elimination scenario loses ground very rapidly in fact in the case of relatively severe temptation the elimination of social security becomes the least desirable alternative under the light of the above findings any reform proposal regarding the social security system should consider departures from standard preferences to preference specifications suitable for dealing with preference reversals

temptation and forward guidance abstract motivated by the extensive experimental and empirical evidence on preference reversal in consumption choices we introduce temptation with self control preferences into a new keynesian model to study the effects of forward guidance in monetary policy and the related forward guidance puzzle in our set up the representative agent faces a trade off between the temptation for immediate satisfaction liquidate wealth with his long run best smooth consumption which he manages by exerting cognitive effort or self control for higher risk aversion in temptation than in commitment utility there is discounting in the linearized euler equation the latter makes the response of current real activity to the announcement of a future policy change declining in the forward guidance horizon which then helps solving the puzzle our framework delivers testable aggregate and policy implications that distinguish it from alternative microfoundations for discounting in the euler equation previously used to solve the puzzle

what drives natural gas prices a structural var approach abstract in this study we develop a structural vector autoregressive model var for the german natural gas market our setup allows us to analyze the determinants of the natural gas price in a comprehensive framework in particular we illustrate the usefulness of our approach by disentangling the effects of different fundamental influences on gas prices during three recent supply interruptions the russian ukrainian gas dispute of january 2009 the libyan civil war in 2011 and the withheld russian exports in february 2012 our results show that the natural gas price is affected by temperature storage and supply shortfalls in the short term while the long term development is closely tied to both crude oil and coal prices capturing the economic climate and the substitution relationship between the different energy commodities

an analysis of the determinants of job satisfaction when individuals baseline satisfaction levels may differ a growing literature seeks to explain differences in individuals self reported satisfaction with their jobs the evidence so far has mainly been based on cross sectional data and when panel data have been used individual unobserved heterogeneity has been modelled as an ordered probit model with random effects this article makes use of longitudinal data for denmark taken from the waves 1995 1999 of the european community household panel and estimates fixed effects ordered logit models using the estimation methods proposed by ferrer i carbonel and frijters 2004 and das and van soest 1999 for comparison and testing purposes a random effects ordered probit is also estimated estimations are carried out separately on the samples of men and women for individuals overall satisfaction with the jobs they hold we find that using the fixed effects approach that clearly rejects the random effects specification considerably reduces the number of key explanatory variables the impact of central economic factors is the same as in previous studies though moreover the determinants of job satisfaction differ considerably between the genders in particular once individual fixed effects are allowed for

the new keynesian cross abstract the new keynesian nk cross is a graphical and analytical apparatus for heterogeneous agent hank models expressing key aggregate demand objects mpc and multipliers as functions of heterogeneity parameters it affords analytical insights into monetary fiscal and forward guidance multipliers and replicates the aggregate implications of quantitative hank the key parameter the constrained agents income elasticity to aggregate income depends on fiscal redistribution when it is larger smaller than one the effects of policies and shocks are amplified dampened with uninsurable idiosyncratic uncertainty this translates intertemporally through compounding discounting in the aggregate euler equation into further amplification dampening of future shocks

self control and the theory of consumption to study the behavior of agents who are susceptible to temptation in infinite horizon consumption problems under uncertainty we define and characterize dynamic self control dsc preferences dsc preferences are recursive and separable in economies with dsc agents equilibria exist but may be inefficient in such equilibria steady state consumption is independent of initial endowments and increases in self control increasing the preference for commitment while keeping self control constant increases the equity premium removing nonbinding constraints changes equilibrium allocations and prices debt contracts can be sustained even if the only feasible punishment for default is the termination of the contract

an assessment of trends in technology use innovative work practices and employees attitudes in europe several studies of innovative work practices show a positive link with firm performance and employees task involvement organizational commitment and citizenship behaviours one of the recent changes faced by firms is the introduction of information and communication technologies icts although several empirical studies analyse the links between ict use innovative work practices and firm performance employee level analyses are scarce using data from the european working condition survey ewcs this article investigates the relationships between use of the internet and computers and positive attitudes among employees social support job satisfaction extra effort in the european context our empirical results are based on data for more than 9500 employees from 16 european countries in 2005 and more than 14 000 in 2010 among the different effects of ict use based on the results for the 2005 2010 and the pooled 2005 2010 sample and in a within cohorts change analysis we find that internet use

forecasting the good and bad uncertainties of crude oil prices using a har framework abstract good or bad uncertainty is the volatility that is associated with positive or negative innovations to asset prices this paper proposes new heterogeneous autoregressive type har type models to forecast the good and bad uncertainties of crude oil prices in this paper we investigate the effects of lagged bad and good uncertainties daily positive and negative signed jump variations and leverages on predicting good and bad uncertainties by in sample and out of sample analysis the in sample results show that bad and good uncertainties have long memory property and the predictability of long term good and bad uncertainties is stronger than that of short and mid term good and bad uncertainties the out of sample results indicate that lagged bad or good uncertainties daily positive signed jump variation and daily negative signed jump variation contain incremental out of sample information for forecasting good or bad uncertainties and in most cases lagged leverages also play indispensable roles in forecasting the good and bad uncertainties in the crude oil market moreover the results of out of sample analysis remain robust across using the other estimation window other har type models and the other sample

return to work after cancer and pre cancer job dissatisfaction abstractwe investigate the association between pre cancer job dissatisfaction and return to work probability 3 years after a cancer diagnosis we use a danish data set combining administrative data and a survey to breast and colon cancer survivors we find that the return to work probability has a negative correlation with pre cancer job dissatisfaction with mental demands where the correlation is driven by the high educated and with physical demands and the superior where the correlation is driven by the low educated educational gradients in the probability of returning to work after cancer are not significantly affected by controlling for pre cancer job dissatisfaction and pre cancer ability to work

can more public information raise uncertainty the international evidence on forward guidance abstract central banks have used different types of forward guidance this paper reports cross country evidence showing that in general forward guidance mutes the response of government bond yields to macroeconomic news however calendar based guidance with a short horizon counter intuitively raises it using a stylized model where agents learn from market signals it shows that the public release of more precise information about future rates lowers the informativeness of market signals and as a consequence may increase uncertainty and amplify the reaction of expectations to macroeconomic news

separated influence of crude oil prices on regional natural gas import prices this paper analyses the impact of global economic activity and international crude oil prices on natural gas import prices in three major natural gas markets using the panel cointegration model it also investigates the shock impacts of the volatility and the increase and decrease of oil prices on regional natural gas import prices the results show that both global economic activity and international crude oil prices have significant long term positive effects on regional natural gas import prices the volatility of international crude oil prices has a negative impact on regional natural gas import prices the shock impact is weak in north america lags in europe and is most significant in asia which is mainly determined by different regional policies for price formation in addition the response of natural gas import prices to increases and decreases in international crude oil prices shows an asymmetrical mechanism of which the decrease impact is relatively stronger

what drives natural gas prices in the united states a directed acyclic graph approach abstract this study investigates the impacts of driving factors for natural gas prices during the period from 1999 to 2017 a data driven approach namely the directed acyclic graph dag is first employed to disclose the contemporaneous relations among natural gas crude oil and various factors the main results indicate that there is a stable contemporaneous causal flow from crude oil to natural gas unlike most of the previous research we found a long term equilibrium relationship between crude oil and natural gas returns when additional factors were taken into account however the impact of oil price returns on natural gas price volatility has decreased after the 2008 global financial crisis finally storage and seasonality factors can never be ignored when analysing natural gas prices while the impact of speculative activity on natural gas volatility is relatively weak

gas and lng trading hubs hub indexation and destination flexibility in east asia abstract in the east asian gas markets issues like gas trading hubs hub indexed pricing and destination flexibility are being debated this paper examines the impact of a change in east asia s pricing benchmark and contract flexibility on the regional and global gas markets the paper uses the nexant world gas model a linear program with global cost minimization as the objective to our knowledge this study on hub competition price benchmark change and contract flexibility improvement in east asia will be the first in the literature and have real policy relevance the results show that both price benchmark change and contract flexibility improvements will create an overall benefit for the world and east asia importers but the impacts are different among exporters and importers however there is no evidence of competition among different benchmark hubs and no evidence that destination restrictions cause the asia premium it implies that removal of destination clauses has higher priority than the change to hub indexation for japan korea and chinese taipei but both should be treated equally in china the study also suggests that east asian importers should cooperate among themselves and with exporters to facilitate the hub creation and contract changes in east asia