analysis of the changing influences on traditional households ownership patterns abstract sociological and economic forces have begun to alter ownership patterns in ways not yet captured by movements in the aggregate ownership rate while demographic factors such as marital status and family structure remain influential in determining tenure choice their impact has waned particularly among the best educated households and those with rising real incomes labor market conditions as evidenced by increasing returns to skill are more strongly felt than ever before in the housing market the impact on owning of being highly educated now rivals the influence of being married with minor children increasingly delayed ownership is a reality even for traditional family units with 36 to 45 year old heads that have not prospered in the labor market the rising real cost of even relatively inexpensive suburban housing is also beginning to be reflected in a heightened impact for real family income on tenure choice finally race currently is more adversely influential in determining suburban ownership for young middle aged minority families than it was in 1960 particularly if the household head is not well educated we suspect this is due to racially disparate impacts of increasingly rigorous zoning regulations and higher impact fees in the suburbs

discrimination competition and loan performance in fha mortgage lending this study tests for the presence of prejudicial or noneconomic discrimination on the part of mortgage lenders by evaluating the performance of home mortgage loans the approach differs from that of previous studies of loan performance in that it is based on the proposition that noneconomic discrimination should be more pronounced in less competitive lending environments while statistical discrimination should not using a rich set of fha insured loan records and measures of local market concentration to proxy the competitive environment we test for the prediction of better loan performance by minority borrowers relative to white borrowers in more concentrated markets we argue that this approach substantially reduces the potential for omitted variable bias that has cast a shadow on previous studies of lending discrimination results fail to reject the null hypothesis of no noneconomic discrimination

measuring racial discrimination with fair housing audits caught in the act a survey technique called a fair housing audit provides a direct measure of racial discrimination in housing this paper examines the econometric issues raised by audit data measures the discrimination uncovered by a 1981 boston study and tests hypotheses about the causes of discrimination the estimated level of discrimination is high black housing seekers are told about 30 percent fewer available housing units than are whites the hypothesis tests indicate that the primary cause of this discrimination is that housing agents illegally promote their economic interests by catering to the racial prejudice of their current or potential white customers

stochastic dominance and mean variance measures of profit and loss for business planning and investment in this paper we first extend the stochastic dominance sd theory by introducing the first three orders of both ascending sd asd and descending sd dsd to decisions in business planning and investment to risk averse and risk loving decision makers so that they can compare both return and loss we provide investors with more tools for empirical analysis with which they can identify the first order asd and dsd prospects and discern arbitrage opportunities that could increase his her utility as well as wealth and set up a zero dollar portfolio to make huge profit our tools also enable investors and business planners to identify the third order asd and dsd prospects and make better choices to complement the stochastic dominance approach we also introduce an improved mean variance criterion to decisions in business planning or investment on both return and loss for risk averse and riskloving investors we then illustrate the superiority of the present approaches with well known examples in the literature and discuss the relationship between the improved stochastic dominance and mean variance criteria

do first time house buyers receive financial transfers from their parents using danish longitudinal data with information about wealth for a sample of first time house buyers and their parents we test whether there are direct financial transfers from parents to children in connection with the house purchase or in connection with unemployment spells occurring just after the purchase when children typically hold few liquid assets first we document that child and parent financial resources are correlated then we introduce conditioning variables and exploit the panel aspect of the data to also condition on fixed unobserved factors which arguably govern preferences and or productivity we find no evidence of direct financial transfers

unemployment institutions and reform complementarities re assessing the aggregate evidence for oecd countries there is no or limited consensus on the quantitative impact of institutions on unemployment which has led some to question the case for structural reforms recent studies suggest also that institutions interact with each other and cannot be analysed in isolation in this paper we estimate a standard reduced form model to explore the institutional determinants of unemployment and assess its robustness using a large battery of robustness checks we show that although the impact of each individual policy varies across countries due to policy interactions the simple linear model can be used to draw inferences for countries with an average mix of institutions the model is then extended to encompass systemic interactions in which individual policies interact with the overall institutional framework we find relatively robust evidence of broad reform complementarities

evidence on discrimination in mortgage lending much of the controversy about whether mortgage lenders discriminate against minorities can be explained in terms of the confusion about how to define discrimination based on the legal definition careful studies of loan denial rates such as that done by the federal reserve bank of boston represent an appropriate method for testing for discrimination by lenders based on that study it is quite clear that lenders discriminate the fact that minorities have higher default rates on average than whites is irrelevant to the interpretation of the race coefficient in such models nonetheless more research on and discussion about the relationship between the race of the applicant and delinquencies defaults and losses would be desirable

international stock market efficiency a non bayesian time varying model approach this article develops a non bayesian methodology to analyse the time varying structure of international linkages and market efficiency in g7 countries we consider a non bayesian time varying vector autoregressive tv var model and apply it to estimate the joint degree of market efficiency in the sense of fama 1970 1991 our empirical results provide a new perspective that the international linkages and market efficiency change over time and that their behaviours correspond well to historical events of the international financial system

effects of individual development accounts on asset purchases and saving behavior evidence from a controlled experiment abstract we evaluate the first controlled field experiment on individual development accounts idas including their own contributions and matching funds treatment group members in the tulsa oklahoma program could accumulate 6750 for home purchase or 4500 for other qualified uses almost all treatment group members opened accounts but many withdrew all funds for unqualified purposes among renters at the beginning of the experiment the ida increased homeownership rates after 4 years by 7 11 percentage points and reduced non retirement financial assets by 700 1000 the ida had almost no other discernable effect on other subsidized assets overall wealth or poverty rates

tax subsidies to owner occupied housing an asset market approach inflation reduces the effective cost of homeownership and raises the tax subsidy to owner occupation this paper presents an asset market model of the housing market and estimates how changes in the expected inflation rate affect the real price of houses and the equilibrium size of the housing capital stock simulation results suggest that the accelerating inflation of the 1970s which substantially reduced homeowners user costs could have accounted for as much as a 30 percent increase in real house prices persistent high inflation rates could lead ultimately to a sizable increase in the stock of owner occupied housing

market reaction to quarterly earnings announcements a stochastic dominance based test of market efficiency the use of the capm in empirical research is subject to some criticism in light of this criticism the stochastic dominance criteria are offered as an alternative research method for the examination of market efficiency the underlying assumptions of the two frameworks are discussed and the stochastic dominance technique is demonstrated via the examination of market reaction to quarterly earnings announcements during the 24 quarters commencing with october 1962 the findings are compared to those of watts watts r the time series behavior of quarterly earnings unpublished paper university of newcastle newcastle n s w 1975 quoted in watts 1978 who utilized the same data base in contrast to watts conclusion our analysis suggests that the market was efficient during the entire period examined and that no significant differences in market behavior between the first and the second 12 month periods was evident the discord may be attributed to the relative effectiveness of the two analytical tool

the dynamics of race income and homeownership abstract this paper treats household decisions regarding homeownership as a dynamic process rather than a static phenomenon the analysis employs a duration model of the sequential housing choices made by families to examine the adjustment of their housing tenure over time this model of housing choice is estimated for the nine year period 1984 to 1992 utilizing the panel study of income dynamics psid particularly for lower income and minority families the analysis finds that these households achieve homeownership more slowly they are less likely to maintain this status and they are less able to move up to better units over time

divergence of cash flow and voting rights opacity and stock price crash risk international evidence this study investigates whether and how the deviation of cash flow rights ownership from voting rights control or simply the ownership control wedge influences the likelihood that extreme negative outliers occur in stock return distributions which we refer to as stock price crash risk we do so using a comprehensive panel data set of firms with a dual class share structure from 20 countries around the world for the period of 1995 2007 we predict and find that opaque firms with a large wedge are more crash prone than opaque firms with a small wedge in addition we predict and find that the positive relation between the wedge and crash risk is less pronounced for firms with more effective external monitoring and for firms with greater growth opportunities the results of this study are broadly consistent with jin and myers s theory that agency costs combined with opacity exacerbate stock price crash risk

racial differences in patterns of wealth accumulation making use of psid data for 1984 1989 and 1994 we examine race differences in patterns of asset accumulation our results indicate as expected that inheritances raise the rate of wealth accumulation of whites relative to that of african americans but while whites devote a greater share of their income to saving racial differences in saving rates are not significant once we control for income though our results may be period specific we also do not find evidence that the rate of return to capital is greater for whites than for african americans simulations suggest that african americans would have gained significant ground relative to whites during the period if they had inherited similar amounts saved at the same rate had comparable income levels and more speculatively had portfolios closer in composition to those of whites

mortgage lending in boston interpreting hmda data the home mortgage disclosure act was enacted to monitor minority and low income access to the mortgage market the data collected for this purpose show that minorities are more than twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as whites yet variables correlated with both race and creditworthiness were omitted from these data making any conclusion about race s role in mortgage lending impossible the federal reserve bank of boston collected additional variables important to the mortgage lending decision and found that race continued to play an important though significantly diminished role in the decision to grant a mortgage copyright 1996 by american economic association

does access to formal agricultural credit depend on caste summary this paper analyzes whether caste impedes access to formal agricultural credit in india credit is provided mainly through cooperative and commercial banks using national data we find that cooperative banks discriminate against lower caste borrowers and find weak evidence that commercial banks instead bias lending in their favor in accordance with affirmative action policies we compare the organizational structures of the two types of bank and explain discrimination by cooperative banks in terms of interest group capture at the district level by showing that discrimination takes place in those districts where higher castes dominate

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

conspicuous consumption and race using nationally representative data on consumption we show that blacks and hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles to visible goods clothing jewelry and cars than do comparable whites these differences exist among virtually all subpopulations are relatively constant over time and are economically large although racial differences in utility preference parameters might account for a portion of these consumption differences we emphasize instead a model of status seeking in which conspicuous consumption is used as a costly indicator of a household s economic position using merged data on race and state level income we demonstrate that a key prediction of the status signaling model that visible consumption should be declining in reference group income is strongly borne out in the data for each racial group moreover we show that accounting for differences in reference group income characteristics explains most of the racial difference in visible consumption

wealth dynamics in the 1980s and 1990s sweden and the united states given differences in public saving programs between sweden and the united states an examination of household private wealth accumulation in these two countries can be enlightening in this paper we examine wealth inequality and mobility in sweden and the

testing for weak form efficiency of crude palm oil spot and future markets new evidence from a garch unit root test with multiple structural breaks there is a sizeable literature that tests for weak form efficiency in commodity and energy spot and future prices while many studies now allow for multiple structural breaks to address the criticism that conventional unit root tests have low power to reject the unit root null in the presence of structural change the extant literature overlooks the fact that conventional unit root tests are biased in the presence of conditional heteroscedasticity we apply a recently developed generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity garch unit root test with multiple structural breaks to crude palm oil spot and future prices and find much more evidence against weak form efficiency than that found using tests that fail to allow for conditional heteroscedasticity our results point to the importance of allowing for heteroscedasticity when testing for efficiency in commodity and energy spot and future prices

a stochastic dominance analysis of yen carry trades abstract yen carry trades have made headline news for over a decade we examine the profitability of such trades for the period 2001 2009 yen carry trades generated high mean returns and sharpe ratios prior to the recent financial crisis they continued to outperform major stock markets for the full sample period given the non normality of carry trade returns we apply non parametric tests based on stochastic dominance sd to evaluate whether the high returns of yen carry trades are compatible with risk as reflected in returns on us and global stock market indices we apply a general test for sd developed recently by linton maasoumi and whang 2005 to six currencies as well as portfolios of these currencies for a large class of risk averse investors profits from yen carry trades cannot be attributed to risks

income transfers and assets of the poor contrary to the predictions of the standard life cycle model many low lifetime income households accumulate little wealth relative to their incomes compared to households with high lifetime income i use data from the panel study of income dynamics and a correlated random effects generalized method of moments estimator to decompose the rich poor gaps in wealth to permanent income ratio into the portions attributable to differences in characteristics such as labor market earnings income uncertainty observed demographics and the utilization of transfer programs which may have stringent income and liquid asset tests and those attributable to differences in the estimated coefficients on the respective characteristics the results suggest that wealth to permanent income ratios are increasing in permanent labor income and income uncertainty but that transfer income with or without asset tests discourages liquid asset accumulation the decompositions indicate that most of the rich poor wealth gap is attr

the relationship between arbitrage and first order stochastic dominance this paper joins together two fields of research in financial economics the first field studies stochastic dominance while the second field studies arbitrage pricing the two fields are linked together through the derivation and the proof of a characterization theorem the characterization theorem gives necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of arbitrage opportunities in terms of the existence of two assets one of which first order stochastically dominates the other and the price of a particular contingent claim examples are provided to demonstrate the theorem s content this paper joins together two fields of research in financial economics the first field studies portfolio choice from the perspective of stochastic dominance see hadar and russell 5 6 hanoch and levy 7 levy and kroll 13 the second field studies arbitrage pricing its characterization and implications see ross 15 kreps 12 harrison and kreps 8 harrison and pliska 9 in these fields it is well known that the existence of arbitrage opportunities implies first order stochastic dominance and that the converse does not hold this paper provides a set of conditions under which the converse is true given complete markets the existence of an arbitrage opportunity is characterized in terms of the existence of two traded assets one of which stochastically dominates the other along with one additional condition the additional condition is roughly that state contingent prices must be zero over the states where the first asset dominates the second the theorem has a qualification however it is applicable only in markets which are complete not in the arrow debreu sense but in a weaker sense in the sense that all contingent claims on the primary assets must trade in many applications especially with respect to continuous trading models this condition is usually satisfied see duffie 2 and harrison and pliska 9 in the case of stochastically dominated assets this paper shows that the relationship of the assets to the state contingent prices is important in identifying arbitrage opportunities in this sense this paper is related to a recent paper of jagannathan 10 jagannathan studies the relationship of second order stochastic dominance not first order to call option valuation this characterization theorem relating arbitrage opportunities to stochastic dominance should provide a valuable tool in the area of stochastic dominance this theorem specifies conditions under which two assets can be compared using first order stochastic dominance on an individual basis for inclusion in the

managerial ownership of voting rights abstract managers of firms with dual classes of common stock can choose different quantities of votes for a given cash flow interest by choosing different quantities of the two securities we study managerial stock holdings in 45 dual class firms and find that vote ownership per se is an important motivation for these holdings in that corporate officers and their families hold a median 56 9 of the votes and 24 0 of the common stock cash flows we also find significant family involvement in many sample firms and document four case studies in which explicit acquisition premiums were paid for superior voting shares

efficiency tests in the french derivatives market abstract the french derivatives market the marche a terme international de france matif or the french international futures and options exchange is one of the major derivatives markets in the world the efficiency of four financial contracts traded on the matif cac40 index futures ecu bond futures national bond futures and pibor 3 month futures are examined in this paper test results from serial correlations unit root tests and variance ratio tests provide overwhelming evidence that the random walk hypothesis cannot be rejected for these contracts

could the global financial crisis improve the performance of the g7 stocks markets abstractfinancial crises are normally associated with negative effects on financial markets in this article we investigate whether the most recent global financial crisis gfc had any positive impact on the g7 canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states indices to conduct the analysis we employ the mean variance mv analysis capm statistics hurst exponent runs test multiple variation ratio test and stochastic dominance sd tests our mv and capm results conclude that most of the g7 stock indices are significantly less volatile the results from hurst exponent run tests and multiple variation ratio confirm that efficiency improved in the post gfc period finally our sd results conclude that there is no arbitrage opportunity and the markets are efficient due to the gfc and in general investors prefer investing in the indices after the gfc overall we conclude that the gfc led to markets that are more efficient and mature confirming that crises can also

racial and ethnic differences in wealth in the health and retirement study this paper examines wealth data in the health and retirement study hrs in comparison with asset data in other major surveys the quality of hrs asset data is high missing asset data does remain a problem however to which future hrs analysts must remain sensitive evidence is presented showing that it is no accident that asset data are missing and solutions for imputing missing data are developed finally racial and ethnic wealth disparities are large these minority wealth disparities are due in part to differential inheritances and desired bequests as inequities perpetuate themselves across generations the disparities are also due to lower minority incomes poorer health and an excessively narrow definition of wealth that excludes social security and employer pensions authors

rates for vehicle loans race and loan source a household s vehicle purchases are among its largest expenditure outlays moreover unlike housing purchases which a typical household may make once or twice over a lifetime a house hold may well buy several cars over the same interval the magnitude and relative frequency of vehicle purchases suggest that differential treatment by race in the vehicle market may have important implications for differences in wealth and financial well being by race yet whereas a robust literature in economics has studied virtu

the decline of the immigrant home ownership advantage life cycle declining fortunes and changing housing careers in montreal toronto and vancouver 1981 2001 in the past working age immigrant families in canada s large urban centres had higher home ownership rates than the canadian born over the past 20 years however this advantage has reversed due jointly to a drop in immigrant rates and a rise in the popularity of home ownership among the canadian born this paper assesses the efficacy of a fairly standard microeconomic consumer choice model which includes indicators for age income education family type and immigrant characteristics plus several interactions with time to explain these changes it is found that the standard model almost completely explains the immigrant homeownership advantage in 1981 as well as the rise in home ownership rates over time among the canadian born even after accounting for the well known decline in immigrant economic fortunes however it is shown that only about half of the 1981 2001 immigrant change in homeownership rates is explained by the standard model

macroeconomic shocks and stock market returns the case of korea abstractthis study examines the effects of macroeconomic shocks on key macro variables including stock market returns in korea using the structural vector autoregression svar model we suggest a three variable svar model incorporating inflation output growth and stock returns we adopt a nonzero z ratio restriction for the long run identifying assumption to allow for economically meaningful relationships among variables while our results support the negative positive relation of demand supply shocks to stock returns we also find that demand shocks influence stock market variance more significantly than supply shocks do the sub period analysis finds that global market fluctuations during the global financial crisis have relatively little effect on korean stock market performance we also examine a generalized five variable model that includes the foreign exchange rate and interest rate confirming the results from the three variable case

car ownership and the labor market of ethnic minorities we show how initial wealth differences between low skilled minorities and white workers can generate differences in their labor market outcomes this even occurs in the absence of a taste for discrimination against ethnic minorities or exogenous differences in distance to jobs because of the initial wealth difference minorities cannot afford to buy a car while whites can car ownership allows whites to reach more jobs per unit of time which gives them a better bargaining position in the labor market as a result in equilibrium ethnic minorities end up with both higher unemployment rates and lower wages than whites furthermore we also show that it takes more time for minorities to reach their jobs even though they travel less miles when employed those predictions are consistent with the data better access to capital markets or better public transportation will reduce the differences in labor market outcomes

estimating housing demand with an application to explaining racial segregation in cities we present a three stage nonparametric estimation procedure to recover willingness to pay for housing attributes in the first stage we estimate a nonparametric hedonic home price function in the second stage we recover each consumer s taste parameters for product characteristics using first order conditions for utility maximization finally in the third stage we estimate the distribution of household tastes as a function of household demographics as an application of our methods we compare alternative explanations for why blacks choose to live in center cities while whites suburbanize

racial differences in homeownership and housing wealth 1970 1986 racial differences in homeownership and housing wealth 1970 1986 black couples are found to own a disproportionately low share of aggregate housing wealth in the united states because they are less likely than whites to be homeowners and because black owned houses have lower market values than white owned houses probability of ownership and house value equations corrected for selectivity bias are estimated with national data for 1970 1980 and 1986 trends in racial differences in homeownership and house value are identified and reasons for their existence are investigated i introduction the wage gap between blacks and whites has been the subject of many labor market studies during the last two decades these studies spawned similar analyses of racial differences in other markets such as housing concern over the black white differential in economic well being continues today with recent attention focusing on the wealth gap between blacks and whites andrew brimmer 1988 points out that blacks owned only 3 0 percent of accumulated wealth in the united states in 1984 even though blacks received 7 6 percent of total money income that year and they comprised 11 percent of all households 1 the equity accumulated in homes constituted the most important form of wealth held by blacks but even so the black share of home equity was only 4 4 percent of the total the value of black owned housing will be disproportionately low if a blacks are not as likely as whites to own homes and b blacks houses are relatively less valuable than whites houses in this paper we investigate both of these possibilities with national data on black and white households covering the period 1970 86 2 existing research has concentrated primarily on racial differences in the probability of homeownership with an eye toward determining the extent of discrimination 3 at least two prominent congressmen joseph kennedy of massachusetts and henry gonzalez of texas have charged that government regulators routinely allow discrimination in home mortgage lending because most studies have relied on data from the 1960s and early 1970s often covering only certain metropolitan areas no reliable estimates of the national trend in black homeownership and housing market discrimination during more recent years exist the question of how much housing blacks consume relative to whites given the decision to own has received only scant attention in the literature yet both decisions influence wealth distribution our study compares the racial differentials in these two dimensions of the housing choice ownership and value a basic hypothesis of the paper is that house value differentials by race will be larger than homeownership differentials by race since the factors that determine house prices are more numerous and probably more susceptible to discriminatory influence than the conditions that influence the decision to own rather than rent ii a model of the homeownership choice this section describes a model of the homeownership decision that can be applied to available data the model is similar to those of previous studies in that it relates the probability of owning a home to several explanatory variables reflecting economic demographic and locational characteristics of the household it differs in an important respect however in that it is estimated on a sample that contains only husband and wife households 4 most earlier studies that have used samples drawn from the entire population have controlled for different household types e g single female headed widowed by means of dummy variables this procedure generally constrains the impact of race on the housing choice to be equal for all household types in addition mcdonald 1974 has pointed out that the current values of variables such as income and labor market activity are more apt to misrepresent their permanent levels for single person or female headed households

consumption down payments and liquidity constraints one frequently cited explanation for the empirical failure of the orthodox life cycle permanent income hypothesis lc pih is the presence of binding liquidity constraints households inability to borrow and lend at the same interest rate or to borrow the desired quantity can distort household consumption profiles depressing consumption during periods when constraints bind whether or not liquidity constraints bind has important implications for the sensitivity of consumption to fluctuations in income the neutrality of government debt and the structure of taxation despite the potential importance of liquidity constraints in understanding macroeconomic behavior there has been comparatively little research into the effect of specific constraints on consumption one area of consumer behavior where liquidity constraints arguably may be important is in housing decisions and mortgage markets households wishing to own a first home must accumulate a down payment in order to qualify for a mortgage loan currently for conventional mortgages in the united states most lending institutions require between s percent and 20 percent of the purchase price of the home put down in advance of the purchase 2 without access to private gifts or loans many

the transition to home ownership and the black white wealth gap this paper analyzes differences in the likelihood that black and white families become homeowners by following a sample of black and white renters over time we are able to separately study racial differences in the likelihood of applying for a mortgage and in the likelihood that a mortgage application is accepted although its effect on the race gap in housing transitions is small we find strong evidence that black applicants are almost twice as likely as comparable white households to be rejected even when credit history proxies and measures of household wealth are accounted for we show that the housing transition gap exists primarily because blacks are less likely to apply for mortgages in the first place the analysis suggests that differences in income family structure and in the ability and willingness of parents to provide down payment assistance are the primary reasons for this applications gap we speculate that the portion of the gap that remains unexplained after controlling for income d

the social and private micro level consequences of homeownership abstract this paper reviews the literature that describes the micro level economic and social consequences of homeownership we adopt an interdisciplinary approach and include studies from economics sociology geography political science psychology and other disciplines our focus is on the set of consequences of homeownership in developed countries our list of potential outcomes of homeownership includes the impact on household wealth and portfolio choice mobility labor force participation urban structure and segregation home maintenance political and social activities health demographics self esteem and child outcomes there is substantial evidence that homeownership has important effects on some household behaviors and outcomes however we find that much of the past 30 year s literature on consequences of homeowning is deficient from a theoretical or econometric perspective we suggest solutions and identify research gaps present in the literature

black white differences in wealth and asset composition using data from the 1976 and 1978 national longitudinal surveys of young men and young women this study examines racial differences in the magnitude and composition of wealth and the reasons for them on average young black families hold 18 percent of the wealth of young white families and hold their wealth in proportionately different forms even after controlling for racial differences in income and other demographic factors as much as three quarters of the wealth gap remains unexplained we speculate on the causes for this concluding that racial differences in intergenerational transfers and to a lesser extent barriers to the accumulation of business and home equity most likely play a role

racial gaps in the transition to first time homeownership the role of residential location abstract evidence suggests that african americans wait longer to transition into first time homeownership than white households with similar endowments this paper relies on data from the panel study of income dynamics psid to examine the contribution of residential location toward the black white gap in first time homeownership transitions for a sample of young renters who first left their parents home during the period 1978 through 1987 i estimate continuous time duration models that explain racial gaps in rental tenure durations prior to first time homeownership as a function of individual household and location specific covariates i find that while several residential location characteristics particularly those associated with the supply of affordable owner occupied housing impinge upon racial gaps in first time homeownership transitions most of the racial gap in homeownership transitions would be eliminated if blacks and whites had similar individual and household characteristics

convergence of the south and non south income distributions 1969 1979 income distribution and inequalities in the southern united states are analyzed and compared with data for the rest of the country the evidence presented in this paper reveals that in the 1970s the souths income distribution either converged or moved significantly closer to the income distribution of the rest of the country the degree of convergence depends on the definition of the recipient unit and to a degree on the particular cost of living index used to deflate southern and non southern incomes the convergence is attributed in part to the labor unionization in the northeast and the resulting relocation of companies to the south data are from the 1970 and 1980 censuses and concern total household income excerpt

homeownership and the american dream for decades it was taken as a given that an increased homeownership rate was a desirable goal but after the financial crises and great recession in which roughly eight million homes were foreclosed on and about 7 trillion in home equity was erased economists and policymakers are re evaluating the role of homeownership in the american dream many question whether the american dream should really include homeownership or instead focus more on other aspects of upward mobility and most acknowledge that homeownership is not for everyone we take a detailed look at us homeownership from three different perspectives 1 an international perspective comparing us homeownership rates with those of other nations 2 a demographic perspective examining the correlation between changes in the us homeownership rate between 1985 and 2015 and factors like age race ethnicity education family status and income 3 and a financial benefits perspective using national data since 2002 to calculate the internal rate of return to homeownership compared to alternative investments our overall conclusion homeownership is a valuable institution while two decades of policies in the 1990s and early 2000s may have put too much faith in the benefits of homeownership the pendulum seems to have swung too far the other way and many now may have too little faith in homeownership as part of the american dream

market response to policy initiatives during the global financial crisis abstract this paper examines the impact of macroeconomic and financial sector policy announcements in the united states the united kingdom the euro area and japan on interbank credit and liquidity risk premia during the recent crisis overall policy interventions were associated with a reduction in interbank risk premia most significantly for recapitalization programs by contrast decisions to bail out individual banks in an ad hoc manner or let them fail were accompanied by a significant rise in interbank risk premia most policy announcements had international spillovers these results are broadly robust to using alternative measures of financial distress and varying the size of the event window

market efficiency of oil spot and futures a mean variance and stochastic dominance approach this paper examines the market efficiency of oil spot and futures prices by using both mean variance mv and stochastic dominance sd approaches based on the west texas intermediate crude oil data for the sample period 1989 2008 we find no evidence of any mv and sd relationships between oil spot and futures indices this infers that there is no arbitrage opportunity between these two markets spot and futures do not dominate one another investors are indifferent to investing spot or futures and the spot and futures oil markets are efficient and rational the empirical findings are robust to each sub period before and after the crises for different crises and also to portfolio diversification

do welfare asset limits affect household saving evidence from welfare reform we use data from the panel study of income dynamics to estimate the effect of new saving incentives implemented as part of the 1996 welfare reform on household saving economic theory predicts that loosening asset limits will increase total savings for households with a large ex ante probability of welfare receipt such as female headed households with children we follow a sample of female heads with children and find that in both absolute terms and relative to comparison groups of male heads and female heads without children there has been no effect of welfare policy changes on the saving of at risk households