earnings inequality among males in the united states trends and the effect of labor force growth we analyze the variance of log earnings within labor force cohorts of u s males with particular attention to the influence of labor force growth rates estimates with data from the 1968 79 current population surveys reveal increases in earnings inequality within labor force cohorts even after we control for the level of education experience and unemployment a model of human capital investment is used to analyze differences among cohorts in the life cycle profile of the variance of log earnings it is shown that a pattern of sharply increasing and then declining labor force growth rates will tend to raise the return on human capital investment and thereby increase the variance of postschooling investment and log earnings early in the life cycle this positive effect on relative earnings inequality should decline with experience and possibly become negative because of the post world war ii baby boom and baby bust recent labor force entrants have faced just such a pattern of actual and projected labor

day of the week effects and asset returns the number of empirical studies using daily stock returns is rapidly increasing researchers generally assume that the distribution of stock returns is identical for all days of the week a convenient statistical assumption but not a necessary condition of market equilibrium nevertheless there are reasons to suspect that the distribution of returns may vary according to the day of the week the most obvious is the impact of weekends on monday s return since monday s return is calculated over three instead of one calender day the mean and variance may well be higher on monday compared with any other daily return perhaps three times as large previous research has examined the daily distribution of stock returns for a monday effect while fama 1965 does not compare daily mean returns he does report that monday s variance is about 20o greater than other daily returns with a traditional distributional assumption regarding the returns on a financial asset specifies that the expected returns are identical for all days of the week contrary to this plausible assumption this paper discovers that the expected returns on common stocks and treasury bills are not constant across days of the week the most notable evidence is for monday s returns where the mean is unusually low or even negative several explanations of the results are investigated but none proves satisfactory aside from documenting significant day of the week effects the implications of the results for tests of market efficiency are examined while market adjusted returns continue to exhibit day of the week effects these effects are no longer concentrated on monday during the last year we have had many conversations with our colleagues throughout the professions we are particularly thankful to the participants at sessions of the western and american finance associations where preliminary versions of this paper were presented special thanks are due to gene fama gailen hite jon ingersoll robert jarrow merton miller clifford smith and rex thompson the expert research assistance of frank rabinovitch and youngsup yun is gratefully acknowledged 1 the list of papers using daily stock returns is too long to name recent examples include charest 1978 dodd 1980 banz 1981 and reinganum 1981

the effect of contemporaneous reserve accounting on the market for federal funds abstract this paper evaluates the effect of the transition from lagged to contemporaneous reserve accounting for the determination of bank reserve requirements through its impact on the market for federal funds the results indicate that increased target reserve uncertainty resulting from the implementation of the contemporaneous reserve accounting system cra caused an initial increase in intraday federal funds rate variance and daily interest rate differences however subsequent to a learning period intraday variance appears to be less pronounced and daily differentials appear to be narrower than under the previously used lagged reserve accounting system lra these results are attributed to the lengthening of the accounting period from one to two weeks therefore while not costless the new system does not appear to have seriously disrupted the federal funds market

soft skills hard skills and the black white wage gap this study examines the relative importance of soft skills versus hard skills across occupations and its impact on the observed wage gap between blacks and whites in the united states it posits that the black white pay gap may vary across occupations that require the use of different types of skills we classify occupations into hard skill intensive versus soft skill intensive jobs using the skill content measures of different occupations from the occupational information network o net we then use data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy and current population survey cps to investigate the impact of job skill type on the wage gap consistent with our theoretical predictions we show that this wage gap in white collar jobs is smaller for hard skills jobs than it is for soft skills jobs moreover we demonstrate that in response to variations in the wage gap across different occupations blacks are more likely to self select themselves into hard skills jobs ceteris paribus this shows not only that discrimination against blacks varies across occupations but also that such discrimination induces the self selection of blacks into certain occupations moreover this finding highlights the role played by co worker customer discrimination in explaining the racial wage gap in the u s labor market jel j15 j31

edgeworth price cycles and intertemporal price discrimination in a retail gasoline market exhibiting edgeworth price cycles prices change asymmetrically with many small decreases interrupted by occasional large increases the result is a de facto menu of prices from which consumers can choose based on exactly when they buy this article introduces four classes of purchase timing strategies designed to systematically shift consumer purchases towards the cycle troughs it shows in the study market of toronto canada the monetary gains to consumers from optimized timing strategies are as high as 3 9 markups earned from these consumers fall up to 82 in spite of the gains from timing strategies surprisingly few consumers use them evidence is presented that a main reason is that consumers are not well informed about the cycles policy implications are discussed

rich dad smart dad decomposing the intergenerational transmission of income we construct a simple model consistent with becker and tomes that decomposes the intergenerational income elasticity into the causal effect of financial resources the mechanistic transmission of human capital and the role that human capital plays in the determination of fathers permanent incomes we show how a particular set of instrumental variables could separately identify the money and human capital transmission effects using data from a 35 percent sample of swedish sons and their fathers we show that only a minority of the intergenerational income elasticity can be plausibly attributed to the causal effect of fathers financial resources

slipping into and out of poverty the dynamics of spells this paper examines the dynamics of poverty previous analyses have examined either fluctuations in the male heads earnings or the frequency of poverty periods over a fixed time frame our approach depends on a definition of spells of poverty using this methodology we find that the majority of poor persons at any time are in the midst of a rather long spell of poverty the methodology also allows us to estimate that less than 40 percent of poverty spells begin because of a drop in the heads earnings while 60 percent of the spells end when the heads earnings increase thus researchers must focus on household formation decisions and on the behavior of secondary family members there has been a dramatic resurgence recently of discussion of the underclass the discussion is reminiscent of debates about poverty during the 1960s when the notions of a culture of poverty particularly as popularized by michael harrington s other america 1962 dominated both intellectual and policy thinking the idea of an underclass seems inconsistent however with much of the research on the dynamics of poverty during the 1970s that research using new longitudinal data seemed to show that the bulk of the poor were poor for only a few years the research also showed that the poor were a very heterogeneous group including a small minority of persistently poor the persistence of poverty is of interest both for understanding the phenomenon and for developing policy claims about dependency and separate life styles among the poor rest on assumptions about the long term nature of poverty questions

a utility based analysis of the wage subsidy program abstract because the poverty line is usually defined in terms of income two families may be classified as having poverty level incomes even though their hours of work and therefore their utilities may be very different this paper compares a government income support program that defines the poverty line in terms of utility with several other support programs that define the poverty line in terms of income through the use of the wage solution of the indirect utility function we find the amount of wage subsidy required to raise a subpoverty line family to the poverty line as defined by the utility function this subsidy is compared with wage subsidies based on directly observable quantities such as income

customer discrimination and employment outcomes for minority workers this paper investigates the effects of customer discrimination on the employment and earnings of minorities particularly blacks data are used from a new survey of employers in four large metropolitan areas in the united states our results show that the racial composition of an establishment s customers has sizable effects on the race of who gets hired particularly in jobs that involve direct contact with customers and in sales or service occupations race of customers also affects wages with employees in establishments that have mostly black customers earning less than those in establishments with mostly white customers

the importance of noncognitive skills lessons from the ged testing program it is common knowledge outside of academic journals that motivation tenacity trustworthiness and perseverance are important traits for success in life thomas edison wrote that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration most parents read the aesop fable of the tortoise and the hare to their young children at about the same time they read them the story of the little train that could numerous instances can be cited of high iq people who failed to achieve success in life because they lacked self discipline and low iq people who succeeded by virtue of persistence reliability and self discipline the value of trustworthiness has recently been demonstrated when market systems were extended to eastern european societies with traditions of corruption and deceit it is thus surprising that academic discussions of skill and skill formation almost exclusively focus on measures of cognitive ability and ignore noncognitive skills the early literature on human capital e g gary becker 1964 contrasted cognitive ability models of earnings with human capital models ignoring noncognitive traits entirely the signaling literature e g michael spence 1974 emphasized that education was a signal of a one dimensional ability usually interpreted as a cognitive skill most discussions of ability bias in the estimated return to education treat omitted ability as cognitive ability and attempt to proxy the missing ability by cognitive tests most assessments of school reforms stress the gain from reforms as measured by the ability of students to perform on a standardized achievement test widespread use of standardized achievement and ability tests for admissions and educational evaluation are premised on the belief that the skills that can be tested are essential for success in schooling a central premise of the educational testing movement since its inception much of the neglect of noncognitive skills in analyses of earnings schooling and other lifetime outcomes is due to the lack of any reliable measure of them many different personality and motivational traits are lumped into the category of noncognitive skills psychologists have developed batteries of tests to measure noncognitive skills e g robert sternberg 1985 these tests are used by companies to screen workers but are not yet used to ascertain college readiness or to evaluate the effectiveness of schools or reforms of schools the literature on cognitive tests ascertains that one dominant factor g summarizes cognitive tests and their effects on outcomes no single factor has yet emerged to date in the literature on noncognitive skills and it is unlikely that one will ever be found given the diversity of traits subsumed under the category of noncognitive skills studies by samuel bowles and herbert gintis 1976 rick edwards 1976 and roger klein et al 1991 demonstrate that job stability and dependability are traits most valued by employers as ascertained by supervisor ratings and questions of employers although they present no direct evidence on wages and educational t discussants susan mayer university of chicago cecilia rouse princeton university nan maxwell california state university hayward janet currie university of california los angeles

work and welfare as determinants of female poverty and household headship this paper formulates and estimates a model of the determinants of female household headship headship responds to variations in the levels of well being a woman can expect if she marries or if she heads her own household the authors measure the opportunity cost of female headship and the effects of welfare benefits and womens work in the market on female headship and poverty they find that if welfare benefits were reduced there would be small reductions in the proportion of women heading households for whites and nonwhites but a substantial increase in poverty for nonwhites they also find that wives work in the market reduces poverty and female headship for nonwhites and reduces poverty but increases headship for whites the study is based on 1975 u s data excerpt

prejudice and wages an empirical assessment of becker s the economics of discrimination we test the predictions from becker s 1957 seminal work on employer prejudice and find that relative black wages a vary negatively with the prejudice of the marginal white in a state b vary negatively with the prejudice in the lower tail of the prejudice distribution but are unaffected by the prejudice of the most prejudiced persons in a state and c vary negatively with the fraction of a state that is black our estimates suggest that one quarter of the racial wage gap is due to prejudice with nontrivial consequences for black lifetime earnings

reserve regulation and recourse as a source of risk premia in the federal funds market abstract in this paper we demonstrate that there is a pronounced and persistent daily pattern of returns in the federal funds market centered on wednesday we present evidence that explains this phenomenon as a reflection of the optimal behavior of banks operating in an environment in which there are effective reserve requirements and a penalty cost for recourse to discount borrowing in particular we report empirical evidence that shows there was a significant upward shift in the amplitude of this pattern of daily returns that resulted from 1 the increase in uncertainty associated with the change in federal reserve operating procedures during the 1979 1982 period and 2 the imposition of a surcharge on discount borrowing instituted by the federal reserve our results demonstrate that what otherwise might be regarded as anomalous interest rate behavior is consistent with the optimal response of banks to the regulatory environment within which they operate

the effects of shifts in monetary policy and reserve accounting regimes on bank reserve management behavior in the federal funds market abstract this paper looks at the effects on fed fund rates and fed fund purchasing behavior of large banks resulting from i the 1982 regime switch from non borrowed to borrowed reserve targeting by the fed and ii the 1984 switch from lagged to almost contemporaneous reserve accounting cra whether we analyse changes in the interest rate or quantity dimensions the shift in monetary policy targets appeared to have had a more profound effect on the market for bank reserves than the shift in reserve accounting regime these results therefore tend to support the contention that a shift to cra by itself will have little effect on bank reserve management behavior unless combined with its logical counterpart a total reserves target

interest rate dispersion and volatility in the market for daily funds abstract the purpose of this paper is to study the determinants of equilibrium in the market for daily funds we use the eonia panel database which includes daily information on the lending rates applied by contributing commercial banks the data clearly show an increase in both the time series volatility and the cross section dispersion of rates towards the end of the reserve maintenance period these increases are highly correlated we design a model to account for these empirical facts our theoretical model shows how the operational framework of monetary policy causes a reduction in the elasticity of the supply of funds by banks throughout the reserve maintenance period this reduction in the elasticity together with market segmentation and heterogeneity is able to generate distributions for the interest rates and quantities traded with the same properties as in the data we also investigate the effects of the changes in the eurosystem s operational framework enacted on march 2004 for interest rate behaviour

high frequency quoting short term volatility in bids and offers at subsecond horizons bids and offers in u s equity markets are more volatile than what would be implied by long term fundamentals to assess costs and consequences this paper suggests that traders random delays latencies interact with quote volatility to generate execution price risk and relative latency costs analysis of the behavior of quote setters suggests that this volatility is more likely to arise from recurrent cycles of undercutting similar to the edgeworth cycles found in product markets rather than mixed strategies of limit order placement

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

federal funds rate prediction we examine the forecasting performance of a range of time series models of the daily us effective federal funds ff rate recently proposed in the literature we find that i most of the models and predictor variables considered produce satisfactory oneday ahead forecasts of the ff rate ii the best forecasting model is a simple univariate model where the future ff rate is forecast using the current difference between the ff rate and its target iii combining the forecasts from various models generally yields modest improvements on the best performing model these results have a natural interpretation and clear policy implications

afdc benefits and the inter urban variation in poverty among female headed households the percentage of families headed by females in poverty varies widely across metropolitan areas for example 8 37 of all families in albany georgia were female headed and in poverty in 1980 while in sheboygan wisconsin the figure was 1 1 though not as dramatic as this interregional difference intra regional variation can also be significant in detroit michigan 4 90 of families were femaled headed and in poverty and in the closest interstate metropolitan area toledo ohio the figure was 3 77 recent research into the behavior of low income femaleheaded families suggests that state benefit differentials in aid to families with dependent children afdc may in part be responsible in this paper we construct a model that explains an important and overlooked implication of non uniform benefit standards among states the inter urban variation in the size of the potential and actual afdc recipient population particular attention is given to 1 the impact of interurban differences in real afdc payments 2 the potential of afdc to alter the number of female headed families in poverty and 3 the relative importance of other urban characteristics in explaining the size of the potential and actual afdc recipient population the model uses 1980 census data and is estimated for all standard metropolitan statistical areas for which we were able to obtain data

the micromechanics of the federal funds market implications for day of the week effects in funds rate variability the federal funds rate arguably is the most important interest rate in the u s capital market because it plays a central role in monetary policy and the term structure this paper examines the micromechanics of the funds market we show that in a continuous market with asynchronous trading regulatory constraints and accounting conventions that focus agents attention on discrete time instants have important implications for the dynamics of trading activity and realized market prices we also exhibit a model of the market that explains observed regularities in the intertemporal behavior of the funds rate

a language theory of discrimination any advanced industrial society is composed of a number of speech communities with different verbal and nonverbal languages in particular in the united states blacks and whites and men and women have sharply differing methods of speaking and listening this paper develops a model in which people can only work together if they speak the same language and in which it is costly to learn a second language the competitive market will tend to minimize communication through segregation but if interaction is required the cost will be borne by the minority a number of nontrivial predictions are derived from the model

human capital specificity evidence from the dictionary of occupational titles and displaced worker surveys 1984 2000 measures of four basic skills constructed from the dictionary of occupational titles are used to examine the source of human capital specificity the measures are used to characterize the skill portfolio of each job and to construct distance measures between jobs wage losses in the displaced worker surveys are shown to be more closely associated with switching skill portfolios than switching industry or occupation code per se these switches represent large decreases in the skill portfolio in the postdisplacement job the recent evidence for industry specific capital is reexamined the results suggest a difference between fluid and crystallized skills

day to day monetary policy and the volatility of the federal funds rate we propose a model of the interbank money market with an explicit role for central bank intervention and periodic reserve requirements and study the interaction of profit maximizing banks with a central bank targeting interest rates at high frequency the model yields predictions on biweekly patterns of the federal funds rate s volatility and on its response to changes in target rates and in intervention procedures such as those implemented by the fed in 1994 theoretical results are consistent with empirical patterns of interest rate volatility in the u s market for federal funds

monetary policy implementation and the federal funds rate this paper investigates how the implementation of monetary policy affects the dynamics and the volatility of the federal funds rate since the early 1980s the most important changes in the fed s conduct of monetary policy refer to the role of the federal funds rate target and the reserve requirement system we show that the improved communication and transparency regarding the federal funds rate target has significantly increased the fed s influence on the federal funds rate since 1994 by contrast the declining role of required reserves in the u s has contributed to higher federal funds rate volatility our results suggest that the planned introduction of remunerated reserves will further enhance the controllability of the federal funds rate

interracial workplace cooperation evidence from the nba using data from the national basketball association nba we examine whether patterns of workplace cooperation occur disproportionately among workers of the same race we find that holding constant the composition of teammates on the floor basketball players are no more likely to complete an assist to a player of the same race than a player of a different race our confidence interval allows us to reject even small amounts of same race bias in passing patterns we find some evidence of own race bias in situations where the outcome of a particular play is less important our findings suggest that high levels of interracial cooperation can occur in a setting where workers are operating in a highly visible setting with strong incentives to behave efficiently jel j15 j71 l23

ultra fast activity and intraday market quality this paper studies the intraday relationship between ultra fast machine driven activity ufa and market quality in automated equity markets we find that higher ufa is associated with lower intraday market quality greater quoted and effective spreads and lower depth this effect is economically significant and robust to different specifications endogeneity tests and alternative measures of ufa our results hold after controlling for volatility periods of unusually high ufa a proxy for quote stuffing and periods where ufa is primarily driven by fleeting orders inside the spread a proxy for spoofing and competition between liquidity providers

the differing nature of black white wage inequality across occupational sectors the nature of racial wage inequality appears to differ across occupation sectors specifically i find that all of the racial wage inequality in the white collar job sector can be accounted for by controlling for the academic skill level of each worker but almost half of the overall racial wage inequality remains in the blue collar sector after controlling for each worker s academic skill relatedly after controlling for academic skill i find that black workers are actually more likely to work in the white collar sector than white workers i show that these findings are consistent and arguably directly implied by both preference based and statistical based models of discrimination however omitted variable bias and measurement error also cannot be ruled out as possible explanations

speed algorithmic trading and market quality around macroeconomic news announcements this paper documents that speed is crucially important for high frequency trading strategies based on u s macroeconomic news releases using order level data on the highly liquid s p 500 etf traded on nasdaq from january 6 2009 to december 12 2011 we find that a delay of 300 ms or more significantly reduces returns of news based trading strategies this reduction is greater for high impact news and on days with high volatility in addition we assess the effect of algorithmic trading on market quality around macroeconomic news in the minute following a macroeconomic news arrival algorithmic activity increases trading volume and depth at the best quotes but also increases volatility and leads to a drop in overall depth quoted half spreads decrease increase when we measure algorithmic trading over the full top of the order book

the trade off between equality and efficiency this paper uses a 1976 microdata base to estimate the marginal cost of reducing income inequality with a policy that has distributional effects similar to the present tax transfer system the analysis uses a simulation methodology in which only the labor supply effects are evaluated other behavioral effects are ignored the most striking finding is that marginal cost is quite high even for modest labor supply elasticities for example in the benchmark case with a weighted average economy wide uncompensated wage elasticity of 0 2 and compensated elasticity of 0 31 the disposable money income of upper income quintiles of households is depressed by 9 51 for each dollar increase in the disposable money income of lower income quintiles when income equivalent values that take account of the value of leisure are compared the marginal cost for this case is estimated to be 3 49

college entry by blacks since 1970 the role of college costs family background and the returns to education college enrollment of black 18 19 year old high school graduates declined from 1980 through 1984 and then rebounded after 1984 this paper presents data from a time series of cross sections of 18 19 year old youths from 1973 through 1988 to test the role of family background direct college costs local economic conditions and returns to college in driving these trends the evidence suggests that on the one hand increases in direct college costs were driving enrollment rates downward throughout the eighties on the other hand dramatic increases in average parental education for black youths exerted upward pressure on college enrollment by blacks particularly in the latter half of the decade the net effect of these two factors contributed to the pattern of decline and recovery observed during the eighties