the political economy of corporate control and labor rents in a democracy a political majority can influence both the corporate governance structure and the return to human and financial capital we argue that when financial wealth is sufficiently concentrated there is political support for high labor rents and a strong governance role for banks or large investors the model is consistent with the great reversal phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century we offer evidence that in several financially developed countries a financially weakened middle class became concerned about labor income risk associated with free markets and supported a more corporatist financial system

the politics of financial development evidence from trade liberalization incumbents in various industries have different incentives to promote or oppose financial development changes in the relative strength of promoter and opponent industries thus result in changes in the political equilibrium level of financial development we conduct an event study using a sample of 41 countries that liberalized trade during 1970 to 2000 and show that the strengthening of promoter relative to opponent industries resulting from liberalization is a good predictor of subsequent financial development the benefits of developing the financial system are insufficient for financial development and rents in particular hands appear to be necessary to achieve it copyright c 2008 by the american finance association

why is bank debt senior a theory of asymmetry and claim priority based on influence costs this theory can explain why bank debt is universally senior consistent with the presence of conflict lawyers and absolute priority violations in financial distress better organized banks would more strongly contest priority in financial distress if they were junior because deterrence can reduce creditors total expenses in a priority contest the ex post stronger lobbyist litigant should be senior ex ante for equivalent reasons the theory can advise when public debt should be senior to trade credit and or implicit contracts and can even suggest one rationale for the absolute priority rule apr this article further shows that chapter hi creditor reimbursement procedures can lower overall costs article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

why has u s inflation become harder to forecast we examine whether the u s rate of price inflation has become harder to forecast and to the extent that it has what changes in the inflation process have made it so the main finding is that the univariate inflation process is well described by an unobserved component trend cycle model with stochastic volatility or equivalently an integrated moving average process with time varying parameters this model explains a variety of recent univariate inflation forecasting puzzles and begins to explain some multivariate inflation forecasting puzzles as well

group loyalty and the taste for redistribution interpersonal preferences preferences that depend on the characteristics of others are typically hard to infer from observable individual behavior as an alternative approach this paper uses survey data to investigate interpersonal preferences i show that self reported attitudes toward welfare spending are determined not only by financial self interest but also by interpersonal preferences these interpersonal preferences are characterized by a negative exposure effect individuals decrease their support for welfare as the welfare recipiency rate in their community rises and racial group loyalty individuals increase their support for welfare spending as the share of local recipients from their own racial group rises these findings help to explain why levels of welfare benefits are relatively low in racially heterogeneous states

does economic structure determine financial structure abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between the structure of the real economy and a country s financial system we consider whether the development of the real economic structure can predict the direction of evolution of a country s financial structure using data for 108 countries we find a significant relationship between real economic structure and financial structure next we exploit shocks to the economies in india finland and sweden and south korea and show that changes in the economic structure of a country influence the evolution of its financial system this suggests that financial institutions and capital markets change in response to the structure of industries

ownership concentration and firm performance in emerging markets a meta analysis the literature concerned with relations between ownership concentration and corporate performance in emerging markets presents conflicting theoretical predications and inconclusive empirical results we use meta analytical techniques to integrate the diverse empirical findings and investigate factors contribute to the inconsistencies in the empirical evidence using 419 correlations collected from 42 primary studies of listed corporations in 18 emerging markets heterogeneity tests show that only a small proportion of the variation in reported ownership concentration performance relations can be attributed to sampling error our meta regressions reveal how population differences researchers modeling choices and inadequate treatment of endogeneity explain a large portion of the true heterogeneity after adjusting for these effects we find ownership concentration has negative relation with firm performance across countries our results emphasize the importance of model specification and methods of addressing endogeneity and support further comparative study of the ownership concentration corporate performance relation between countries with seemingly similar corporate governance environments

the political economy of financial systems evidence from suffrage reforms in the last two centuries initially voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets the franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the uncertainty and financial returns from stock markets our panel data evidence covering 1830 1999 shows that tighter restrictions on the voting franchise induce a greater stock market development whereas a broader voting franchise is more conducive towards the banking sector consistent with perotti and von thadden 2006 our results are robust to controlling for other political determinants and endogeneity

stock markets banks and growth panel evidence this paper investigates the impact of stock markets and banks on economic growth using a panel data set for the period 1976 98 and applying recent gmm techniques developed for dynamic panels on balance we find that stock markets and banks positively influence economic growth and these findings are not due to potential biases induced by simultaneity omitted variables or unobserved country specific effects

political intervention in debt contracts this paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of an agricultural economy in which poor farmers borrow from rich farmers because output is stochastic we allow for idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks there may be default ex post we compare equilibria with and without political intervention intervention takes the form of a moratorium and is decided by voting when bad economic shocks are highly likely state contingent debt moratoria always improve ex post efficiency and may also improve ex ante efficiency moreover the threat of moratoria enhances efficiency when adverse macro shocks are unlikely state contingent moratoria always improve ex ante welfare by completing incomplete debt contracts

strategic transparency and informed trading will capital market integration force convergence of corporate governance dominant investors can influence the publicly available information about firms by affecting the cost of information collection under strategic competition transparency results in higher variability of profits and output thus lenders prefer less transparency since this protects firms when in a weak competitive position while equity holders prefer more market interaction creates strategic complementarity in gathering information on competing firms thus entry by transparent competitors will improve price informativeness moreover as the return to information gathering increases with liquidity increasing global trading may undermine the ability of bank control to keep firms opaque

who is against immigration a cross country investigation of individual attitudes toward immigrants abstract this paper empirically analyzes economic and noneconomic determinants of individual attitudes toward immigrants within and across countries the two survey data sets used covering a wide range of developed and developing countries make it possible to test for interactive effects between individual characteristics and country level attributes in particular theory predicts that the correlation between pro immigration attitudes and individual skill should be related to the skill composition of natives relative to immigrants in the destination country skilled individuals should favor immigration in countries where natives are more skilled than immigrants and oppose it otherwise results based on direct and indirect measures of the relative skill composition are consistent with these predictions noneconomic variables also are correlated with immigration attitudes but they don t alter significantly the labor market results

introducing the bank of canada staff economic projections database we present a new publicly available database of real time data and forecasts from the bank of canada s staff economic projections which will be updated on an annual basis we describe the data construct its variables coverage and frequency we then provide a forecast evaluation for gross domestic product gdp growth consumer price index cpi inflation and the policy rate since 1982 we compare the staff s forecasts with those from commonly used time series models estimated with the real time data and with forecasts from other professional forecasters and provide standard bias tests finally we study changes in predictability of the canadian economy following the announcement of the inflation targeting regime in 1991 our data set is unprecedented outside the usa and our evidence is particularly interesting as it covers over 30 years of staff forecasts two severe recessions and different monetary policy regimes

employment protection and takeovers labor restructuring is a key driver of takeovers and the associated synergy gains worldwide in a difference in differences research design we show that major increases in employment protection reduce takeover activity by 14 27 and the combined firm gains synergies by over half consistent with the labor channel behind these effects deals with greater potential for workforce restructuring show a greater reduction in volume number and synergies the reforms do impede layoffs and the associated wage costs match the magnitude of synergy losses offer prices are not fully adjusted with both bidders and targets exhibiting lower returns following the reforms

stock market development and cross country differences in relative prices abstract we document a positive correlation between stock market capitalization and price levels wages within the group of countries with poorly developed stock markets and a negative correlation between these two variables within the group of countries with more developed stock markets this paper argues that there is a causal relationship behind these correlations stock markets initially stimulate growth pushing the demand for nontradables and increasing prices and wages stock markets also promote a shift toward more capital intensive technologies in the tradable sector increasing the migration of workers to services and eventually putting downward pressure on wages and prices

has the economy become more predictable changes in greenbook forecast accuracy several researchers have recently documented large reductions in economic volatility but a more important question may be whether the economy has become more predictable using forecasts from the federal reserve greenbooks i find that inflation and output have become more predictable though the results for output are somewhat mixed the reductions in unpredictability if any are significantly smaller than reductions in volatility associated with this the predictable component of fluctuations in output and inflation has virtually disappeared

people s opium religion and economic attitudes since max weber there has been an active debate on the impact of religion on people s economic attitudes much of the existing evidence however is based on cross country studies in which this impact is confounded by differences in other institutional factors we use the worldvalues surveys to id entify the relationship between intensity of religious beliefs and economic attitudes controlling for country fixed effects we study several economic attitudes towardcooperation the government working women legal rules thriftiness andthe market economy we also distinguish across religious denominations differentiating on whether a religion is dominant in a country we find that on average religious beliefs are associated with good economic attitudes where good is defined as conducive to higher per capita income andgrowth yet religious people tendto be more racist andless favorable with respect to working women these effects differ across religious denominations overall we find that christian religions are more positively associatedwith attitudes conducive to economic growth r 2003 elsevier science b v all rights reserved jel classification a1 e0 n4 z1

good bye lenin or not the effect of communism on people s preferences preferences for redistribution as well as the generosities of welfare states differ significantly across countries in this paper we test whether there exists a feedback process of the economic regime on individual preferences we exploit the experiment of german separation and reunification to establish exogeneity of the economic system from 1945 to 1990 east germans lived under a communist regime with heavy state intervention and extensive redistribution we find that after german reunification east germans are more in favor of redistribution and state intervention than west germans even after controlling for economic incentives this effect is especially strong for older cohorts who lived under communism for a longer time period we further find that east germans preferences converge towards those of west germans we calculate that it will take one to two generations for preferences to converge completely

the central bank as shaper and observer of events the case of the yield spread the yield spread has commonly been employed as a successful predictor of economic growth and recessions although its marginal predictive power has decreased since the 1990s notably the yield spread s declining power to predict us economic activity coincided with its growing power to predict us interest rate changes in my view these phenomena are inevitably linked and share one cause the central bank intended to enhance both its transparency and credibility through greater information disclosure this disclosure improved interest rate predictability but might also have crowded out useful private information formerly in the yield spread that helped predict economic activity

social mobility and redistributive politics just like economists voters have conflicting views about redistributive taxation because they estimate its incentive costs differently we model rational agents as trying to learn from their dynastic income mobility experience the relative importance of effort and predetermined factors in the generation of income inequality and therefore the magnitude of these incentive costs in the long run left wing dynasties believing less in individual effort and voting for more redistribution coexist with right wing dynasties this allows us to explain why individual mobility experience and not only current income matters for political attiitudes and how persistent differences in perceptions about social mobility can generate persistent differences in redistribution across countries

public education and pensions in democracy a political economy theory a dynamic political economy theory of scal policy is presented to explain the simultaneous existence of public education and pensions in modern democracies the driving force of the model is the intergenerational conict over the allocation of the public budget successive generations of voters choose scal policies through repeated elections the political power of elderly voters creates the motive for adults to support public investment in the human capital of future generations since it expands future pension possibilities we characterize the markov perfect equilibrium of the voting game in a small open economy the equilibrium reproduces salient features of intergenerational

does social distrust always lead to a stronger support for government intervention the paper considers trust as an empirical determinant of individual support for government intervention the central notion is that the influence of generalized trust on policy attitudes is conditional on confidence in both state actors and major companies the starting point is the idea that individuals who generally distrust other persons have a stronger taste for the regulation of economic activities while people with high interpersonal trust are in favor of less stringent regulatory control yet people who do not trust unknown others also tend to mistrust government and private companies if mistrust in state actors dominates we should not necessarily expect stronger interventionist preferences estimating the determinants of interventionist attitudes using data from the world values survey european values study for approximately 130 000 individuals in forty oecd and eu countries we find evidence that the impact of social trust on government intervention attitudes is conditional on institutional trust confidence in major companies appears to have a stronger effect on preference formation than trust in state actors

federal reserve information and the behavior of interest rates this paper tests for the existence of asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public by examining federal reserve and commercial inflation forecasts it demonstrates that the federal reserve has considerable information about inflation beyond what is known to commercial forecasters it also shows that monetary policy actions provide signals of the federal reserve s information and that commercial forecasters modify their forecasts in response to those signals these findings may explain why long term interest rates typically rise in response to shifts to tighter monetary policy jel e52 e43 d82 asymmetric information between the federal reserve and the public is a phenomenon that is often posited but rarely tested numerous models of central bank behavior for example show that the existence of asymmetric information has important implications for the effectiveness of policy and the consequences of dynamic inconsistency yet there

stability and non linear dynamics in the broad demand for money in spain in this article we estimate a money demand function for broad money in spain in the period 1978 1998 stability tests indicate the existence of a stable money demand function in the long but not in the short run using recent non linear techniques we find that such instabilities are caused by a non linear adjustment of real balances towards a stable long run equilibrium

a stable us money demand function 1874 1975 we apply recent econometric techniques to the demand for money in the united states over a period of some hundred years using data previously analyzed by friedman and schwartz 1982 our results parallel those of hendry and ericsson s 1991 uk study we find evidence of a unique long run money demand function and of a stable short run demand function which passes a range of diagnostic tests and exhibits parameter constancy also parameter non constancy in an inverted equation where prices appear as the dependent variable is inconsistent with the hypothesis of exogenous money determining prices through the money demand function

regulation and distrust in a cross section of countries government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with social capital we document this correlation and present a model explaining it in the model distrust creates public demand for regulation while regulation in turn discourages social capital accumulation leading to multiple equilibria a key implication of the model is that individuals in low trust countries want more government intervention even though the government is corrupt we test this and other implications of the model using country and individual level data on social capital and beliefs about government s role as well as on changes in beliefs and in trust during the transition from socialism

the demand for money a dynamic rational expectations model macroeconomic modelling generally has widely adopted the use of forwardlooking variables in behavioural relationships studies of the demand for money being something of an exception the aim of this paper is to provide preliminary empirical results of a model which explicitly incorporates expectations of the future into the demand function for narrow money the approach adopted is the modelling of the demand for money within a multi period costs of adjustment framework under the assumption of rational expectations agents are assumed to pursue a target or long run level of money balances which is itself a function of prices income and interest rates this results in an empirical specification which consists of both backwardlooking and forward looking components the model is estimated using uk data for the period i963i i983iii the remainder of the paper is divided into four sections in section i we outline the framework in which our model is derived in the following section we discuss the econometric techniques used and in section iii we present our empirical results a final section concludes

actively learning by pricing a model of an experimenting seller this article presents a model of a rational seller who is actively learning the slope of his demand curve via his pricing strategy consequently this seller optimally experiments with his price resulting price patterns show a tendency for discreteness as observed in the data which has proved to be a major challenge to most price setting models the experimentation motive can also replicate the observation that prices are more volatile than costs as well as the presence of many idiosyncratic price changes in the data it can do so without a need to assume the existence of large idiosyncratic shocks

long run money demand in taiwan revisited evidence from a cointegrating str approach previous studies on the nonlinearity of the money demand function focus only on short run dynamics and assume that the long run cointegrated relationship is linear which according to economic theory need not be the case thus this article focuses on the variables that make up the long run money demand function in taiwan and their determinants by using the cointegrating smoothing transition regression cstr test developed by choi and saikkonen 2004 this model is more general than the previous str model in that it may contain several transition functions and has more than a single transition variable we demonstrate our empirical results for robustness and adopt two models to ascertain whether or not the stock price should be added as a determinant of the demand for money our empirical results show the existence of a stationary long run relationship among real money demand functions for the period from 1976q1 to 2005q1 and the robustness test covers the 1980q1 2005q1 period in taiwan by comparing

indeterminacy and forecastability recent studies document the deteriorating performance of forecasting models during the great moderation this conversely implies that forecastability is higher in the preceding era when the economy was unexpectedly volatile we offer an explanation for this phenomenon in the context of equilibrium indeterminacy in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models first we analytically show that a model under indeterminacy exhibits richer dynamics that can improve forecastability then using a prototypical new keynesian model we numerically demonstrate that indeterminacy due to passive monetary policy can yield superior forecastability as long as the degree of uncertainty about sunspot fluctuations is relatively small

the regulation of labor author s botero juan djankov simeon la porta rafael lopez de silanes florencio shleifer andrei abstract we investigate the regulation of labor markets through employment collective relations and social security laws in 85 countries we find that the political power of the left is associated with more stringent labor regulations and more generous social security systems and that socialist french and scandinavian legal origin countries have sharply higher levels of labor regulation than do common law countries however the effects of legal origins are larger and explain more of the variation in regulations than those of politics heavier regulation of labor is associated with lower labor force participation and higher unemployment especially of the young these results are most naturally consistent with legal theories according to which countries have pervasive regulaory styles inherited from the transplantation of legal systems

sovereign debt auctions uniform or discriminatory abstract many financial assets especially government bonds are issued by an auction an important feature of the design is the auction pricing mechanism uniform versus discriminatory theoretical papers do not provide a definite answer regarding the dominance of one type of auction over the other we investigate the revealed preferences of the issuers by surveying the sovereign issuers that conduct auctions we find that the majority of the issuers countries in our sample use a discriminatory auction mechanism for issuing government debt we use a multinomial logit procedure and discriminatory analysis to investigate the mechanism choice it was interesting to find that market oriented economies and those that practice common law tend to use a uniform method while economies who are less market oriented and practice civil law tend to use discriminatory price auctions

asymmetric responses of money demand to oil price shocks in saudi arabia a non linear ardl approach saudi arabia is an open oil based economy with fixed exchange rates therefore it has limited monetary policy autonomy using non linear autoregressive distributed lag approach this article inves

can foreign stock investors influence policymaking foreign portfolio stock investors fpsis often attach political criteria to their investment choices sometimes in the hope of pressuring policymakers in boycotted markets to adjust their policies

on the political origin of corporate governance species although economies business practices and living standards have converged since wwii corporate structures continue to differ among the advanced economies of the world looking at the diversity of corporate structures of large sized firms around the world and over time would fascinate charles darwin this work develops a critical review of the literature on political determinants of corporate governance through the darwinian theory including some lamarckian aspects as darwin in his work on the origin of species explicates the diversity of species of tortoises finches and iguanas of the galapagos islands so darwinism may contribute in understanding the origin and the persistence of corporate diversity in particular this article takes into account politics driven variations their inheritances and the subsequent selection of advantageous corporate attributes

evolution over time of the determinants of preferences for redistribution and the support for the welfare state the objective of this article is to analyse the determinants of preferences for redistribution in spain both at an aggregate and regional level using country level data we put to the test the alesina and angeletos 2005 hypothesis the strong and positive relationship between the belief that luck determines income and the support for redistributive policies as an innovative contribution we contrast this hypothesis using a set of panel data models with regional and time fixed effects our main finding is the existence of a structural change in preferences formation for redistribution in spain between 1995 and 2007 furthermore the empirical results provide some evidence suggesting that 1 the belief that society is unfair have a moderate effect on the individuals preferences for redistribution and 2 regional beliefs in spanish regions are not equally important when determining demand for redistribution

monetary policy in a data rich environment abstract most empirical analyses of monetary policy have been confined to frameworks in which the federal reserve is implicitly assumed to exploit only a limited amount of information despite the fact that the fed actively monitors literally thousands of economic time series this article explores the feasibility of incorporating richer information sets into the analysis both positive and normative of fed policymaking we employ a factor model approach developed by stock j h watson m w diffusion indices journal of business economic statistics 2002 20 2 147 forecasting inflation 1999 journal of monetary economics 44 2 293 that permits the systematic information in large data sets to be summarized by relatively few estimated factors with this framework we reconfirm stock and watson s result that the use of large data sets can improve forecast accuracy and we show that this result does not seem to depend on the use of finally revised as opposed to real time data we estimate policy reaction functions for the fed that take into account its data rich environment and provide a test of the hypothesis that fed actions are explained solely by its forecasts of inflation and real activity finally we explore the possibility of developing an expert system that could aggregate diverse information and provide benchmark policy settings

the role of law in economic growth a literature review abstract compared with other explanatory variables such as capital accumulation technological innovations geographical endowments economic openness and cultural factors institutions especially legal institutions have been regarded as a crucial condition for economic growth in recent years the importance of legal rules is systematically revealed by a series of cross country econometric studies conducted by la porta et al who claim that legal origins are central to understanding the divergence in living standards across the regions and countries of the world and compared with civil law countries especially those countries with french civil law tradition common law countries have enjoyed superior economic outcomes the controversies set off by la porta et al s proposition indicate that there are a number of questions that are difficult to explain by la porta et al s theory and hence call for more work on comparative analysis of different legal families before a consensus can be reached

product based cultural change is the village global we provide a model of product based cultural change where trade integration leads to cultural convergence a standard trade model of dixit stiglitz monopolistic competition is coupled with a micro founded model of cultural dynamics we show that access to varieties that are attached to a global cultural type changes the incentives of parents to socialize their children and transmit their type the resulting increase in agents of the global cultural type leads to a magnification of the initial shock a striking feature of the model is that even temporary shocks to openness may have permanent effects through the changing distribution of preferences in the economy

has euro area inflation persistence changed over time this paper analyzes the stability over time of the econometric process for euro area inflation since 1970 focusing in particular on the behavior of the so called persistence parameter the sum of the coefficients on the lagged dependent variables perhaps surprisingly in light of the lucas critique our principal finding is that there appears to be relatively little instability in the parameters of the euro area inflation process full sample estimates of the persistence parameter are generally close to 1 and we fail to reject the hypothesis that this parameter has been stable over time we discuss how these results provide some indirect evidence against rational expectations models with strong forward looking elements such as the new keynesian phillips curve

neither a borrower nor a lender be an economic analysis of interest restrictions and usury laws interest rate restrictions are pervasive and important regulations this article suggests that these restrictions served in part as a primitive means of social insurance lowering the rate of interest effectively transfers income to states of the world where individuals have a high marginal utility of income and are borrowers from states of the world where individuals have a low marginal utility of income and are lenders the model predicts that interest rate restrictions will be tighter when income inequality is high and impermanent and when growth rates are low furthermore loan supply must be somewhat inelastic data from u s states support a connection between inequality income shocks and tighter usury laws usury laws were also stricter in older more stable communities the history of usury laws suggests that this social insurance mechanism is one reason usury laws exist and persist but this history also suggests that usury laws have played many roles across time and that no one theory can po

labor protection and leverage this paper exploits inter temporal variations in employment protection across countries and finds that rigidities in labor markets are an important determinant of firms capital structure decisions over the 1985 2007 period we find that reforms increasing employment protection are associated with a 187 basis point reduction in leverage we interpret this finding to suggest that employment protection increases operating leverage crowding out financial leverage this result is robust across measures of employment protection and leverage and does not appear to be due to pre treatment differences between treated and control firms omitted variables unobserved changes in regional economic conditions and reverse causality heterogeneous treatment effects are consistent with our economic intuition we find that the negative effect is more pronounced in firms that are subject to frequent hiring and firing

investigating capitalism aversion capitalism aversion there are two non mutually exclusive theories of individual variations in pro capitalism opinions the first theory views pro capitalism opinions as self serving individuals are opposed to market forces when they threaten their economic rents the second theory views differences in such opinions as reflecting genuine disagreement on the efficiency of various economic systems using individual data we investigate the validity of both theories focusing on attitudes toward private ownership private profit and competition we find evidence that the first theory explains some of the variations in attitudes however consistent with the second theory we also find evidence of individual learning about the comparative virtues of economic systems the learning is slow home biased and path dependent long run cultural and historical determinants of pro market attitudes such as religion and legal origins explain more than 40 of the cross country variations in capitalism aversion last we provide tentative evidence that at the country level pro market opinions affect the nature of economic institutions our results suggest that the feasibility of economic reform does not depend solely on its impact on the distribution of rents ideological a prioris are likely to be important as well

smooth adjustment econometrics and inventory theoretic money management abstract a growing number of empirical papers use miller orr s s money management as economic motivation for application of non linear smooth adjustment models this paper shows such models are not implied by the miller orr economy instead the miller orr economy implies non standard smooth adjustment as derived in the neglected and misinterpreted work of milbourne et al 1983 remarkably this function includes a varying weight on the lagged dependent variable capturing static not dynamic effects interpretations of these apparent dynamics are presented some of which may be useful in non monetary s s contexts results imply a new agenda for applied smooth adjustment modeling of money

business groups and the natural state abstract recent revisionist accounts of corporate governance in both business history and finance are challenging the tradition narrative associated with berle and means 1932 and chandler 1977 in which the american model of diffuse ownership and coherent diversification is both an inevitable outcome of economic development and perhaps a normative standard for the world to follow this essay is an attempt to rethink that narrative in light of the continued significance of the pyramidal business group as a governance structure around the world i argue that business groups arise in response both to inadequacies in arm s length markets and to the needs of what north et al 2009 call the natural state in this view the quality of markets and the demands of the state are tightly interconnected phenomena such a perspective explains the emergence of business groups in developing countries as well as their persistence even in wealthy and sophisticated polities apart from the u s and the u k in the end moreover i endorse the view that the much discussed and oft misunderstood exceptionalism of the u s in corporate governance arises not only from the sophistication of american markets but also importantly from government policies toward corporate taxation and securities regulation policies that arose from the unique public choice problem posed by the differential effect on the u s of the collapse of globalization during the middle years of the twentieth century

the political economy of the us mortgage default crisis we examine the effects of constituents special interests and ideology on congressional voting on two of the most significant pieces of legislation in us economic history representatives whose constituents experience a sharp increase in mortgage defaults are more likely to support the foreclosure prevention act especially in competitive districts interestingly representatives are more sensitive to defaults of their own party constituents special interests in the form ofhigher campaign contributions from the financial industry increase the likelihood of supporting the emergency economic stabilization act however ideologically conservative representatives are less responsive to both constituent and special interests jel d72 g21 g28

evaluating the efficiency of the fomc s new economic projections since 2007 fomc policymakers have been publishing detailed numerical projections of macroeconomic series over the next three years by testing whether the revisions to these projections are unpredictable i find that fomc s efficiency is generally accepted for inflation but often rejected for real economic variables notably for the unemployment rate the rejection is due to the strong autocorrelation of revisions which may reflect information rigidity of fomc s unemployment projections the joint efficiency of the entire projection is accepted in most cases

enjoying the quiet life corporate governance and managerial preferences much of our understanding of corporations builds on the idea that managers when they are not closely monitored will pursue goals that are not in shareholders interests but what goals would managers pursue this paper uses variation in corporate governance generated by state adoption of antitakeover laws to empirically map out managerial preferences we use plant level data and exploit a unique feature of corporate law that allows us to deal with possible biases associated with the timing of the laws we find that when managers are insulated from takeovers worker wages especially those of white collar workers rise the destruction of old plants falls but the creation of new plants also falls finally overall productivity and profitability decline in response to these laws our results suggest that active empire building may not be the norm and that managers may instead prefer to enjoy the quiet life

distributive politics and economic growth a crude distinction between economics and politics would be that economics is concerned with expanding the pie while politics is about distributing it in this paper we analyze the relationship between the two we focus on how an economy s initial configuration of resources shapes the political struggle for income and wealth distribution and how that in turn affects long run growth our main conclusion is that inequality is conducive to the adoption of growth retarding policies we derive this result from a simple political economy model of growth and present cross country evidence consistent with it the key feature of our model is that individuals differ in their relative factor endowments we distinguish between two types of factors an accumulated factor called capital and a nonaccumulated factor called labor growth is driven by the expansion of the capital stock which is in turn determined by individual saving decisions long run growth is endogenous as the aggregate production function is taken to be linearly homogeneous in capital and productive government services taken together the provision of government services is financed by a tax on capital because government services are productive a small tax on

why are some people and countries more protectionist than others we analyze two cross country data sets that contain information on attitudes toward trade as well as a broad range of socio demographic and other indicators we nd that pro trade preferences are signi cantly and robustly correlated with an individual s level of human capital in the manner predicted by the factor endowments model preferences over trade are also correlated with the trade exposure of the sector in which an individual is employed individuals in non traded sectors tend to be the most pro trade while individuals in sectors with a revealed comparative disadvantage are the most protectionist third an individual s relative economic status has a very strong positive association withpro trade attitudes finally non economic determinants in the form of values identities and attachments play an important role in explaining the variation in preferences over trade high degrees of neighborhood attachment and nationalism patriotism are associated withprotectionist tendencies c

a cross country comparison of seasonal cycles and business cycles in a recent paper barsky and miron 1989 examine the seasonal fluctuations in the u s economy they show that the key stylized facts about the business cycle characterize the seasonal cycle as well and they suggest that the interpretation of many of these stylized facts over the seasonal cycle is easier than interpretation over the business cycle the reason is that the ultimate sources of seasonal cycles are more readily identifiable than those of business cycles this paper uses the cross country variation in seasonal patterns to pin down the ultimate sources of seasonal variation more precisely than is possible from examination of u s data alone we conclude that a christmas shift in preferences and synergies across agents are the key determinants of the seasonal patterns around the world the paper also establishes that across developed countries the key observations about aggregate variables that characterize the business cycle also characterize the seasonal cycle thus the similarity of the seasonal cycle and the business cycle demonstrated by barsky and miron 1989 for the united states is a robust stylized fact this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

household inequality entrepreneurial dynamism and corporate financing economic theories provide conflicting hypotheses on how wealth inequality affects entrepreneurial dynamism to empirically investigate its impact we construct local measures of household wealth inequality based on financial rents home equity and 1880 farmland we identify its effects on entrepreneurship by instrumenting it with land distribution under the 1862 homestead act or us states removal of death taxes wealth inequality decreases firm entry and exit and the proportion of high tech businesses across metropolitan statistical areas there is also less redistribution into public goods supportive of entrepreneurship such as schooling and the judiciary income per capita consequently grows more slowly

measuring the accuracy of federal reserve forecasts markets across the world pay enormous attention to every economic forecast made by federal reserve governors particularly those from the chair this article develops a new way that the academic literature can assess the accuracy of these federal reserve forecasts in particular our proposed method allows for both general and specific predictions to be assessed while also accounting for the macroeconomic volatility that prevails at the time of the forecast to develop this measure we expand upon a methodology proposed by the wall street journal to score the accuracy of forecasts made by the fed our results show that alan greenspan was consistently the most accurate forecaster among fed governors while the most recent chair in our sample janet yellen has performed relatively poorly more generally we find that the chairs have become less accurate over time with their forecasts and have also tended to make fewer specific predictions

nowcasting u s headline and core inflation we propose a new and parsimonious model for nowcasting headline and core inflation in the u s price index for personal consumption expenditures pce and the consumer price index cpi

law and finance at the origin what are the key determinants of financial development and growth a large literature debates the relative importance of countries legal and political environment in this paper i present evidence from ancient rome where an early form of shareholder company the societas publicanorum developed i show that the societas publicano rum flourished in a legally underdeveloped but politically supportive environment roman republic and disappeared when roman law reached its height of legal sophistication but the political environment grew less supportive roman empire in the roman case legal development appears to have mattered little as long as the law as practiced was flexible and adapted to economic needs the law as practiced in turn reflected prevalent political interests after discussing parallels in more recent history i provide a brief overview of the literature on law and finance and on politics and finance the historical evidence suggests that legal systems may be less of a technological constraint for growth than previously thought at least at the origin