We examine how bank capital and borrower bargaining power affect loan spreads. Consistent with previous studies, higher bank capital has a negative impact on loan rates, but borrower cash flow has a ...significant effect on this impact: compared with high-capital banks, lowcapital banks charge more for borrowers with low cash flow, but offer greater marginal discounts as these borrowers’ cash flow rises. These effects are largely focused on more bank-dependent borrowers. We find some evidence that low-capital banks charge a higher premium for bank-dependent borrowers’ systematic risk, but not for their total equity risk or default risk.
We use unique administrative data and a quasi-field experiment of exogenous allocation in Sweden to estimate medium-and longer-run effects of peoples’exposure to financially literate neighbors on ...their financial behavior. We contribute evidence of (1) a causal impact of exposure and of a social multiplier of financial knowledge and (2) unfavorable distributional aspects of externalities. Exposure promotes saving in private retirement accounts and stockholding, especially when neighbors have economics or business education, but only for educated households and for substantial interaction possibilities. Findings point to a transfer of knowledge rather than mere imitation or effects through labor, education, or mobility channels.
We use firm-level data on U.S. multinationals to show how offshoring affects domestic employment within and across firms. We introduce a new instrument for offshoring, bilateral tax treaties, which ...reduce the cost of offshore activities. We find substantial heterogeneity in effects. A 10% increase in affiliate employment drives a 1.3% increase in employment at the U.S. parent firm, with smaller effects at the industry and regional levels. In contrast, offshoring by vertical multinationals drives declining employment among nonmultinationals in the same industry, and firms opening new affiliates exhibit smaller domestic employment growth than those expanding existing affiliates.
This paper reviews key themes that impact on the role and management of human resources in tourism (primarily relating to work and employment) and assesses whether the past 20 years provides evidence ...of significant change within the sector. The paper considers the status of work in tourism and reflects upon the impact that key environmental developments have had upon employment—the practice of human resource management in contemporary tourism; the impact of global and social forces on perceptions of work and careers; the impact of ICT on work and employment in tourism; changing interpretations of skills within tourism; and the increasingly diverse nature of the tourism workforce in developed countries. Conclusions are drawn which point to a “hung jury” in considering whether change in the tourism workplace, over the review timeframe, has been ephemeral or more fundamental.
Bond Liquidity Premia Fontaine, Jean-Sébastien; Garcia, René
The Review of financial studies,
04/2012, Letnik:
25, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Theory predicts that funding conditions faced by financial intermediaries are an important limit to arbitrage. We identify and measure the value of funding liquidity from the crosssection of Treasury ...securities. To validate our interpretation, we establish linkages with funding conditions in the repo market, the shadow banking sector, and the overall economy. Looking at asset pricing implications, we find that increases in funding liquidity predict lower risk premia for all Treasury securities but higher risk premia on LIBOR loans, swap contracts, and corporate bonds. The impact of funding conditions on interest rates is large and pervasive throughout crises and normal times.
This paper finds evidence of severe health deficits among young children who were exposed to the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency in Northern Uganda (1987–2007). We employ a ...difference‐in‐differences approach to estimate a 0.74 standard deviation deficit in height‐for‐age z‐scores among children exposed to the fighting for a period of more than 9 months. Extending our analysis, we use a mediation model to investigate the transmission mechanisms through which the war may have affected childhood nutrition. We find support for the hypothesis that deficits occurred partly through changes in the frequency at which younger children received solid or semi‐solid foods.
This study is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to infer the consequences on productivity entailed by anticompetitive regulations in product and labor markets through their impacts on production ...prices and wages. Results show that changes in production prices and wages at country*industry levels are informative about the creation of rents impeding productivity in different ways and to different extents. A simulation based on OECD regulation indicators suggests that nearly all countries could expect sizeable gains in multifactor productivity from the implementation of large structural reform programs changing anticompetitive regulation practices on product and labor markets.
Opinion polls and other surveys are used to capture public sentiments on a variety of issues. If citizens are unwilling to reveal certain policy preferences to others, surveys may fail to ...characterize population preferences accurately. The innovation of this paper is to use unique data that allow one to measure biases in surveyed preferences for a broad range of public policies. I combine data on 184 referenda held in Switzerland between 1987 and 2007 with postballot surveys that ask how the citizens voted for each proposal. The difference between stated preferences in the survey and revealed preferences at the ballot box provides a direct measure of survey bias. I find that these biases vary by policy area, with the largest occurring in policies on immigration, international integration, and votes involving liberal or conservative attitudes. Also, citizens show a tendency to respond in accordance with the majority.
This paper analyzes the auto-correlations of international crude oil prices on the basis of the estimation of the Hurst exponent dynamics for returns over the period from 1987 to 2007. In doing so, a ...model-free statistical approach—detrended fluctuation analysis—that reduces the effects of non-stationary market trends and focuses on the intrinsic auto-correlation structure of market fluctuations over different time horizons, is used. Tests for time variations of the Hurst exponent indicate that over long horizons the crude oil market is consistent with the efficient market hypothesis. However, meaningful auto-correlations cannot be excluded for time horizons smaller than one month where the Hurst exponent manifests cyclic, non-periodic dynamics. This means that the market exhibits a time-varying short-term inefficient behavior that becomes efficient in the long term. The proposed methodology and its findings are put in perspective with previous studies and results.
In 2006 the controversial step was undertaken by the Maltese government to provide incentives for new routes with the intention of attracting low cost carriers to fly to the Islands. This paper ...examines the impact that low cost airline operations are likely to have on the volume and profile of passengers visiting Malta. The focus is on whether the low cost carriers are merely facilitating existing custom in terms of tourism flows, or whether they are attracting a different kind of visitor. The analysis uses data from a number of air transport and tourism sources and concentrates on the UK; the largest tourist market and where the low cost carriers are likely to have the greatest impact. Initially the effects of low cost carriers to date are examined and then there is an assessment of the longer-term impacts investigating recent developments of other low cost routes from the UK. The evidence shows that traffic to Malta increased significantly in 2007 but these additional travellers do not seem to be more interested in history or culture, nor do they take shorter trips or travel more in off-peak times. This is unlike the situation at a number of other European destinations where the introduction of regular low cost services has provided the flexibility for short break cultural tourism to develop.
PDF
