In Tajikistan, theSoviets used inherent Tajik ideological, regional, and ethnic conflicts to movetheir affairs forward. In 1992, after enduring Soviet imposition for seventyyears, the Tajiks reversed ...the process and toppled the Soviet power structurein Tajikistan. The volume traces the development of the conflict using primaryTajik sources.
This study provides a comprehensive account of the civil war that erupted in Tajikistan in 1992. Based on a wide range of primary sources, it analyzes the conflict's long-term historical and ...structural roots as well as its short-term causes, including the rapid dismantling of the Soviet Union and the revival of Islamic and nationalist forces.
In this paper, we analyze the effect of employer‐initiated criminal background checks on the likelihood that employers hire African Americans. We find that employers who check criminal backgrounds ...are more likely to hire African American workers, especially men. This effect is stronger among those employers who report an aversion to hiring those with criminal records than among those who do not. We also find similar effects of employer aversion to ex‐offenders and their tendency to check backgrounds on their willingness to hire other stigmatized workers, such as those with gaps in their employment history. These results suggest that, in the absence of criminal background checks, some employers discriminate statistically against black men and/or those with weak employment records. Such discrimination appears to contribute substantially to observed employment and earnings gaps between white and black young men.
This paper develops and tests a theory, referred to as "preference for whiteness," which predicts that the interracial (white-black) and intraracial wage gap widens as the skin shade of the black ...worker darkens. Using data drawn from the Multi City Study of Urban Inequality and the National Survey of Black Americans, we report evidence largely consistent with the theory. Moreover, we decompose the estimated interracial and intraracial wage gaps, and find that favorable treatment of lighter-skinned workers is a major source of interracial and intraracial wage differences as predicted by the theory.
The choice of a retirement date is one of the most important decisions facing older workers. It is a decision that will affect their economic well-being for the remainder of their lives. One factor ...that undoubtedly impacts this choice is the worker's health. However, the many studies examining the relationship between health and retirement have failed to agree on the relative importance of health compared with financial variables. Efforts to do so have been hampered by the difficulty of correctly measuring health status. Much of the concern centers on the fear that subjective reports of health are biased by individuals using poor health as a justification for early retirement. This paper takes advantage of a unique measure of labor force attachment, the subjective probability of continued work, to reexamine the role of health and changes in health status. By focusing exclusively on workers, I eliminate the concern about justification bias among retired individuals and find that subjective reports of health do have important effects on retirement, effects that are arguably stronger than those of the financial variables. The effects of subjective health remain large even when the model includes more objective measures of health, such as disease conditions. I also find that changes in retirement expectations are driven to a much greater degree by changes in health than by changes in income or wealth.
This paper develops a closed-form option valuation formula for a spot asset whose variance follows a GARCH (p, q) process that can be correlated with the returns of the spot asset. It provides the ...first readily computed option formula for a random volatility model that can be estimated and implemented solely on the basis of observables. The single lag version of this model contains Heston's (1993) stochastic volatility model as a continuous-time limit. Empirical analysis on S&P500 index options shows that the out-of-sample valuation errors from the single lag version of the GARCH model are substantially lower than the ad hoc Black-Scholes model of Dumas, Fleming and Whaley (1998) that uses a separate implied volatility for each option to fit to the smirk/smile in implied volatilties. The GARCH model remains superior even though the parameters of the GARCH model are held constant and volatility is filtered from the history of asset prices while the ad hoc Black-Scholes model is updated every period. The improvement is largely due to the ability of the GARCH model to simultaneously capture the correlation of volatility with spot returns and the path dependence in volatility.
This paper studies the hedging policies of oil and gas producers between 1992 and 1994. My evidence shows that the extent of hedging is related to financing costs. In particular, companies with ...greater financial leverage manage price risks more extensively. My evidence also shows that the likelihood of hedging is related to economies of scale in hedging costs and to the basis risk associated with hedging instruments. Larger companies and companies whose production is located primarily in regions where prices have a high correlation with the prices on which exchange-traded derivatives are based are more likely to manage risks.
This article presents an empirical study of market power in the British electricity industry. Estimates of price-cost markups are derived using direct measures of marginal cost and several approaches ...that do not rely on cost data. Since two suppliers facing inelastic demand dominate the industry, most oligopoly models predict prices substantially above marginal costs. All estimates indicate that prices, while higher than marginal costs, are not nearly as high as most theoretical models predict. Regulatory constraints, the threat of entry, and financial contracts between the suppliers and their customers are considered as possible explanations for the observed price levels.
This article analyzes the timing of CEO stock option awards, as a method of investigating corporate managers' influence over the terms of their own compensation. In a sample of 620 stock option ...awards to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies between 1992 and 1994, I find that the timing of awards coincides with favorable movements in company stock prices. Patterns of companies' quarterly earnings announcements are consistent with an interpretation that CEOs receive stock option awards shortly before favorable corporate news. I evaluate and reject several alternative explanations of the results, including insider trading and the manipulation of news announcement dates.
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