Finance Commons^™

Census Bureau Seeks Partners In Business, Chester Smolski

Smolski Texts

"By now you should have seen the advertisements for the U.S. Census Bureau to apprise us of the forthcoming census on April 1, 2000. And there will be plenty more since the Bureau has budgeted $167 million on this push for public awareness, something it has never perviously paid to do."

Review Of The Reserves And Operable Capability Markets: New England's Experience In The First Four Months, Peter Cramton

Peter Cramton

I review the performance of the operating reserves and the operable capability markets in New England. The review covers the first four months of operation from May 1 to August 31, 1999. The review is based on my knowledge of the market rules and their implementation by the ISO, and the market data during this period, including bidding, operating, and settlement information. In the review, I (1) identify the potential market flaws with these markets, (2) look at the performance of the markets to see if the potential problems have materialized, (3) evaluate the ISO's short-term remedies for these market …

Volatility Of Central Europe Exchange Rates: Reaction To Financial Contagion, And Policy Recommendations For European Union Accession, Lucjan T. Orlowski, Thomas D. Corrigan

WCBT Faculty Publications

Examines the volatility of the exchange rates in Central Europe. Role of capital account liberalization and financial market integration in exchange rate stability; Remedies employed to financial problems of each countries; Impact of Asian and Russian financial crises on currencies of Central European countries; Recommendations for European Union accession.

Multivariate Density Forecast Evaluation And Calibration In Financial Risk Management: High-Frequency Returns On Foreign Exchange, Francis X. Diebold, Jinyong Hahn, Anthony S. Tay

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide a framework for evaluating and improving multivariate density forecasts. Among other things, the multivariate framework lets us evaluate the adequacy of density forecasts involving cross-variable interactions, such as time-varying conditional correlations. We also provide conditions under which a technique of density forecast calibration can be used to improve deficient density forecasts, and we show how the calibration method can be used to generate good density forecasts from econometric models, even when the conditional density is unknown. Finally, motivated by recent advances in financial risk management, we provide a detailed application to multivariate high-frequency exchange rate density forecasts. © …

Affidavit Of Peter Cramton, Peter Cramton

Peter Cramton

Summary of review of reserves and operable capability markets. For ISO New England.

Impacts Of Strike Replacement Banks In Canada, Peter Cramton, Morley Gunderson, Joseph Tracy

Peter Cramton

In the labor relations area no issue generates as much controversy and division between labor and management as does the legislative ban on replacement workers. In the United States, the issue of a ban on permanent replacement workers has come before Congress four times since 1988, although the only action taken has been an executive order in 1995, banning the government from doing business with firms that use permanent replacements (Cramton and Tracy 1998). In Canada, where labor matters are under provincial jurisdiction, legislative bans on permanent replacement workers exist in most jurisdictions (except New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince …

The Effect Of Collective Bargaining Legislation On Strikes And Wages, Peter Cramton, Morley Gunderson, Joseph Tracy

Peter Cramton

Using Canadian data on large, private-sector contract negotiations from January 1967 to March 1993, we find that wages and strikes are substantially influenced by labor policy. The data indicate that conciliation policies have largely been ineffective in reducing strike costs. In contrast, contract reopener provisions appear to make both unions and firms better off by reducing negotiation costs without systematically affecting wage settlements. Legislation banning the use of replacement workers appears to lead to higher strike costs both by increasing the frequency and duration of strikes.

The Fundamental And Non-Fundamental Components Of Stock Prices: The Role Of Time-Varying Expected Inflation, Maosen Zhong

Doctoral Dissertations

I derive testable implications of fundamental and non-fundamental components of stock prices. In order to control for the role of time-varying expected inflation and to be able to perform reasonable empirical tests, I use a nominal (rather than a real) interpretation of the present-value model (PVM), whereby nominal interest rates approximate expected inflation. I conjecture that the fundamental and non-fundamental components represent the permanent and temporary components of stock prices, respectively. A series of cointegration analysis over the annual period 1871–1997 confirms my conjecture for the model with time-varying expected inflation. Various fundamental and non-fundamental exclusion tests indicate that both …

Institutional Changes And Discretionary Value For Property Rights In Drylands’ Farming Of The Sudan, Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Professor Issam A.W. Mohamed

Research on land tenure and use control and the socioeconomic sets of regulations in the agricultural rainfed sub sector of Sudan, come to focus for many reasons. Anthropogenic pressure, expanding animal population and migration led to accelerated impacts on both the ecological systems and land yields. Conflicts between governmental regulations and indigenous rules contribute to generate inconsistencies on who have the right to till the land and hence own it. With such transformation logically, more intensive commercial farming took place and land intake exponentially increased. Private or collective property rights of land are procured through traditional tenure, prescription, settlement or …

The Role Of The Iso In U.S. Electricity Markets: A Review Of Restructuring In California And Pjm, Peter Cramton, Lisa Cameron

Peter Cramton

Several regions of the U.S. have sought to restructure the electric power industry by separating the potentially competitive generation sector from the natural monopoly functions of electricity transmission and distribution. Under this restructuring scheme, a central authority, which we will refer to as the independent system operator (ISO), is given control over both the transmission system and the spot market for electricity. The ISO's role in managing the spot market is relatively uncontroversial. This is because the spot market takes place in real time and requires continuous physical adjustments to electricity supply and demand subject to complex constraints, such as …

Behavioral Foreign Exchange Rates, Thanomsak Suwannoi

Doctoral Dissertations

The foreign exchange market is one of the most active financial markets. The sheer volume of trade in the foreign exchange market has captured the attention of many researchers. Since exchange rates began to float in 1973, there has been much empirical work on exchange rate behavior. The results from previous studies appear to be somewhat sensitive to econometric techniques employed. Thus, the correct statistical characterization of exchange rate behavior remains an open question.

Chapter 2 examines time-series behavior of monthly real exchange rates. The results show that real exchange rates do not follow a pure random walk process. Changes …

Charities In Tax Reform: Threats To Subsidies Overt And Covert, Evelyn Brody

Evelyn Brody

Fundamental tax reform would do far more damage to charities than the obvious repeal of the deduction for charitable contributions. Over the decades, charities have quietly garnered billions of dollars worth of indirect benefits. For example, the largest tax expenditure - the exclusion from workers' income of employer-provided health insurance - has fattened nonprofit hospitals, and the new tuition tax credits promise to spur tuition inflation. Tax reform presents an opportunity to eliminate tax subsidies and enact any desired direct expenditures for specific public goods and activities. However, converting tax expenditures to direct outlays would likely take the form of …

Project Appraisal For The Keynesian Investment Planner, Greg Hill

Greg Hill

This paper outlines a theory of project appraisal wherein the neoclassical premises of conventional cost-benefit analysis are replaced by their Keynesian counterparts. The paper shows how the social rate of return on investment, the private and social rates of discount, and other concepts used in cost-benefit analysis may be modified to take account of the income externalities generated by the multiplier, mark-up pricing, and the causal priority of investment over saving.

The Distributional Effects Of Carbon Regulation, Peter Cramton, Suzi Kerr

Peter Cramton

We examine the distributional effects of carbon regulation. An auction of carbon permits is the best way to achieve carbon caps set by international negotiation to limit global climate change. An auction is preferred to grandfathering (giving polluters permits in proportion to past pollution), because it allows reduced tax distortions, provides more flexibility in distribution of costs, provides greater incentives for innovation, and reduces the need for politically contentious arguments over the allocation of rents.

Will Aging Baby Boomers Bust The Federal Budget?, Ronald Lee, Jonathan Skinner

Dartmouth Scholarship

The authors analyze in three steps the influence of the projected mortality decline on the long-run finances of the Social Security System. First, mortality decline adds person years of life which are distributed across the life cycle. The interaction of this distribution with the age distribution of taxes minus benefits determines the steady state financial consequences of mortality decline. Second, examination of past mortality trends in the United State and of international trends in low mortality populations, suggests that mortality will decline much faster than foreseen by the SSA's forecasts. Third, based on work on stochastic demographic forecasting, stochastic forecasts …

The Exchange Rate Mechanism And The Ruble Devaluation Of 1998, Philip Porter

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

I will first examine what I see as the common sense fundamentals of the exchange rate mechanism, noting as I go, the relationship with the current Russian crisis. In my examination, I will take the simplest approach, assuming free trade, unrestricted capital movements and negligible transaction costs. Concluding, I will delve into the quagmire of the Russian situation.

How Successful Was The Revision Of Ucc Article 9?: Reflections Of The Reporters, Steven L. Harris, Charles W. Mooney Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Waiting For The Omelet To Set: Match-Specific Assets And Minority Oppression In The Close Corporation, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Looking At Communities And Markets, Lan Cao

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Documentary Credit Law And Practice In The Global Information Age, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Documentary letters of credit have historically been an important and popular method of payment in international trading transactions. In fact, they have been described as the "life-blood of international commerce." A number of uniform international practices have developed for their use, many of which are codified in international rules such as the UCP 500. However, in the global information age, as the nature of international commerce changes, so too must the operation of such payment mechanisms. With the increase in electronic trading, the "documentary" nature of these credits may require some revision. This paper examines ways in which the law …

Implementing Efficient Allocations In A Model Of Financial Intermediation, Edward J. Green

Centre for Public Policy Studies : CPPS Working Paper Series

In a nite-trader version of the Diamond and Dybvig (1983) model, the ex-ante efficient allocation is implementable by a direct mechanism (i.e., each trader announces the type of his own ex-post preference) in which truthful revelation is the strictly dominant strategy for each trader. When the model is modified by formalizing the sequential-service constraint (cf. Wallace, 1988), the truth-telling equilibrium implements the symmetric, ex-ante efficient allocation with respect to iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies.