National Settlement Depository (NSD), Russia’s central securities depository, has approved a series of regulations governing the operations of its Valuation Center, including the Regulations on NSD’s Valuation Center and the Regulations on the Expert Council of NSD’s Valuation Center.
read more...NSD Approves Its Valuation Centerâs Expert Council Composition And Documents
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IFORS Regional Groupings â IFORS News September 2016
As President of IFORS I write a quarterly column for its IFORS Newsletter (which I highly recommend). Â This is my column for September 2016.
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Clearstreamâs Monthly Report
After the successful third migration wave, TARGET2 Securities (T2S) is now gaining momentum, and Europe is one step closer to a harmonised settlement. With its own migration drawing near, Clearstream is making sure that it is in constant communication with its customers, and together with them is looking forward to its own smooth and successful migration in February 2017.
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Real Anomalies -- by Jules H. van Binsbergen, Christian C. Opp
We examine the importance of asset pricing anomalies (alphas) for the real economy. We develop a novel quantitative model with lumpy investment that features such informational inefficiencies and yields closed-form solutions for cross-sectional distributions of firm dynamics. Our findings indicate that anomalies can cause material real inefficiencies, raising the possibility that agents that help eliminate them can provide significant value added to the economy. The framework reveals that alphas alone are poor indicators of real distortions, and that efficiency losses depend on the persistence of alphas, the amount of mispriced capital, and the Tobin's q of firms affected.
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Trade Policy and Redistribution when Preferences are Non-Homothetic -- by Quy-Toan Do, Andrei A. Levchenko
We compare redistribution through trade restrictions vs. domestic lump-sum transfers. When preferences are non-homothetic, even domestic lump-sum transfers affect relative prices. Thus, contrary to the conventional wisdom, domestic lump-sum transfers are not necessarily superior to distortionary trade policy. We develop this argument in the context of food export bans imposed by many developing countries in the late 2000s.
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The Earnings of Undocumented Immigrants -- by George J. Borjas
Over 11 million undocumented persons reside in the United States, and there has been a heated debate over the impact of legislative or executive efforts to regularize the status of this population. This paper examines the determinants of earnings for undocumented workers. Using newly developed methods that impute undocumented status for foreign-born persons sampled in microdata surveys, the study documents a number of findings. First, the age-earnings profile of undocumented workers lies far below that of legal immigrants and of native workers, and is almost perfectly flat during the prime working years. Second, the unadjusted gap in the log hourly wage between undocumented workers and natives is very large (around 40 percent), but half of this gap disappears once the calculation adjusts for differences in observable socioeconomic characteristics, particularly educational attainment. Finally, the adjusted wage of undocumented workers rose rapidly in the past decade. As a result, there was a large decline in the wage penalty associated with undocumented status. The relatively small magnitude of the current wage penalty suggests that a regularization program may only have a modest impact on the wage of undocumented workers.
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Financial Markets and Fiscal Unions -- by Patrick J. Kehoe, Elena Pastorino
Do sophisticated international financial markets obviate the need for an active union-wide authority to orchestrate fiscal transfers between countries to provide adequate insurance against country-specific economic fluctuations? We argue that they do. Specifically, we show that in a benchmark economy with no international financial markets, an activist union-wide authority is necessary to achieve desirable outcomes. With sophisticated financial markets, however, such an authority is unnecessary if its only goal is to provide cross-country insurance. Since restricting the set of policy instruments available to member countries does not create a fiscal externality across them, this result holds in a wide variety of settings. Finally, we establish that an activist union-wide authority concerned just with providing insurance across member countries is optimal only when individual countries are either unable or unwilling to pursue desirable policies.
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The Emergence of Market Structure -- by Maryam Farboodi, Gregor Jarosch, Robert Shimer
What market structure emerges when market participants can choose the rate at which they contact others? We show that traders who choose a higher contact rate emerge as intermediaries, earning profits by taking asset positions that are misaligned with their preferences. Some of them, middlemen, are in constant contact with other traders and so pass on their position immediately. As search costs vanish, traders still make dispersed investments and trade occurs in intermediation chains, so the economy does not converge to a centralized market. When search costs are a differentiable function of the contact rate, the endogenous distribution of contact rates has no mass points. When the function is weakly convex, faster traders are misaligned more frequently than slower traders. When the function is linear, the contact rate distribution has a Pareto tail with parameter 2 and middlemen emerge endogenously. These features arise not only in the (inefficient) equilibrium allocation, but also in the optimal allocation. Moreover, we show that intermediation is key to the emergence of the rest of the properties of this market structure.
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Intangible Capital and Measured Productivity -- by Ellen R. McGrattan
Because firms invest heavily in R&D, software, brands, and other intangible assets--at a rate close to that of tangible assets--changes in measured GDP, which does not include all intangible in- vestments, understate the actual changes in total output. If changes in the labor input are more precisely measured, then it is possible to observe little change in measured total factor productivity (TFP) coincidentally with large changes in hours and investment. This mismeasurement leaves business cycle modelers with large and unexplained labor wedges accounting for most of the fluctuations in aggregate data. To address this issue, I incorporate intangible investments into a multi-sector general equilibrium model and parameterize income and cost shares using data from an updated U.S. input and output table, with intangible investments reassigned from intermediate to final uses. I employ maximum likelihood methods and quarterly observations on sectoral gross outputs for the United States over the period 1985-2014 to estimate processes for latent sectoral TFPs--that have common and sector-specific components. Aggregate hours are not used to estimate TFPs, but the model predicts changes in hours that compare well with the actual hours series and account for roughly two-thirds of its standard deviation. I find that sector-specific shocks and industry linkages play an important role in accounting for fluctuations and comovements in aggregate and industry-level U.S. data, and I find that the model's common component of TFP is not correlated at business cycle frequencies with the standard measures of aggregate TFP used in the macroeconomic literature.
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Poorly Measured Confounders are More Useful on the Left Than on the Right -- by Zhuan Pei, Joern-Steffen Pischke, Hannes Schwandt
Researchers frequently test identifying assumptions in regression based research designs (which include instrumental variables or difference-in-differences models) by adding additional control variables on the right hand side of the regression. If such additions do not affect the coefficient of interest (much) a study is presumed to be reliable. We caution that such invariance may result from the fact that the observed variables used in such robustness checks are often poor measures of the potential underlying confounders. In this case, a more powerful test of the identifying assumption is to put the variable on the left hand side of the candidate regression. We provide derivations for the estimators and test statistics involved, as well as power calculations, which can help applied researchers interpret their findings. We illustrate these results in the context of various strategies which have been suggested to identify the returns to schooling.
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Asset Mispricing -- by Kurt F. Lewis, Francis A. Longstaff, Lubomir Petrasek
We use a unique dataset of corporate bonds guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. to test a number of recent theories about why asset prices may diverge from fundamental values. These models emphasize the role of funding liquidity, slow-moving capital, the leverage of financial intermediaries, and other frictions in allowing mispricing to occur. Consistent with theory, we find there are strong patterns of commonality in mispricing and that changes in dealer haircuts and funding costs are significant drivers of mispricing. Furthermore, mispricing can trigger short-term margin and funding-cost spirals. Using detailed bond and dealer-level data, we find that most of the cross-sectional variation in mispricing is explained by differences in dealer funding costs, inventory positions, and trading liquidity measures. These results provide strong empirical support for a number of current theoretical models.
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The Economics of Non-Marital Childbearing and The "Marriage Premium for Children" -- by Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine
A large literature exists on the impact of family structure on children's outcomes, typically focusing on average effects. We build on this with an economic framework that has heterogeneous predictions regarding the potential benefit for children of married parents. We propose that the gains to marriage from a child's perspective depend on a mother's own level of resources, the additional net resources that her partner would bring, and the outcome-specific returns to resources. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are consistent with the heterogeneous predictions of this framework. In terms of high school completion or avoiding poverty at age 25, the "marriage premium for children" is highest for children of mothers with high school degrees and mothers in their early/mid-20s. For the more advanced outcomes of college completion or high income at age 25, the marriage premium is monotonically increasing with observed maternal age and education.
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Are the Rich More Selfish than the Poor, or Do They Just Have More Money? A Natural Field Experiment -- by James Andreoni, Nikos Nikiforakis, Jan Stoop
The growing concentration of resources among the rich has re-ignited a discussion about whether the rich are more selfish than others. While many recent studies show the rich behaving less pro-socially, endogeneity and selection problems prevent safe inferences about differences in social preferences. We present new evidence from a natural field experiment in which we "misdeliver" envelopes to rich and poor households in a Dutch city, varying their contents to identify motives for returning them. Our raw data indicate the rich behave more pro-socially. Controlling for pressures associated with poverty and the marginal utility of money, however, we find no difference in social preferences. The primary distinction between rich and poor is simply that the rich have more money.
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The Making of Hawks and Doves: Inflation Experiences on the FOMC -- by Ulrike Malmendier, Stefan Nagel, Zhen Yan
We show that personal experiences of inflation strongly influence the hawkish or dovish leanings of central bankers. For all members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) since 1951, we estimate an adaptive learning rule based on their lifetime inflation data. The resulting experience-based forecasts have significant predictive power for members' FOMC voting decisions, the hawkishness of the tone of their speeches, as well as the heterogeneity in their semi-annual inflation projections. Averaging over all FOMC members present at a meeting, inflation experiences also help to explain the federal funds target rate, over and above conventional Taylor rule components.
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Dissecting Characteristics Nonparametrically -- by Joachim Freyberger, Andreas Neuhierl, Michael Weber
We propose a nonparametric method to test which characteristics provide independent information for the cross section of expected returns. We use the adaptive group LASSO to select characteristics and to estimate how they affect expected returns nonparametrically. Our method can handle a large number of characteristics, allows for a flexible functional form, and is insensitive to outliers. Many of the previously identified return predictors do not provide incremental information for expected returns, and nonlinearities are important. Our proposed method has higher out-of-sample explanatory power compared to linear panel regressions, and increases Sharpe ratios by 50%.
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The Investment CAPM -- by Lu Zhang
A new class of Capital Asset Pricing Models (CAPM) arises from the first principle of real investment for individual firms. Conceptually as "causal"' as the consumption CAPM, yet empirically more tractable, the investment CAPM emerges as a leading asset pricing paradigm. Firms do a good job in aligning investment policies with costs of capital, and this alignment drives many empirical patterns that are anomalous in the consumption CAPM. Most important, integrating the anomalies literature in finance and accounting with neoclassical economics, the investment CAPM succeeds in mounting an efficient markets counterrevolution to behavioral finance in the past 15 years.
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Shock Restricted Structural Vector-Autoregressions -- by Sydney C. Ludvigson, Sai Ma, Serena Ng
Identifying assumptions need to be imposed on autoregressive models before they can be used to analyze the dynamic effects of economically interesting shocks. Often, the assumptions are only rich enough to identify a set of solutions. This paper considers two types of restrictions on the structural shocks that can help reduce the number of plausible solutions. The first is imposed on the sign and magnitude of the shocks during unusual episodes in history. The second restricts the correlation between the shocks and components of variables external to the autoregressive model. These non-linear inequality constraints can be used in conjunction with zero and sign restrictions that are already widely used in the literature. The effectiveness of our constraints are illustrated using two applications of the oil market and Monte Carlo experiments calibrated to study the role of uncertainty shocks in economic fluctuations.
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Earnings Inequality and Mobility Trends in the United States: Nationally Representative Estimates from Longitudinally Linked Employer-Employee Data -- by John M. Abowd, Kevin L. McKinney, Nellie L. Zhao
Using earnings data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this paper analyzes the role of the employer in explaining the rise in earnings inequality in the United States. We first establish a consistent frame of analysis appropriate for administrative data used to study earnings inequality. We show that the trends in earnings inequality in the administrative data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program are inconsistent with other data sources when we do not correct for the presence of misused SSNs. After this correction to the worker frame, we analyze how the earnings distribution has changed in the last decade. We present a decomposition of the year-to-year changes in the earnings distribution from 2004-2013. Even when simplifying these flows to movements between the bottom 20%, the middle 60%, and the top 20% of the earnings distribution, about 20.5 million workers undergo a transition each year. Another 19.9 million move between employment and non-employment. To understand the role of the firm in these transitions, we estimate a model for log earnings with additive fixed worker and firm effects using all jobs held by eligible workers from 2004-2013. We construct a composite log earnings firm component across all jobs for a worker in a given year and a non-firm component. We also construct a skill-type index. We show that, while the difference between working at a low- or middle-paying firm are relatively small, the gains from working at a top-paying firm are large. Specifically, the benefits of working for a high-paying firm are not only realized today, through higher earnings paid to the worker, but also persist through an increase in the probability of upward mobility. High-paying firms facilitate moving workers to the top of the earnings distribution and keeping them there.
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Globalized Israel: High Tech Prowess and Buttressing FDI -- by Assaf Razin
The paper reviews the crucial role which globalization forces played in Israel's transformation from low tech to high tech economy. Special emphasis is placed on foreign direct investment as a driver for the high-tech transformation.
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Measures of Participation in Global Value Chains and Global Business Cycles -- by Zhi Wang, Shang-Jin Wei, Xinding Yu, Kunfu Zhu
This paper makes two methodological contributions. First, it proposes a framework to decompose total production activities at the country, sector, or country-sector level, to different types, depending on whether they are for pure domestic demand, traditional international trade, simple GVC activities, and complex GVC activities. Second, it proposes a pair of GVC participation indices that improves upon the measures in the existing literature. We apply this decomposition framework to a Global Input-Output Database (WIOD) that cover 44 countries and 56 industries from 2000 to2014 to uncover evolving compositions of different production activities. We also show that complex GVC activities co-move with global GDP growth more strongly than other types of production activities.
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