1999, Musto, David K

A weekly database of retail money fund portfolio statistics is uneconomical for retail investors to observe, so it allows direct comparison of disclosed and undisclosed portfolios. This makes possible a more direct and unambiguous test for “window dressing” than elsewhere in the literature. The analysis shows that funds allocating between government and private issues hold more in government issues around disclosures than at other times, consistent with the theory that intermediaries prefer to disclose safer portfolios. Cross-sectional comparisons locate the most intense rebalancing in the worst recent performers.

2010-05-01, Stevenson, Betsey

Between 1972 and 1978 U.S. high schools rapidly increased their female athletic participation rates in order to comply with Title IX. This paper examines the causal implications of this expansion by using variation in the level of boys' athletic participation across states before Title IX to instrument for change in girls' athletic participation. Analysis of differences in outcomes across states in changes between pre- and postcohorts reveals that a 10 percentage point rise in state-level female sports participation generates a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point rise in female labor force participation.

2012-11-01, Combes, Pierre-Philippe, Duranton, Gilles, Gobillon, Laurent, Roux, Sébastien

This paper provides descriptive evidence about the distribution of wages and skills in denser and less dense employment areas in France. We confirm that on average, workers in denser areas are more skilled. There is also strong over-representation of workers with particularly high and low skills in denser areas. These features are consistent with patterns of migration including negative selection of migrants to less dense areas and positive selection towards denser areas. Nonetheless migration, even in the long-run, accounts for little of the skill differences between denser and less dense areas. Finally, we find marked differences across age groups and some suggestions that much of the skill differences across areas can be explained by differences between occupational groups rather than within.

2005-04-01, Burgess, Robin, Pande, Rohini, Wong, Grace

State-led credit and savings programs have been implemented in numerous low income countries, but their success in reaching the poor remains widely debated. We report on research that exploits the policy features of the Indian social banking program to provide evidence on this issue. State-led branch expansion into rural unbanked locations reduced poverty across Indian states. In addition, the enforcement of directed bank lending requirements was associated with increased bank borrowing among the poor, in particular low caste and tribal groups. (JEL: O38, G28)

2015-06-01, Zaring, David T

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), which controls the supply of money in the United States, may be the country’s most important agency.1 The chair of the committee is often dubbed the second most powerful person in Washington, only deferring to the President himself.2 Financial scholars and analysts obsess over the institution, leading to a rich tradition of FOMC Kremlinology, veneration, and second-guessing in business schools and economics departments. But legal scholars have been less entranced by the committee—put off, perhaps, by the fact that the institution has never been checked by the courts or by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).4 As a result, there has been no effort to come to grips with the administrative law of the FOMC; this article seeks to redress that gap. The FOMC enjoys a legal mandate that shields its discretion to a remarkable degree. The principal claim here is that this shield, combined with the imperatives of bureaucratic organization in an institution whose raison d’etre is stability, has turned the FOMC into an agency governed by internally developed tradition in lieu of externally imposed constraints. The makeup of the committee, the materials that it consults before rendering monetary policy decisions, its voting mechanisms, and the way its decisions are promulgated are products of a mélange of evolving tradition and statutory permissiveness. One might argue that some combination of law and tradition explains what happens in most agencies. But the degree of reliance on tradition sets the FOMC apart. No one worries about the customs governing evidence presentation and voting order on multimember boards like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), but they are subjects of scrutiny at the FOMC. By the same token, APA law, rather than traditions such as that of the FOMC’s so-called “beige book,” governs what goes into the record before, say, the EPA or Commerce Department make their factual findings.5 And Supreme Court decisions like Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Ass’n v. State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co. mean that the decisions rendered by most agencies are substantially lengthier, and strive for substantially less ambiguity, than those of the FOMC.6 It is possible that this sort of development of routinized custom might be expected for agencies with few legal constraints. If so, the FOMC is a fine example of an institutional tendency, one that might have particular application in other forms of financial regulation. A mix of tradition and legal constraint are a feature of administrative constraint in that field, where litigation providing definitive opinions on required process is rare, and informal—and often nontransparent—oversight a norm. An account of the FOMC that jibes with the way this sort of regulation works might serve as a prod or a comparator for other accounts of the administrative law of financial oversight. Given this theme, the article makes the following additional points: 1. The FOMC enjoys the sorts of broad delegations that other New Deal agencies benefit from, only more so; the orders issued by the committee at the conclusion of each of its eight annual meetings do not fit within the traditional paradigms of administrative rulemaking or adjudication, leading courts to eschew any effort to review those decisions as committed to the agency’s discretion.7 2. Given its free hand, the FOMC might be expected to be an empire builder. But in reality, it has only expanded its remit with regard to the sort of transactions it takes on, which have moved beyond the purchase and sale of federal government debt to include positions in a broader range of financial assets, as the financial crisis exemplified. 3. The modest problems that the FOMC has endured at the hands of the branches that monitor independent agencies like it—the courts and Congress—have reflected its extraordinary independence and relative opacity. The courts have turned away a series of plaintiffs, including two senators, concerned about the breath of the delegation of power over the economy to the committee and the mechanism of appointment of committee members. Congress has occasionally fretted about the black box within which the committee makes its economy-changing decisions. However, in 1990, Congress removed legislation passed in the 1970s designed to require more reporting from the committee, suggesting that it, too, is cowed by the idea of subjecting the agency to much legislative oversight.8 4. The committee makes decisions in a procedurally consistent but increasingly lengthy and elaborate way. Simple correlations between the transcripts of these meetings (length, size, mood, number of times the chair spoke), the ultimate decision made by the FOMC, and a number of leading economic indicators found one intriguing relationship between attendance and the direction of the federal funds rate.9 There may be some promising research directions available for this sort of analysis. If the above observations are meant to make a descriptive case about the way the FOMC makes decisions, the question arises whether we should regret its distance from traditional sorts of administrative procedure. The FOMC’s procedural uniqueness is a function of its independence; that independence isjustly celebrated. We can live with the irregularities and experiments offered by the idiosyncratic procedures of financial regulation in general, and with the FOMC in particular, though comfort with the independence of the committee does not excuse unfamiliarity with the way it operates. It is accordingly worth determining how the FOMC does its business, and no scholar has yet done so. This lack of coverage by legal scholars of the rules and culture surrounding open market operations is not, to be sure, a terrible dereliction of duty. Administrative lawyers often assume that the subjects they study closely—rulemaking and adjudication by agencies—are quite different from other services provided by the government, including block grants, the management of state-owned enterprises, and, indeed, the oversight of interest rates. These lawyers do not necessarily claim that administrative scholarship should cover the entire waterfront of government action. Moreover, from a disciplinary perspective, although lawyers are very much engaged in financial supervision—that is, the way that the Federal Reserve (the Fed) regulates banks—they have little to do with either the decisionmaking by the FOMC, which expands or shrinks the nation’s monetary supply, or the implementation of its open market orders, which is done by the traders who staff the New York Fed’s open market operations desk. Although these are all good reasons not to place the scrutiny of the government’s open market operations agency at the top of every scholar’s agenda, they do not justify ignorance of the committee. Any lawyer interested in institutional design ought to be interested in the design of one of the government’s signature institutions; by the same token, knowing how law constrains the least rule-bound or adjudicatory of agencies essays an outline of the reach of these legal constraints. In part III of this article, the legal constraints of the FOMC are considered in the classical administrative law vein. As this article discusses, those constraints have not limited the discretion of the FOMC, which enjoys a remarkable degree of independence from Congress, the executive, and the judiciary. Nonetheless, the limitations on the freedom of committee members to do as they wish are reviewed to give the reader a comprehensive sense of how the law, as expressed by the actual practice of the courts and Congress, have constrained the agency. But the analysis of how the FOMC operates begins in part II, where the way that the constraints that do exist have affected the agency’s decisionmaking process is considered. A brief conclusion ends the analysis.

2010-01-01, Davis, Gerald F, Cobb, J. Adam

Using time-series data from the US since 1950 and from 53 countries around the world in 2006, this chapter documents a strong negative relation between an economy’s employment concentration (that is, the proportion of the labor force employed by the largest 10, 25, or 50 firms) and its level of income inequality. Within the US, we find that trends in the relative size of the largest employers (up in the 1960s and 1970s, down in the 1980s and 1990s, up in the 2000s) are directly linked to changes in inequality, and that corporate size is a proximal cause of the extravagant increase in social inequality over the past generation. We conclude that organization theory can provide a distinctive contribution to understanding societal outcomes.

2010-03-01, Duggan, Mark, morton, Fiona S

Medicare Part D began coverage of prescription drugs in 2006. Rather than setting pharmaceutical prices, the government contracted with private insurers to provide drug coverage. Theory suggests that additional insured consumers will raise the optimal price of a branded drug, while the insurer's ability to move demand to substitute treatments may lower prices. We estimate the program's effect on the price and utilization of pharmaceutical treatments. We find that Part D enrollees paid substantially lower prices than while uninsured, and increased their utilization of prescription drugs. We find relative price declines only for drugs with significant therapeutic competition.

1985-05-01, Coffman, E. G, Kadota, T. T, Shepp, Larry A

We study a model of dynamic storage allocation in which requests for single units of memory arrive in a Poisson stream at rate λ and are accommodated by the first available location found in a linear scan of memory. Immediately after this first-fit assignment, an occupied location commences an exponential delay with rate parameter μ, after which the location again becomes available. The set of occupied locations (identified by their numbers) at time t forms a random subset St of {1,2, . . .}. The extent of the fragmentation in St, i.e. the alternating holes and occupied regions of memory, is measured by (St) - |St |. In equilibrium, the number of occupied locations, |S|, is known to be Poisson distributed with mean ρ = λ/μ. We obtain an explicit formula for the stationary distribution of max (S), the last occupied location, and by independent arguments we show that (E max (S) - E|S|)/E|S| → 0 as the traffic intensity ρ → ∞. Moreover, we verify numerically that for any ρ the expected number of wasted locations in equilibrium is never more than 1/3 the expected number of occupied locations. Our model applies to studies of fragmentation in paged computer systems, and to containerization problems in industrial storage applications. Finally, our model can be regarded as a simple concrete model of interacting particles [Adv. Math., 5 (1970), pp. 246–290].

2011-02-01, Conyon, Martin J, Core, John E, Guay, Wayne R

We compute and compare risk-adjusted CEO pay in the United States and United Kingdom, where the risk adjustment is based on estimated risk premiums stemming from the equity incentives borne by CEOs. Controlling for firm and industry characteristics, we find that U.S. CEOs have higher pay, but also bear much higher stock and option incentives than U.K. CEOs. Using reasonable estimates of risk premiums, we find that risk-adjusted U.S. CEO pay does not appear to be large compared to that of U.K. CEOs. We also examine differences in pay and equity incentives between a sample of non-U.K. European CEOs and a matched sample of U.S. CEOs, and find that risk-adjusting pay may explain about half of the apparent higher pay for U.S. CEOs.

1981, Harrison, J. M, Shepp, Larry A

We consider the stochastic equation X(t) = W(t) + βlX0(t), where W is a standard Wiener process and lX0(⋅) is the local time at zero of the unknown process X. There is a unique solution X (and it is adapted to the fields of W) if |β| ≤ 1, but no solutions exist if |β| > 1. In the former case, setting α = (β + 1)/2, the unique solution X is distributed as a skew Brownian motion with parameter α. This is a diffusion obtained from standard Wiener process by independently altering the signs of the excursions away from zero, each excursion being positive with probability α and negative with probability 1−α. Finally, we show that skew Brownian motion is the weak limit (as n→∞) of n−1/2S[nt], where Sn is a random walk with exceptional behavior at the origin.