Effects of California migration

California ; Emigration and immigration ; West (U.S.) ; Federal Reserve District, 12th

Housing price cycles and prepayment rates of U.S. mortgage pools.

Empirical mortgage prepayment models generally have trouble explaining differences in mortgage prepayment speeds among pools with similar interest rates on the underlying mortgages. In this paper, we model some of the sources of termination heterogeneity across mortgage pools, particularly the role of regional variations in housing prices in generating atypical prepayment speeds. Using a sample of Freddie Mac mortgage pools from 1991-1998, we find evidence that differences in house price dynamics across regions are an important source of between-pool heterogeneity. This finding is then shown to be robust to alternative ways of parameterizing pool heterogeneity in mortgage termination models.Real property ; Mortgages

Regional effects of the peso devaluation

Mexico ; Peso, Mexican ; Exports ; Foreign exchange - Law and legislation

Is state and local competition for firms harmful?

Industrial location ; Taxation ; Competition

Effects of welfare reform on Western States

Welfare ; State finance ; Local finance ; California ; West (U.S.) ; Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996

The Effects Of General Inflation And Idiosyncratic Cost Shocks On Within-Commodity Price Dispersion: Evidence From Microdata

This study investigates the dispersion of price levels within highly disaggregated markets by examining plant-level product records from the U.S. Census of Manufactures. The paper estimates the effects of inflation on price dispersion through cross-sectional variation in the drift rate of average input costs within a market, arguing that, in several models that relate inflation to price dispersion, the effects of cost increases on dispersion is similar to the effects of general inflation. We also disentangle the effects of aggregate and idiosyncratic shocks on price dispersion. In general, we find that the higher the drift rate of input costs of a given commodity, the larger the amount of price dispersion. The standard deviation of idiosyncratic shocks also is positively correlated with the degree of price dispersion. © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Capacity utilization and structural change

Industrial capacity ; Inflation (Finance)

Evidence on IO Technology Assumptions From the Longitudinal Research Database

This paper investigates whether a popular IO technology assumption, the commodity technology model, is appropriate for specific United States manufacturing industries, using data on product composition and use of intermediates by individual plants from the Census Longitudinal Research Database. Extant empirical research has suggested the rejection of this model, owing to the implication of aggregate data that negative inputs are required to make particular goods. The plant-level data explored here suggest that much of the rejection of the commodity technology model from aggregative data was spurious; problematic entries in industry-level IO tables generally have a very low Census content. However, among the other industries for which Census data on specified materials use is available, there is a sound statistical basis for rejecting the commodity technology model in about one-third of the cases: a novel econometric test demonstrates a fundamental heterogeneity of materials use among plants that only produce the primary products of the industry.CES,economic,research,micro,data,microdata,chief,economist

Mortgage interest rates, valuation, and prepayment risk

Mortgages ; Interest rates