Real interest rate persistence: evidence and implications

The real interest rate plays a central role in many important financial and macroeconomic models, including the consumption-based asset pricing model, neoclassical growth model, and models of the monetary transmission mechanism. We selectively survey the empirical literature that examines the time-series properties of real interest rates. A key stylized fact is that postwar real interest rates exhibit substantial persistence, shown by extended periods of time where the real interest rate is substantially above or below the sample mean. The finding of persistence in real interest rates is pervasive, appearing in a variety of guises in the literature. We discuss the implications of persistence for theoretical models, illustrate existing findings with updated data, and highlight areas for future research.Interest rates

Real interest rate persistence: evidence and implications

The real interest rate plays a central role in many important financial and macroeconomic models, including the consumption-based asset pricing model, neoclassical growth model, and models of the monetary transmission mechanism. The authors selectively survey the empirical literature that examines the time-series properties of real interest rates. A key stylized fact is that postwar real interest rates exhibit substantial persistence, shown by extended periods when the real interest rate is substantially above or below the sample mean. The finding of persistence in real interest rates is pervasive, appearing in a variety of guises in the literature. The authors discuss the implications of persistence for theoretical models, illustrate existing findings with updated data, and highlight areas for future research.Interest rates

Common fluctuations in OECD budget balances

We analyze comovements in four measures of budget surpluses for 18 OECD countries for 1980-2008 with a dynamic latent factor model. The world factor in national budget surpluses declines substantially in the 1980s, rises throughout much of the 1990s to a peak in 2000, before declining again in the most recent period. This world factor explains a substantial portion of the variability in budget surpluses across countries. World factors in national output gaps, dividend-price ratios, and military spending significantly explain variation in the world budget surplus factor. The significant relationship between national output gaps and OECD measures of cyclically adjusted budget surpluses suggests that such cyclical measures inadequately adjust for the international business cycle. Sizable fluctuations in idiosyncratic components of national budget surpluses often readily relate to well known "unusual" country circumstances.Budget ; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Is inflation an international phenomenon?

Common shocks, similarities in central bank reaction functions, and international trade potentially produce common components in international inflation rates. This paper characterizes such links in international inflation rates with a dynamic latent factor model that decomposes inflation for 65 countries into world, regional, and idiosyncratic components. The world component accounts for 34% of inflation variability on average across countries, although the importance of this global factor differs substantially across countries. Variables that reflect policy as well as economic and financial development strongly explain the cross-section variation in the relative importance of global influences. A parsimonious model of time variation in the factor loadings shows that most countries became more sensitive to international inflation influences over 1951 2006. In addition, European-specific influences became more important over time for countries participating in European economic and monetary integration.Inflation (Finance)

Talking the Walk: Incorporating Intergroup Dialogue Processes into a Critical Service-Learning Program

Service-learning, particularly critical service-learning, is relational work that endeavors to create and maintain more just relationships among students and community members within and across social identity groups (Mitchell, 2008). It is essential that students in service-learning courses learn how to talk, listen and collaborate with community members in ways that acknowledge and explore how social identities, privilege, and oppression impact people’s life experiences and relationships. However, in our socially-segregated society, in which schools and neighborhoods are as divided by race and income as they were half a century ago (Reardon & Bischoff, 2011; Reardon & Owens, 2014), many college students are not accustomed to talking, learning, and working with others across differences. Research suggests that when college students participate in structured dialogue across differences, such as intergroup dialogue, they are better prepared to understand and engage with others across diverse social identities (Gurin, Nagda, & Zúñiga, 2013). Yet, research on the outcomes of integrating intergroup dialogue pedagogy into service-learning courses is sparse. Informed by existing literature on service-learning and intergroup dialogue, this qualitative case study of the Citizen Scholars Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst provides an account of how 18 undergraduate students learned about and practiced dialogue processes as a curricular component of a multi-semester, cohort-based service-learning program. Case study methodology was employed to analyze 25 individual interview transcripts, 36 final papers, and 126 reflective memos. Three significant findings emerged from the thematic analysis of the data. First, learning to dialogue and engaging in dialogue with others about social identity issues profoundly mattered to the CSP students. Second, practicing dialogue in a structured, reflective curriculum, facilitated students’ broader civic learning, evidenced by the ways they extended dialogue to their community service relationships and integrated dialogue sensibilities into their everyday lives. Finally, students’ learning to dialogue (and the subsequent outcomes linked to this learning) was supported by an intentionally-designed, engaged learning process. These findings suggest the significant potential of incorporating dialogue across differences into service-learning as part of a broader approach of centering social justice processes and outcomes to promote students’ development of civic sensibilities and social responsibility

Trouble in Tucson: Using The Hunger Games to teach Freirean principles post HB 2281

This article explores the effects of Arizona’s HB 2281 and Tucson Unified School District’s purging of its Mexican American Studies program on the utilization of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in the public K-12 classroom. As the use of the text becomes more controversial, educators who wish to teach Freirean principles must choose between assigning the text to their students, at the risk of career ending consequences, or seeking out a substitute text that embodies Freire’s philosophies. It is suggested that a text popular within current youth culture be assigned in order to help students make personal connections with the content. The Hunger Games is presented as an appropriate alternative text due to having themes parallel to those presented in Freire’s text. The responsibility of teachers to help students integrate Freirean principles into their everyday lives is also discussed

E-mentoring: A Model and Review of the Literature

With the growth of technology and greater use of virtual teams, organizations have increasingly begun to use e-mentoring for socializing, training, and developing individual employees via technology. Despite the growing importance of e-mentoring, relatively little research has examined its process or effectiveness. Therefore, we: 1) provide a framework for understanding the e-mentoring process, 2) review the e-mentoring literature, and 3) present hypotheses to generate additional research on e-mentoring. As technology develops, the use of e-mentoring and, thus, the need to better understand it will grow

Forecasting the equity risk premium: The role of technical indicators

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Projector - a partially typed language for querying XML

We describe Projector, a language that can be used to perform a mixture of typed and untyped computation against data represented in XML. For some problems, notably when the data is unstructured or semistructured, the most desirable programming model is against the tree structure underlying the document. When this tree structure has been used to model regular data structures, then these regular structures themselves are a more desirable programming model. The language Projector, described here in outline, gives both models within a single partially typed algebra and is well suited for hybrid applications, for example when fragments of a known structure are embedded in a document whose overall structure is unknown. Projector is an extension of ECMA-262 (aka JavaScript), and therefore inherits an untyped DOM interface. To this has been added some static typing and a dynamic projection primitive, which can be used to assert the presence of a regular structure modelled within the XML. If this structure does exist, the data is extracted and presented as a typed value within the programming language