Federal Post-Disaster Recovery: A Review of Federal Programs

Summarizes discussions and recommendations from a January 2010 roundtable on removing barriers in federal programs to timely, effective, and flexible recovery efforts and improving partnerships with states, localities, nonprofits, and the private sector

Public-Private Wage Gap in Australia: Variation Along the Distribution

Previous research on public-private wage differentials in Australia is scarce and has focused on the central parts of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, this study applies quantile regression models to examine whether the sectoral wage effect varies along the wage distribution. For females, we find public sector wage premiums for almost the entire wage distribution and the premiums are relatively stable except at the extremities of the distribution. For males, the premiums decrease monotonically and are negative for the top half of the conditional wage distribution. The decomposition results show that the observed differences in individuals and job characteristics account for a substantial proportion of the overall sectoral wage gap.wage gap, quantile regression, decomposition

Art Arbitrage - Violations of the Law of One Price Created by Fine Art Auctions

Although fine art is becoming increasingly popular as investment, its price determination is relatively opaque. This paper expands upon the work of Pesando (1993) and Pesando and Shum (2007) concerning the law of one price in the art auction industry. By examining the sale history of silkscreen prints from Andy Warhol’s 1970 series Flowers, this paper controls for the physical characteristics of particular artwork and seeks to determine the likelihood of sale and price differentials created by specific auction environments. This paper further examines the extent to which auction houses take into account these auction environments when setting presale price estimates, as well as how correlated these estimates are to the final realized price of a work. The results suggest that significant factors impacting likelihood of sale and final realized price for a work include the average price of the total sale it was included in—indicative of spillover effects from other works in the sale. The results also suggest that on some level, auction houses set presale estimates strategically, based on factors aside from market trends and the inherent quality and condition of the work. Larger, more established houses are likely more strategic at setting estimates—valuing lower to increase the probability of sale

Are optimistic expectations keeping the Chinese happy?

In this paper we study the effect of optimistic income expectations on life satisfaction amongst the Chinese population. Using a large scale household survey conducted in 2002 we find that the level of optimism about the future is particularly strong in the countryside and amongst rural-to-urban migrants. The importance of these expectations for life satisfaction is particularly pronounced in the urban areas, though also highly significant for the rural area. If expectations were to reverse from positive to negative, we calculate that this would have doubled the proportion of unhappy people and reduced proportion of very happy people by 48%. We perform several robustness checks to see if the results are driven by variations in precautionary savings or reverse causality.Expectations; Happiness; Consumption and Savings; China; Political Economy

Influence of interface structure on electronic properties and Schottky barriers in Fe/GaAs magnetic junctions

The electronic and magnetic properties of Fe/GaAs(001) magnetic junctions are investigated using first-principles density-functional calculations. Abrupt and intermixed interfaces are considered, and the dependence of charge transfer, magnetization profiles, Schottky barrier heights, and spin polarization of densities of states on interface structure is studied. With As-termination, an abrupt interface with Fe is favored, while Ga-terminated GaAs favors the formation of an intermixed layer with Fe. The Schottky barrier heights are particularly sensitive to the abruptness of the interface. A significant density of states in the semiconducting gap arises from metal interface states. These spin-dependent interface states lead to a significant minority spin polarization of the density of states at the Fermi level that persists well into the semiconductor, providing a channel for the tunneling of minority spins through the Schottky barrier. These interface-induced gap states and their dependence on atomic structure at the interface are discussed in connection with potential spin-injection applications.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figures, to appear in PR