The frequency of "brilliant" and "genius" in teaching evaluations predicts the representation of women and African Americans across academia

Because of the negative stereotypes against women’s and African Americans’ intellectual abilities, academic fields that prize brilliance and genius might be unwelcoming to members of these stigmatized groups. A recent nationwide survey of academics provided initial support for this possibility, insofar as the fields whose practitioners believed that natural talent is crucial for success in their field were also the fields where women and African Americans were least likely to obtain Ph.D.’s. The present study seeks to replicate this initial finding with a different, and arguably more naturalistic, measure of the extent to which brilliance and genius are prized within a field. Specifically, we measured field-by-field variability in the emphasis on these intellectual qualities by tallying college students’ use of the words “brilliant” and “genius” in over 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessors.com. Consistent with prior work, this simple word count predicted both women’s and African Americans’ representation at the Ph.D. level across the academic spectrum: Fields where the words “brilliant” and “genius” were frequent in undergraduates’ evaluations also had fewer female and African American Ph.D.’s. This relationship held even when accounting for a field’s intellectual rigor (as indexed by students’ average scores on the Quantitative Graduate Record Examination [GRE]), as well as several other explanations concerning group differences in representation. The fact that such a simple, naturalistic measure of a field’s focus on brilliance predicted the magnitude of its gender and race gaps speaks to the tight link between ability beliefs and diversity

Implied Market Loss Given Default in the Czech Republic: Structural-Model Approach

This paper focuses on the key credit risk parameter – Loss Given Default (LGD). We describe its general properties and determinants with respect to seniority of debt, characteristics of debtors and macroeconomic conditions. Furthermore, we illustrate how the LGD can be extracted from market observable information with help of the adjusted Mertonian structural approach. We present a derivation of the formula for the expected LGD and show its sensitivity with respect to other structural company parameters. Finally, we estimate the 5-year expected LGDs for companies listed on the Prague Stock Exchange and find that the average LGD for this analyzed sample is in the range of 20–45 %. To the authors’ knowledge, these are the first implied market estimates of LGD in the Czech Republic.loss given default, credit risk, structural models

Monetary Policy Rules with Financial Instability

To provide a rigorous analysis of monetary policy in the face of financial instability, the authors extend the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to include a financial system. Their simulations suggest that if financial stability affects output and inflation with a lag, and if the central bank has privileged information about financial stability, then monetary policy responding instantly to deteriorating financial stability can trade off more output and inflation instability today for a faster return to the trend than a policy that follows the traditional Taylor rule. This augmented rule leads in some parameterizations to improved outcomes in terms of long-term welfare, but the welfare impacts of such a rule are small.DSGE models, financial instability, monetary policy rule

Taxes and Benefits: Work Incentive Effects of Policies

Using net replacement rates between net household income while out of work and in work, the authors investigate to what extent taxes and benefits may affect work incentives. They find that in 2006, net replacement rates are higher for low-income households and for households with children and a partner, attenuating work incentives. Work incentives are significantly affected by eligibility rules and the amounts of benefits, particularly unemployment benefit and social assistance. Next, the authors examine how the reform of social benefits introduced in 2007 affects work incentives. While social assistance is less generous, diminishing the incidence of high net replacement rates, the reform gives preferential treatment to households with some work income. Net replacement rates are also higher for households with children, who receive a substantially higher housing benefit, but some less well-off households consequently receive less social assistance. The authors also see that increased parental allowance has the same crowding-out effect on other income-tested benefits as higher housing benefit has on social assistance. In addition, the rise in parental allowance may lock eligible individuals in non-employment, increasing the loss of human capital. This is particularly important for lone parents, who face the highest specific unemployment rate compared to other household types.labor supply, microsimulations, net replacement rate, tax-benefit system

Cointegration and Extreme Value Analyses of Bovespa and the Istanbul Stock Exchange

This paper investigates the long-term financial integration and bivariate extreme dependence between Bovespa and the Istanbul Stock Exchange. While a static cointegration test presents no evidence of long-term cointegration, the introduction of a structural break into the model shows that Bovespa and the ISE were cointegrated following the local crisis in Turkey in 2000. Dynamic cointegration tests and DCC-GARCH analysis also reveal that Bovespa and the ISE reacted strongly not only to systemic crises as expected, but also unexpectedly to local crises in each other. This shows that equity prices in two emerging markets in distant regions of the world can co-move in the absence of significant trade and financial linkages. This suggests that there are underlying processes that affect equity prices other than trade, financial linkages, macroeconomic ties, and FDI as the prior literature suggests. While episodic cointegration is found for Bovespa and the ISE, the extremes of these markets still possess asymptotic independence, suggesting diversification opportunities.cointegration, structural break, dynamic conditional correlations, bivariate extreme value, emerging markets, Turkey, Brazil

Output Volatility in Emerging Market and Developing Countries: What Explains the “Great Moderation” of 1970-2003?

Output volatility and the size of output drops have declined across groups of nontransition countries studied in this paper over the past three decades, but have remained considerably higher in developing countries than in industrial countries. The paper employs a Bayesian latent dynamic factor model to decompose output growth into global, regional, and country-specific components. The favorable trends in output volatility and large output drops in developing countries are found to have resulted from lower country-specific volatility and more benign country-specific events. Evidence from cross-section regressions over the 1970–2003 period suggests that the volatility of discretionary fiscal spending and terms of trade volatility together with exchange rate flexibility were key determinants of volatility and large output drops.output volatility, output drops, fiscal policy, exchange rate policy, developing countries

Volatility Regimes in Macroeconomic Time Series: The Case of the Visegrad Group

The authors analyze several monthly and quarterly macroeconomic time series for the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia. These countries embarked on an economic transition in the early 1990s which ultimately led to their membership in the European Union, with Slovakia joining the euro area in 2009. It is natural to assume that changes of such a magnitude should also influence the major macroeconomic indicators. The authors explore the characteristics of these series by endogenously identifying their volatility regimes. In the course of their analysis, they show the difficulties in the handling of unit roots as a necessary step preceding volatility modeling. The final set of breaks identified shows very few changes near the beginning of the series, which corresponds to the transition period.macroeconomic fluctuations, economic transition, structural breaks, volatility regimes, cumulative sum of squares, unit root testing

Price-Level Targeting–A Real Alternative to Inflation Targeting?

This paper reviews price-level targeting in the light of current theoretical knowledge and past practical experience. The authors discuss progress in the economic debate on this issue, starting with the traditional arguments discussed in the early 1990s and ending with the most recent literature from the beginning of the new millennium. They devote special attention to the issues of the zero interest rate bound, time consistency, and communication. Practical experience from Sweden in the 1930s and Czechoslovakia in the first few years after WWI is used to illustrate the advantages and disadvantages of price-level targeting. Finally, the similarities of price-level and inflation developments with hypothetical outcomes under price-level targeting are investigated in selected inflation-targeting countries.price-level targeting, deflation, zero bound, communication, time inconsistency

Detecting Information-Driven Trading in a Dealers Market

We focus on the extent of information-driven trading originating from order flows to capture the behavior of the market makers on an emerging market. We modified the classical Easley et al. (1996) model for the probability of informed trading using a jackknife approach in which trades of one particular market maker at a time are left out from the sum of all buys and sells. Using the estimates from the jackknife approach, for each market maker we test whether the order flows associated with the particular market maker behaved significantly differently from the others. Data from the Prague Stock Exchange SPAD trading platform are used to demonstrate our methodology. Finding significant differences in the probability of informed trading computed from order flows, we conclude that order flows could reveal the extent of information-driven trading and could potentially be used by regulatory authorities to identify suspicious behavior by market participants.dealers’ market, emerging markets, informed trading, trading systems

Are House Prices Characterized by Threshold Effects? Evidence from Developed and Post-Transition Countries

The authors use a nonlinear framework in order to explore house price determinants and adjustment properties. They test for threshold cointegration using a sample of four developed countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Ireland) and four transition countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Estonia). In addition to testing for nonlinearities, they explore house price determinants in these four transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Asymmetric house price adjustment is present in all transition countries and the USA, while no threshold effects are detected in developed European countries. In a threshold error correction framework, house prices are aligned with fundamentals, but house price persistence coupled with a slow and asymmetric house price adjustment process might have facilitated the house price boom in transition countries and the USA.house prices, threshold cointegration, transition