A large body of evidence has emerged in recent studies confirming that macroeconomic factors play an important role in determining investor risk premia and the ultimate path of equity returns. This paper illustrates how widely tested financial and economic variables from these studies can be employed in a time varying dynamic sector allocation model for U.S. equities. The model developed here i...

We examine a decision-theoretic Bayesian framework for the estimation of Sharpe Style portfolio weights of the MSCI sector returns. Following van Dijk and Kloek (1980) an appropriately defined prior density of style weights can incorporate non-negativity and other constraints. We use factor-mimicking portfolios as proxies to global style factors such as Value, Growth, Debt and Size. Our computa...

The economic consequences of large-scale government investments in education depend on the general equilibrium (GE) effects in both the labor market and the education sector. I develop a general equilibrium model and derive sufficient statistics that capture the consequences of such massive countrywide schooling initiatives. I provide unbiased estimates of the sufficient statistics using a Regr...

W investigate the association between information contained in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) metric and future stock market performance. Some past research has provided results suggesting that the financial markets misprice customer satisfaction; i.e., firms advantaged in customer satisfaction are posited to earn positive future-period abnormal stock returns. We reexamine this...

This paper studies the labor market in Vietnam during the transition towards market economy (1993-2006): we show that the public-private sector wage gap markedly increased, but that wage inequality decreased overall. Our aim is to assess how much of this evolution can be explained by workers’ productive skills and their allocation between sectors. We use a simple, yet innovative, method that al...

This paper analyzes the degree of return predictability (or weak-form informational efficiency) of Dow Jones Islamic and conventional size and sector-indices using the data from 1996 to 2013. Employing the automatic portmanteau and variance ratio tests for the martingale difference hypothesis of asset returns, we find that all Islamic and conventional sub-index returns have been predictable in ...

We show that a one-sector real business cycle model with mild increasing returns-to-scale, variable capital utilization and saddle-path stability is able to produce qualitatively realistic business cycles driven solely by disturbances to government purchases. Due to an endogenous increase in labor productivity, a positive spending shock can lead to simultaneous increases in output, consumption,...

We study 6,686 IPOs spanning the period 1981-2005 and find that the new issues puzzle disappears in a Fama-French three-factor framework. IPOs do not underperform in the aftermarket on a risk-adjusted basis and do not underperform a matched sample of non-issuers. IPO underperformance is concentrated in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, and IPO’s either perform the same as the market, or outperform o...

We show that a one-sector real business cycle model with mild increasing returns-toscale and variable capital utilization is able to produce qualitatively realistic business cycles driven solely by aggregate demand shocks. In particular, a positive government spending shock can lead to simultaneous increases in output, consumption, investment, employment, labor productivity and the real wage. O...

The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector is growing. Different accounts exist as to the causes of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using data from Ghana, we investigate the changing structure of earnings in self-employme...