NBER News and Research Archive

A repurchase agreement -- "repo" -- is the sale of securities together with an agreement for the seller to buy back those securities at a later date. Between the second quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2009, net repo financing provided to U.S. banks and broker-dealers fell by about $1.3 trillion. Gary Gorton and Andrew Metrick analyze official data sources on repo, along with the results of a unique market survey conducted by the Bond Market Association among its members on their use of repo as of June 30, 2004. The researchers conclude that the 2007-9 “run on repo” was predominantly driven by the flight of foreign financial institutions, domestic and offshore hedge funds, and other unregulated cash pools.

According to the "unbiasedness hypothesis", the interest rate differential between two countries should be an unbiased predictor of the change in the exchange rate between them. In a sample of countries extending up to the year 2000, this was true at longer horizons of five and ten years, but not for shorter horizons of up to one year. Menzie Chinn and Saad Quayyum ask whether this relationship still holds in data extending up to 2011. They find that it does, but their results are sensitive to the bond yields used and are more pronounced at long horizons when they use the pound instead of the dollar as the base currency. For currencies characterized by particularly low bond yields – the Japanese yen and the Swiss franc -- interest rates from the mid-1990s onward do not point in the right direction for subsequent exchange rate changes.

Is corporate social responsibility profitable, and do financial constraints change the relationship between profits and corporate “goodness”? Harrison Hong, Jeffrey Kubik, and Jose Scheinkman study a sample of S&P 500 firms over the period 1991-2008 and find that during the Internet bubble, when firms that had previously faced financial constraints were less constrained, their “goodness” temporarily increased relative to their peers who had not previously had financial constraints. The researchers also find that a financially constrained firm's (environmental) sustainability score increases more with its equity valuation and a lower cost of capital than does the score of a less constrained firm.

Karen Clay, Jeff Lingwall, and Mel Stephens analyze the effect of compulsory attendance laws on the schooling of U.S. children for three overlapping time periods: 1880-1927, 1890-1927, and 1898-1927. They find that laws passed after 1880 had significant effects on both school enrollment and attendance. Laws passed after 1890 affected not only enrollment and attendance but also educational outcomes, and the timing of the increases in enrollment and attendance suggests that they were caused by the change in the laws. For men of school age in 1898-1927 who reported positive wage income in the 1940 census, the compulsory attendance laws increased both schooling and wage income.

Dean Karlan, Robert Darko Osei, Isaac Osei-Akoto, and Christopher Udry analyze the results of an experiment in northern Ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to one group that received a cash grant, another that received free rainfall-index insurance or the opportunity to purchase it, and a third group that received a combination of the two. They find that the demand for rainfall insurance is strong, and that having such insurance leads farmers to invest more in their land and to choose production methods that on average yield more crops, but are more rain-sensitive. For farmers, the constraint to investing in agriculture appears to be uninsured rainfall risk.

To study gender differences in wage negotiation and related issues, Andreas Leibbrandt and John List posted job advertisements for administrative assistant positions in nine major US cities, to which nearly 2,500 job-seekers responded. They find that when there is no explicit initial statement that wages are negotiable, men are more likely to negotiate than women. The researchers also find that men are relatively more likely to apply to jobs where negotiation of initial wages is ambiguous, while women prefer job environments where the "rules of wage determination" are concrete.

Judith Scott-Clayton, Peter Crosta, and Clive Belfield analyze administrative data -- including high school transcripts, remedial test scores, and college grades -- for tens of thousands of students in two community college systems to evaluate the efficacy of existing remedial course assignments. They find that roughly one in four test-takers in math, and one in three test-takers in English, are improperly assigned to remedial courses under the current test-based policies. They conclude that using high school transcript information -- either instead of or in addition to test scores -- could significantly reduce the number of assignment errors. They also find that if institutions took account of students’ high school performance, they could remediate substantially fewer students without lowering success rates in college-level courses.

Gabriella Conti, Andrea Galeotti, Gerrit Mueller, and Stephen Pudney analyze data collected from seniors in Wisconsin high schools in 1957 to evaluate the relationship between youthful popularity and success in later life. These students and their family members were surveyed periodically up to the year 2005. Using data on the number of friendship nominations received from schoolmates as a measure of popularity, the researchers estimate that moving from the 20th to the 80th percentile of the high-school popularity distribution yields a 10 percent wage premium nearly 40 years later.

Using data from the Health and Retirement Study covering the time period 1992-2008, Kathleen McGarry finds considerable variation over time in monetary transfers from parents to adult children. The data suggest that in a typical year, approximately 14 percent of children receive a transfer from their parents, but only 6 percent of the sample receives a transfer in any two consecutive survey years. Furthermore, 46 percent of the adult children in this sample receive a transfer at least once, but less than 1 percent receive a transfer in each of the nine waves of data. Changes over time in transfers are negatively related to changes in the adult child’s income.

The dates of Advanced Placement (AP) exams taken by high school students change from year to year, so students who take two subject exams in one year may have a different number of days between those exams than students who take the same tests in a different year. Ian Fillmore and Devin Pope find that having less time between exams is associated with lower scores, particularly on the second of the two. The researchers estimate that students who take exams ten days apart are 8 percent more likely to pass both of them than students who take the same two exams one day apart.