National Bureau of Economic Research

About: National Bureau of Economic Research is a nonprofit organization based out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Population. The organization has 2626 authors who have published 34177 publications receiving 2818124 citations. The organization is also known as: NBER & The National Bureau of Economic Research.

A survey of behavioral finance

Abstract: Behavioral finance argues that some financial phenomena can plausibly be understood using models in which some agents are not fully rational. The field has two building blocks: limits to arbitrage, which argues that it can be difficult for rational traders to undo the dislocations caused by less rational traders; and psychology, which catalogues the kinds of deviations from full rationality we might expect to see. We discuss these two topics, and then present a number of behavioral finance applications: to the aggregate stock market, to the cross-section of average returns, to individual trading behavior, and to corporate finance. We close by assessing progress in the field and speculating about its future course.

Fifty Years of Mincer Earnings Regressions

Abstract: The Mincer earnings function is the cornerstone of a large literature in empirical economics. This paper discusses the theoretical foundations of the Mincer model and examines the empirical support for it using data from Decennial Censuses and Current Population Surveys. While data from 1940 and 1950 Censuses provide some support for Mincer's model, data from later decades are inconsistent with it. We examine the importance of relaxing functional form assumptions in estimating internal rates of return to schooling and of accounting for taxes, tuition, nonlinearity in schooling, and nonseparability between schooling and work experience. Inferences about trends in rates of return to high school and college obtained from our more general model differ substantially from inferences drawn from estimates based on a Mincer earnings regression. Important differences also arise between cohort-based and cross-sectional estimates of the rate of return to schooling. In the recent period of rapid technological progress, widely used cross-sectional applications of the Mincer model produce dramatically biased estimates of cohort returns to schooling. We also examine the implications of accounting for uncertainty and agent expectation formation. Even when the static framework of Mincer is maintained, accounting for uncertainty substantially affects the return estimates. Considering the sequential resolution of uncertainty over time in a dynamic setting gives rise to option values, which fundamentally changes the analysis of schooling decisions. In the presence of sequential resolution of uncertainty and option values, the internal rate of return - a cornerstone of classical human capital theory - is not a useful guide to policy analysis.

Microeconomic evidence of creative destruction in industrial and developing countries

Abstract: This paper provides an analysis of the process of creative destruction across 24 countries and 2-digit industries over the past decade. It relies on a newly assembled dataset that draws from different micro data sources (business registers, census, or representative enterprise surveys). The novelty of the approach is in the harmonization of firm level data across countries, which enables international comparisons and the identification of country-specific factors as opposed to sectoral and time effects. All countries display a massive reallocation of resources, with the entry and exit of many firms in all markets, the failure of many newcomers and the expansion of successful ones. This process of creative destruction affects productivity directly, by reallocating resources towards more productive uses, but also indirectly through the effects of increased market contestability. There are also large differences across groups of countries. While entry and exit rates are fairly similar across industrial countries, post entry performance differs markedly between Europe and the U.S., a potential indication of the importance of barriers to firm growth as opposed to barriers to entry. Transition economies show an even more impressive process of creative destruction and, amongst them, those that have progressed the most towards a market economy show better outcomes from this process. Finally, Mexico shows large firm dynamics with many new firms entering the battle but also many failing rapidly, while Argentina resembles more of Continental Europe with smaller flows and less impressive post-entry growth of successful firms.

The rate of obsolescence of knowledge, research gestation lags, and the private rate of return to research resources

Abstract: This paper points out the conceptual distinction between the rates of decay in the physical productivity of traditional capital goods and that of the appropriate revenues accruing to knowledge-producing activities, and notes that it is the latter parameter which is required in any study which constructs a stock of privately marketable knowledge The rate of obsolescence of knowledge is estimated from a simple patent renewal and the estimates are found to be comparable to evidence provided by firms on the lifespan of the output of their R&D activities These estimates, together with mean R&D gestation lags, are then used to correct previous estimates of the private excess rate of return to investment in research We find that after the correction, the private excess rate of return to investment in research, at least in the early 1960's, was close to zero, which may explain why firms reduced the fraction of their resources allocated to research over the subsequent decade