Climate economics has been criticized for ignoring uncertainty, catastrophic changes, and tipping points (Stern 2016). The present paper addresses these issues. We consider multiple climate shocks which are recurring, random, uninsurable, and potentially large. The associated damages and the...

Inquiry into CSR as a human capital management tool has suggested that firms benefit from such activities because employees value the meaningfulness of these activities, which influences motivation and retention. We propose an alternate avenue through which firms can benefit from an important...

We introduce three new STATA commands, nop, ziop2 and ziop3, for the estimation of a three-part nested ordered probit model, the two-part zero-inflated ordered probit models of Harris and Zhao (2007, Journal of Econometrics 141: 1073-1099) and Brooks, Harris and Spencer (2012, Economics Letters...

Using quarterly financial statements data of listed firms during 2008-2016, this paper identifies the “borrow to lend” shadow banking activities of non-financial firms in China by examining the connection of key financial variables and investigates how liquidity shocks affect such...

Adding multivariate stochastic volatility of a flexible form to large Vector Autoregressions (VARs) involving over a hundred variables has proved challenging due to computational considerations and over-parameterization concerns. The existing literature either works with homoskedastic models or...

We investigate the question whether macroeconomic variables contain information about future stock volatility beyond that contained in past volatility. We show that forecasts of GDP and industrial production growth from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Professional Forecasters predict volatility...

We study the relative risk aversion of an individual with particular social preferences: his well-being is influenced by his relative wealth, and by how concerned he is about having low relative wealth. Holding constant the individual's absolute wealth, we obtain two results. First, if the...

This paper documents two facts: (i) elasticities of substitution in production vary significantly across sectors, with manufacturing sectors being generally less flexible than service sectors, and (ii) during the Great Recession the rise in bond spreads varied systematically with these...

Macroeconomic models often invoke consumption "habits" to explain the substantial persistence of macroeconomic consumption growth. But a large literature has found no evidence of habits in the microeconomic datasets that measure the behavior of individual households. We show that the apparent...