The number of small business start ups that fail may be highly over-estimated according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek (Klein 3/99). Government data is based on employee terminations and 75% of start ups are untracked solo operations. So while this presents a more hopeful scenario, we remain in the...

Economists have traditionally viewed futures prices as fully informative about future economic activity and asset prices. We argue that open interest could be more informative than futures prices in the presence of hedging demand and limited risk absorption capacity in futures markets. We find...