Stefano d'Addona

Nominal and Real Volatility as Determinants of FDI

This article examines the role of country-specific sources of output and interest rate or exchange rate volatility in driving Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) activities. Building on a dataset with bilateral FDI flows among 24 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) economies over the period 1985–2007, we find that nominal and real volatility strongly deter foreign investments. Output and exchange rate volatility matter in particular for the decision whether to invest in a foreign country in the first place. Interest rate volatility mainly influences the amount of foreign investments.

Forced Manager Turnovers in English Soccer Leagues: A Long-Term Perspective

The authors conduct an empirical analysis of a hand-collected sample of 2,376 turnovers of soccer managers in the four major English leagues in the seasons from 1949-1950 to 2007-2008. While the relation between the probability of a manager being fired and long-term performance remained remarkably stable, both the absolute frequency and the sensitivity of firing decisions on the outcome of recent matches steadily and significantly increased during the six decades covered by the sample. This is likely to reflect the increased level of competition in and economic importance of the English soccer leagues.

The British Opt-Out from the European Monetary Union: Empirical Evidence from Monetary Policy Rules

We analyse the current state of monetary integration in Europe, focusing on the United Kingdoms position regarding the European Monetary Union (EMU). The interest rate decisions of the European Central Bank and the Bank of England are compared through different specifications of the Taylor rule. Comparison of the monetary conduct of these two institutions provides useful guidance in identifying the differences that the British Government claims motivating its refusal to join the EMU. Testing for forward-looking behaviour and possible asymmetries in policy responses, we show evidence supporting the opt-out decision taken by the British Government.

Testing Habits in an Asset Pricing Model

We develop a model of asset pricing assuming that investors behavior is habit forming. The model predicts that the effect of consumption growth shocks on the risk premium depends on the business cycle phase of the economy. This empirical implication is tested with a Markovswitching VAR model on the US postwar economy. The results show that the response of the risk premium to shocks to consumption is not significantly different over the business cycle phases of the economy. We interpret this as evidence against the habit formation hypothesis of the investors behavior.

Too Small or Too Low? New Evidence on the 4-Factor Model

In 1992, Fama and French published a landmark paper in which they provided, by means of a cross-sectional analysis, strong evidence of explanatory power by size and book-to-market factors, compared with little or no ability by the market factor to explain differences in equity returns. After this, a large body of literature came out evidencing the beta model’s weakness in explaining asset returns. Empirical works have mostly used US data, and most of them reject the beta Capital Asset Pricing model (CAPM — see, for example, Grinold, 1993). In another paper, Fama and French (1993), using a time-series approach, found basically the same evidence. However, further evidence for their model (Lakonishok et al., 1994; Haugen, 1995), highlighted the role of investor overreaction (De Bondt and Thaler, 1985) in explaining the value anomaly. Based on the overreaction/under-reaction argument to information, Jegadeesh andTitman (1993) and Rouwenhorst (1998) document the existence of a momentum anomaly: over a medium time horizon, firms with high returns over the previous three months to one year continue to outperform firms with low past returns over the same period.

Information Processing with Recursive Utility: Some Intriguing Results

We study information processing in a simple endowment economy where the mean consumption growth rate are governed by a hidden state variable and agents have recursive preferences. We show that for typical parameter values, there is a strong incentive to commit to ignoring future information on the state of the economy, but that such commitment raises time-inconsistency problems. We estimate the model on postwar US data and find that the representative consumer can achieve a utility gain equivalent to a 20% increase in lifetime consumption simply by not paying attention to the state of the economy.

The stability of tax elasticities over the business cycle in European countries

The change of national income brings about tax revenue change. This relationship is embodied in the tax elasticity and usefully estimated both for the long-run and the short-run. In this paper we show that the short-run tax elasticity - the percent change in the tax revenue in response to a one percent change in national income - changes itself according to the business cycle. Using a novel dataset of tax policy reforms on 15 European countries from 1980 to 2013, we estimate a two state Markov-switching regression model to account for possible differences in tax elasticities during different phases of the economy. The estimated difference between elasticities during booms and recessions turns out to be always statistically significant and often even economically so. Results show a clear tendency for short-run elasticities of (i) indirect taxes, (ii) social contributions, and to a lesser extent, (iii) corporate income taxes to increase in recessions. Differences in tax elasticities for personal income taxes are somehow less pronounced. Across countries, results show a tendency for larger elasticities in recessions to prevail.

Asset Prices and Optimal Monetary Policy Rules

We construct a New Keynesian DSGE model that features financial frictions, investment frictions, long-run productivity risk and Epstein-Zin preferences. The model successfully reproduces key features of both asset prices and macroeconomic quantities such as consumption, investment, and output. Under this set up, we examine the implications of different monetary policy rules where the central bank responds to inflation, output and asset prices in the presence of productivity shocks, monetary policy shocks and financial shocks. This paper contributes to the current debate on how central bankers ought to respond to asset price volatility, in the context of an overall strategy for monetary policy.

LONG-RUN RISK AND MONEY MARKET RATES: AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT

Using postwar U.S. data, I study the implied interest rates in a simple long-run risk (LRR) model. Empirical estimates show that, as in standard consumption-based models with power utility preferences, the movements of the implied risk-free rate are entirely determined by the variations of expected consumption growth. This leads to a negative relationship between LRR Euler equation rates and money market rates. Nevertheless, when the low-frequency movements of consumption growth are accounted for, the long-run component of consumption growth is a key element to partially capture the countercyclical variations of the money market rates.

Is Ignorance Bliss? The Cost of Business Cycle Uncertainty

We investigate the cost of business-cycle uncertainty (lack of firm knowledge about the prevailing state of the economy) in a setup where the economy switches between booms and recessions at random intervals. Calibrating an exchange economy model to match the properties of the postwar U.S. data, we find that giving consumers additional information beyond that already contained in the endowment growth rates yields only moderate gains. In a second stage, we investigate the effect of nonperfect information processing in this setting. Surprisingly, we find that opting for slow learning might yield large utility gains, especially for consumers with a strong preference for early resolution of uncertainty.