{"title":"New Evidence for the Present-Value Model of Stock Prices: Why the REH Version Failed Empirically","authors":"R. Frydman, Michael D. Goldberg, Nicholas Mangee","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2585690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2585690","url":null,"abstract":"Shiller (1981) and others have shown that the quantitative predictions of the REH present-value model are inconsistent with time-series data on stock prices and dividends. In this paper, we assess the empirical relevance of the model without explicitly representing how a rational market participant forecasts dividends and interest rates. We find that stock prices are driven largely by news about fundamental factors. Moreover, this news moves prices through changes in the market’s forecasts of dividends and/or interest rates in ways that are remarkably consistent with the present-value model. We also find that the structure of the process underpinning stock prices undergoes quantitative change, and that both fundamental and psychological factors play an important role in this process. Taken together, Shiller’s findings and ours point to a novel explanation of the present-value model’s empirical difficulties. They also imply that macroeconomists and finance theorists should rethink how to represent rational forecasting in real-world markets.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"137 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133096846","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Labor in the Twenty-First Century: The Top 0.1% and the Disappearing Middle-Class","authors":"William Lazonick","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2586239","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2586239","url":null,"abstract":"The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy. Since the beginning of the 1980s, employment relations in U.S. industrial corporations have undergone three major structural changes – summarized as “rationalization,†“marketization,†and “globalization†– that have permanently eliminated middle-class jobs in the United States. From the early 1980s, rationalization, characterized by plant closings, terminated the jobs of high-school educated blue-collar workers, most of them well-paid union members. From the early 1990s, marketization, characterized by the end of a career with one company as an employment norm, placed the job security of middle-aged whitecollar workers, many of them college educated, in jeopardy. From the early 2000s, globalization, characterized by the movement of employment offshore to lower-wage nations, left all members of the U.S. labor force, whatever their educational credentials and work experience, vulnerable to displacement. Initially, these structural changes in employment could be justified as business responses to changes in technologies, markets, and competitors. Once U.S. corporations transformed their employment relations, however, they often pursued rationalization, marketization, and globalization to cut current costs rather than to reposition themselves to produce competitive products. Defining superior corporate performance as ever-higher quarterly earnings per share, companies turned to massive stock repurchases to “manage†their own corporations’ stock prices. Trillions of dollars that could have been spent on innovation and job creation in the U.S. economy over the past three decades have instead been used to buy back stock for the purpose of manipulating stock prices. Legitimizing this financialized mode of corporate resource allocation has been the ideology, itself a product of the 1980s and 1990s, that a business corporation should be run to “maximize shareholder value.†Through their stock options and stock awards, corporate executives who make these resource-allocation decisions are themselves prime beneficiaries of the focus on rising stock prices as the sole measure of corporate performance. While rationalization, marketization, and globalization undermined stable and remunerative employment structures, the “financialization†of the U.S. corporation entailed the distribution of corporate cash to shareholders through stock repurchases, often in addition to generous cash dividends, and, incentivizing these distributions, the stock-based remuneration of top corporate executives. In this essay, I review evidence on the fundamental structural changes related to rationalization, marketization, and globalization that, since the early 1980s, have eroded U.S. middle-class employment opportunities. Then, I analyze how,","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"142 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2015-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123453427","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who Invests in the High-Tech Knowledge Base?","authors":"M. Hopkins, William Lazonick","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2638091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2638091","url":null,"abstract":"A nation must accumulate a high-tech knowledge base to prosper. In this paper, we provide a historical perspective on the interaction of household families, government agencies, and business enterprises, or what we call “the investment triad†, in providing a foundation for the accumulation of a high-tech knowledge base in the United States. Households and governments interact by making investments in education. Governments and businesses interact in the development of the high-tech knowledge base by investing in research and development. Businesses and households interact to invest in the knowledge base through the employment relation. The quality of these interactions in terms of complementarity and sophistication are of critical importance to the productivity performance of investments in the knowledge base. Most discussions of investing in the high-tech knowledge base focus on investments made in R&D by government and business as well as universities and non-profits. We argue that investment in R&D does not capture the productivity of R&D in generating high-quality, low cost high-tech products, nor how the revenues from those products support the higher incomes of the broad base of employees in the high-tech labor force. Over the past decade total R&D spending as a percent of GDP in the United States has remained high by historical standards, with Business-funded R&D exceeding the proportion of Government-funded R&D in the total. Yet there is a sense in the United States that over the past two to three decades the institutional arrangements for investing in the knowledge base have broken down. We hypothesize that the innovation problem resides in the interaction of the organizations – household families, government agencies, and business enterprises – in the investment triad. Using the investment-triad framework, this report provides an historical overview of the evolution of the institutional arrangements for investing in the knowledge base in the United States since the mid-19th century, culminating in an agenda for research on the contemporary operation and performance of the investment triad.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-12-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123596242","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Political Movement that Dared Not Speak its Own Name: The Neoliberal Thought Collective Under Erasure","authors":"Philip Mirowski","doi":"10.2139/SSRN.2682892","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/SSRN.2682892","url":null,"abstract":"Why do so many people who should know better argue that Neoliberalism 'does not exist'? In this paper I examine the disinclination to treat the Neoliberal political project as a serious intellectual project motivating a series of successes in the public sphere. Economists seem especially remiss in this regard.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130293267","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Crisis and Recovery in the German Economy: The Real Lessons","authors":"Servaas Storm, C. Naastepad","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2638053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2638053","url":null,"abstract":"Owing to its strong dependence on exports, Germany was among the economies hit hardest by the financial crisis. But unlike almost all other countries, Germany emerged from the crisis quickly and stronger than before. What lies behind this success story, if at all it is one? The commonplace – neoliberal – answer is that Germany's success is the hard-won reward for strict economic management, combining fiscal conservatism and structural reforms of welfare and the labour market. The latter, by reducing labour costs, fostered competitiveness, boosted growth, and increased employment. “Progressive” economists arguing that Germany beggared its Eurozone neighbours by squeezing workers’ wages, share a similar view. However, this particular explanation of Germany's resilience is wrong and unhelpful. Germany's export success cannot be explained in terms of its (labour) cost competitiveness, but is caused by strong non-price competitiveness. This, in turn, is due – much more than is normally recognized – by the remaining distinctly non-neoliberal dimensions of Germany's economic model (including a Keynesian crisis response). German and European policymakers preaching austerity and structural labour-market changes as the model for other Eurozone countries, misunderstand Germany's rebound from crisis, with serious costs to Eurozone populations.","PeriodicalId":445141,"journal":{"name":"Institute for New Economic Thinking Working Paper Series","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129899351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}