Local Distributional Effects of Government Cash Transfers in Chile

Despite rapid economic growth and poverty reduction, inequality in Chile has remained high and remarkably constant over the last 20 years, prompting academic and public interest in the subject. Due to data limitations, however, research on inequality in Chile has concentrated on the national and regional levels. The impact of cash subsidies to poor households on local inequality is thus not well understood. Using poverty-mapping methods to asses this impact, we find heterogeneity in the effectiveness of regional and municipal governments in reducing inequality via poverty-reduction transfers, suggesting that alternative targeting regimes may complement current practice in aiding the poor.

Tourism and economic development in a cash-in-advance economy

This paper examines the impact of tourism on welfare in a cash-in-advance economy. As a result of the expansion in tourism, the price of the non-traded good increases. This gives rise to a terms-of-trade improvement. However, the cash-in-advance constraint causes a distortion in consumption. For tourism demand, where the gain from the terms-of-trade improvement dominates (does not dominate) the loss from the consumption distortion, tourism is welfare-improving (welfare-reducing). A similar condition for welfare improvement (deterioration) holds for a model of capital inflow and endogenised tourism.

Wealth holdings and portfolio allocation of the elderly : the role of marital history

This paper investigates the role of marital history in terms of explaining differences in wealth holdings and portfolio allocation of older individuals by studying data from the first wave of Health and Retirement Study which was conducted in 1992. The results generally suggest that both men and women suffer from the negative shocks of past marital dissolutions in terms of household wealth accumulation. The significance level, however, differs across currently married couples, single males, and single females. The examination of the asset components of net worth also indicates that both the probability of owning a particular asset and the fraction of wealth allocated to that asset might vary depending on the elderly individuals’ marital history.

A-Reit price responses to cash rate changes

With the rapid increasing number and assets of A-REITs, there has been an urgent need to study the relationship between the changes of cash rates and the A-REITs returns. This study investigates whether there were relationships between Australian-Real Estate Investment Trusts stock returns and policy interest rate changes in the past decade by using event study with a multivariate regression model. The findings indicate that cash rate changes have no significantly positive or negative influence on the equity A-REIT stock prices. A series of successive cash rate changes do not take a continuous and dramatic effect on the equity A-REIT stock prices in each economic cycle. Moreover, the A-REITs with relatively smaller assets show more significant fluctuation to the changes of cash rates, and the A-REITs owning more than $ 10 billion in capital assets have relatively steady stock prices. Overall, the findings from this research lead to a call for comprehensive research into various areas in order to ascertain the determinants of A-REIT price changes.

ATM (cash machine) SFX

ATM (Cash Machine) sound effect.

Does cash flow predict returns?

In this paper, we propose the hypothesis that cash flow and cash flow volatility predict returns. We categorize firms listed on the New York Stock Exchange into sectors, and apply tests for both in-sample and out-of-sample predictability. While we find strong evidence that cash flow volatility predicts returns for all sectors, the evidence obtained when using cash flow as a predictor is relatively weak. Estimated profits and utility gains also suggest that it is cash flow volatility that is more relevant as a source of information than cash flow.