Note: Center Discussion Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussions and critical comments. Abstract This study considers the links between primary indicators of health and individual labor productivity in Colombia and explores how additional public expenditures on health may improve individuals' health. Sample statistics show that illness occurs more frequently for wome...

This study examines whether firms issue capital expenditure forecasts as a commitment to not engage in expropriation of lenders through opportunistic investment activities. We find that firms with higher leverage and lower credit quality are more likely to issue capital expenditure forecasts and deviate less from the forecasts. Furthermore, for firms that issue capital expenditure forecasts, lo...

Evidence that women's employment and earnings foster increased allocations of household resources to children's well-being have led to advocacy of investment in women's employment as a method for targeting the social benefits of enhanced economic opportunity. Work and associated earnings are hypothesized to empower women, who can then exercise their individual preferences for spending on child ...

We carefully construct measures of earnings forecast accuracy and recommendation profitability that enable us to examine the association between the qualities of these two key outputs of individual security analysts. We find that analysts with superior earnings forecasts issue significantly more profitable recommendations than those with less accurate forecasts. The average annual recommendatio...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper proposes a new method for determining the upper bound of any investment strategy's maximum profit , applied in a given time window [0,T]. This upper bound is defined once all the prices are known at time T and therefore represents the ex-post maximum efficiency of any investment strategy determined during the relevant time interval. This approach allows us to ga...

This paper attempts to build an investment portfolio optimization model based on the typical transaction cost. First, shortages of current investment portfolio models are analyzed. By analyzing the changing process of the transaction cost in practical investments, the author introduces the non-concave and non-convex transaction cost function and the mean-variance model, and adopts the investmen...

Increasing income and wealth inequality has led to renewed interest in understanding and explaining wealth and income distributions, and in particular the recent growth in their top shares (Piketty, 2014). The literature has largely emphasized the role of earnings inequality in explaining wealth inequality. Indeed, Bewley-Aiyagari economies, which focus on precautionary savings as an optimal re...