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This paper investigates the association between public spending on childcare and the labor force participation rates of both women and men, considering both full-time and part-time employment in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. We include both genders in the study to reveal the potential imbalances in the impact of the public childcare expenditure on the labor market across gender lines. The findings of this paper align with previous research, indicating that policies promoting part-time work and parental leave benefits increase part-time employment for both females and males. The results highlight that publicly subsidized childcare, when combined with other family-friendly programs, represents an effective policy approach for promoting male and female employment in potentially high-skilled positions.

We seek to determine whether a United States President's job approval rating is influenced by the Misery Index. This hypothesis is examined in two ways. First, we employ a nonlinear model that includes several macroeconomic variables: the current account deficit, exchange rate, unemployment, inflation, and mortgage rates. Second, we employ probit and logit regression models to calculate the probabilities of U.S. Presidents' approval ratings to the Misery Index. The results suggest that Layton's model does not perform well when adopted for the United States. Conversely, the probit and logit regression analysis suggests that the Misery Index significantly impacts the probability of the approval of U.S. Presidents' performances.

In this paper, a general model of the competitive firm's behavior under output and factor (total) price uncertainty is developed to evaluate the role of market interdependencies in analyzing long-run equilibrium conditions and comparative statics analysis of increased uncertainty in output and input prices. It is demonstrated that the results shown in the literature are a special case of the findings reported here and market interdependencies play a central role in determining the firm's long-run equilibrium under uncertainty.

This paper examines the hypothesis of optimizing behavior of the U.S. consumers using quarterly and seasonally adjusted series on real consumer expenditures on eight commodity groups: clothing, durable goods, energy, food, housing, medical care, transportation, and others for the period of 1947:I through 1993:I. Following the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP), a money-metric utility function is derived to calculate an efficiency index to determine the percentage difference between the observed cost of consumption and the optimum cost of consumption in each period of the sample. The empirical results provide evidence that the allocative efficiency in the U.S. has improved only slightly due to the wave of deregulations in the early 1980s. Our results are consistent with the predictions of the general theory of second best in showing that gains in the allocative efficiency may be minimal as long as many sectors of the economy remain partially or totally regulated.

We investigate the association of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) program with food insufficiency and related anxieties among families with incomes below $35000. Analyzing the US Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey data, our xtprobit specification and estimation reveals the disparate impact of the CTC across demographic and racial divides, a departure from previous work. Subgroup analyses reveal that the final two CTC installments disproportionately benefited Hispanic households and those earning under $25000/year while producing no significant decrease in food insufficiency for black households or those earning $25000–$35000/year. The study indicates that the expanded CTC's reduction of low-income households' food insufficiency persisted across the program's duration. Thus, the expansion achieved its intended purpose by helping to buffer low-income families against the fallout of the disrupted pandemic economy—an important result to keep in mind as policy makers continue to consider modifications to the CTC that improve efficacy and equity. JEL Codes: A12, A13, A14

AbstractWe assess the relationship between regime‐dependent volatility in S&P 500, economic policy uncertainty, the S&P 500 bull and bear sentiment spread (bb_sp), as well as the Chicago Board Options Exchange's VIX over the period 2000–2018. Our findings from two‐covariate GARCH–MIDAS (GM) methodology, regime switching Markov Chain, and quantile regressions suggest that the association of realized volatility and sentiment varies across high‐ and low‐volatility regimes and depends on investors' sensitivity toward incidents of market uncertainties under these regimes. The findings suggest that these indicators may not be useful in volatility forecasting, especially under high‐volatility regimes.

This paper studies the effects of fiscal stimuli on the real GDP of the United Kingdom for the period of 1997 through the first quarter of 2017. Structural vector autoregressive and vector error correction models are estimated. Impulse responses from both models provide support for the Keynesian view that fiscal stimuli are associated with rises in the real GDP. Variance decomposition analysis shows that over time, depending which model is considered; tax cuts impart a positive effect on the real GDP in the range of 5 to 20 percent. Government expenditure shocks account for 8 to 15 percent of variations in the real GDP based on the two models. The multipliers of tax cuts and government expenditures initially rise reaching a peak in the ninth quarter and decline to 1.60 and 1.74 in three years, respectively.

The recent depreciation of the dollar against major currencies of the world, notably the euro, has kindled discussion on the causes of this phenomenon and the possible outcomes should it continue. Many politicians blame the rising U.S. current account deficit and some economists have questioned the sustainability of the current account deficit. This paper examines the relationship between the U.S. current account balance, the net U.S. international investment position, and the exchange value of the dollar. Our results show that there is a relationship between the exchange value of the dollar and the current account balance. However, our results do not show that the current account balance is solely responsible for changes in the exchange value of the dollar. This is not surprising given the many influences currently under investigation as possible explanations for the recent behavior of the dollar.

We test for the presence of low-dimensional chaotic structure in the gold and silver futures markets. While we find strong evidence of nonlinear dependencies, the evidence is not consistent with chaos. Our test results indicate that ARCH-type processes, with controls for contract-maturity effects, generally explain the nonlinearities in the data. We also make a case that employing seasonally adjusted price series is important to obtaining robust results via some of the existing tests for chaotic structure.

AbstractWe examine the impact of crude oil price fluctuations on equity markets for four emerging Latin American markets, namely, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. We adopt an approach that examines this relationship in both a time and frequency domains. The co‐spectral analysis confirmed that most of the observable coherence between crude oil and equity returns occurred at relatively short frequencies. The structural vector autoregression (SVAR) results suggest that shocks to crude oil price directed all equity markets into negative territory, though they typically reversed course after approximately twenty‐four months. Although the decomposition of the prediction error variance showed that crude oil prices were weakly exogenous in the SVAR model, in most cases Brazil's equity market may have been responsible for the higher percentage of variations in the remaining indices. The nonlinear Granger causality tests reveal, with the exception of the Merval index, the equity markets under study were responsive to crude oil price shocks.