Evolving Market Efficiency with an Application to Some Bulgarian Shares

With new technically advanced methods and computers at our disposal, the efficient market hypothesis is once again being debated. At the same time, we are witnessing an unprecedented growth in both existing and new financial markets. These new markets are often in economies which have just recently embraced free market economics; we term these stock markets infant markets. Such stock markets are obviously not efficient in allocating the supply of savings to productive capital. We do not test whether or not these infant markets are informationally efficient, but instead examine whether and how they are becoming more efficient. We propose modelling the excess returns of individual securities using a multi-factor model with time-varying coefficients and generalised auto-regressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) errors. If the markets are becoming more informationally efficient or the agents are learning, we would expect this to manifest itself as the time-varying coefficients becoming more stable as time increases. We test our model using data on four Bulgarian shares. First, we estimate an AR(2) model and a GARCH-M(1,1) model for the shares. Then, we estimated our AR(2) model with time varying coefficients and GARCH type errors. We find varying levels of efficiency and varying speeds of movement towards efficiency within our sample of four shares.     

Continuing barriers to women's credibility: A feminist perspective on the proof process

This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law Conference on Reform of Evidence Law, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, August 3–7, 1992.     

Bureaucratic choice and nonoptimal provision of public goods: Theory and evidence

Local governments' allocation decisions are modeled in the context of a slack maximizing bureaucrat who produces public goods according to a production function that includes both provision and the constituents' socio-economic characteristics. To gain a better understanding of the determinants of slack, comparative statics and an empirical study of Illinois municipalities are conducted. The indirect output distance function provides efficiency scores upon which we regress several variables, representing socio-economic characteristics, costs and competition measures. We find that slack or inefficient behavior is associated with richer communities, lower education levels and a lack of competition for residents among municipalities.     

Rehumanizing Birth and Death in America

THESIS: Despite spending more on medical care than any other country in the world, the United States still boasts some of the worst patient outcomes of any developed nation. This disparity is especially true of how Americans give birth and die.  These natural human transitions have become catastrophically expensive and leave patients and their families traumatized from unnecessary interventions. This article examines the costs and outcomes associated with the medicalization of birth and death and argues that alternatives exist that improve patient outcomes while lowering costs. Access to these alternatives will require changing current regulatory and reimbursement structures and providing trained support staff to help families navigate beginning- and end-of life decisions.