Steven Davis | Liberty University (original) (raw)

Papers by Steven Davis

Chem Phys, 1985

Electronic quenching of IF B 3Π(0+) was studied in a time resolved laser fluorescence experiment.... more Electronic quenching of IF B 3Π(0+) was studied in a time resolved laser fluorescence experiment. IF (B) deactivation rate constants were determined as a function of vibrational quantum number for the following collision partners: He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe, N2, F2, I2, O2, and H2O. Quenching by the noble gases and N2 was extremely slow with all rate constants less than 1×10-14 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for 3≤v'≤8. The quenching rate constants for F2 showed a weak dependence on vibrational quantum number, ranging from (3.4±0.5)×10-12 to (5.2±0.4)×10-12 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for v'=3 and v'=7, respectively. Double exponential IF (B) fluorescence decays were observed with both O2 and H2O indicating two depletion processes occurring over the lifetime of IF (B). The quenching rate constants, extracted from the decays at long times, were (1.4±0.2)×10-12 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for O2 and (7.6±1.6)×10-12 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for H2O. At early times, the respective deactivation rate constants for O2 and H2O were (8.3±1.4)×10-12 and (2.4±0.7)×10-10 cm3 molecule-1 s-1. A possible quenching mechanism by O2 is discussed. The most efficient quencher was I2 with an estimated rate constant of 3.9×10-10 cm3 molecule-1 s-1.

In principle, the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) which links the establishments in the Annu... more In principle, the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) which links the establishments in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) is ideal for examining the dynamics of firm and aggregate behavior. However, the published ASM aggregates are not simply the appropriately weighted sums of establishment data in the LRD. Instead, the published data equal the sum of LRD-based sample estimates and nonsample estimates. The latter reflect adjustments related to sampling error and the imputation of small-establishment data. Differences between the LRD and the ASM raise questions for users of both data sets. For ASM users, time-series variation in the difference indicates potential problems in consistently and reliably estimating the nonsample portion of the ASM.

This study measures the heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes in the U.S. manuf... more This study measures the heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes in the U.S. manufacturing sector over the 1972 to 1986 period. We measure this heterogeneity in terms of the gross creation and destruction of jobs and the rate at which jobs are reallocated across plants. Our measurement efforts enable us to quantify the connection between job reallocation and worker reallocation, to evaluate theories of heterogeneity in plant-level employment dynamics, and to establish new results related to the cyclical behavior of the labor market.

This paper describes the Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing (PQEM) database, w... more This paper describes the Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing (PQEM) database, which contains plant-level observations on electricity purchases, electricity prices and electricity suppliers for the U.S. manufacturing sector. To construct the database, we link plant-level data on electricity prices and quantities in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) to information on electricity suppliers from the Energy Information Administration and other sources. The resulting database contains about 1.8 million annual observations over the period from 1963 to 2000. purchase level variables. Sections 7 and 8 explain the imputations we used for observations with clearly unreasonable electricity prices. Section 9 discusses the handling of total value of shipments outliers in the PQEM. In Section 10, we describe the distribution of annual plant electricity purchases by utility ownership type.

Page 1. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES RELATIVE WAGE MOVEMENTS AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONSUMPTION Ora... more Page 1. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES RELATIVE WAGE MOVEMENTS AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONSUMPTION Orazio Attanaslo Steven J. Davis Working Paper No. 4771 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH ...

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NBER Macroeconomics Annual

We study the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards. T... more We study the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards. To carry out our study, we exploit the recently developed Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), which contains annual observations on employment and payroll for all U.S. businesses. Our central finding is a large secular decline in the cross sectional dispersion of firm growth rates and in the average magnitude of firm level volatility. Measured the same way as in other recent research, the employment-weighted mean volatility of firm growth rates has declined by more than 40% since 1982. This result stands in sharp contrast to previous findings of rising volatility for publicly traded firms in COMPUSTAT data. We confirm the rise in volatility among publicly traded firms using the LBD, but we show that its impact is overwhelmed by declining volatility among privately held firms. This pattern holds in every major industry group. Employment shifts toward older businesses account for 27 perce...

This paper develops and implements a framework for quantifying the gains to international trade i... more This paper develops and implements a framework for quantifying the gains to international trade in risky financial assets. The framework can handle may agents, many assets, incomplete markets and limited participation in asset markets. It delivers closed-form analytic solutions for consumption, portfolio allocations, asset prices and the gains to trade. We find enormous gains to trade when asset returns are calibrated to observed risk premia and all agents participate in asset markets. The gains-to-trade puzzle is closely related to, but distinct from, the equity premium puzzle. High risk aversion merely alters the form of the gains-to-trade puzzle, but limited participation in asset markets goes a long way towards addressing both puzzles. We also identify three reasons for limited international risk sharing. First, the requirement that asset markets span the space of national output shocks fails in a serious way. Second, for many countries the cost of using financial assets to hedg...

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run res... more Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow economy, alter the industry mix of market activity, and twist labor demand in a way that amplifies negative effects on market work and concentrates effects on the less skilled. We also describe conditions whereby cross-country OLS regressions yield unbiased estimates of the total effect of taxes, inclusive of indirect effects that work through government spending responses to tax revenues. Regressions on rich-country samples in the mid 1990s indicate that a unit standard deviation tax rate difference of 12.8 percentage points leads to 122 fewer market work hours per adult per year, a drop of 4.9 percentage points in the employment-population ratio, and a rise in the shadow economy equal to 3.8...

We consider three questions related to the choice between war in Iraq and a continuation of the p... more We consider three questions related to the choice between war in Iraq and a continuation of the pre-war containment policy. First, in terms of military resources, casualties and expenditures for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, is war more or less costly for the United States than containment? Second, compared to war and forcible regime change, would a continuation of the containment policy have saved Iraqi lives? Third, is war likely to bring about an improvement or deterioration in the economic well-being of Iraqis? We address these questions from an ex ante perspective as of early 2003. According to our analysis, pre-invasion views about the likely course of the Iraq intervention imply present value costs for the United States in the range of 100to100 to 100to870 billion. Our estimated present value cost for the containment policy is nearly 300billionandrangesupwardto300 billion and ranges upward to 300billionandrangesupwardto700 billion when we account for several risks stressed by national security analysts. Our analysis also...

We characterize the covariance structure between asset returns and labor income shocks for synthe... more We characterize the covariance structure between asset returns and labor income shocks for synthetic persons defined in terms of sex, education and birth cohort. The correlation of income shocks with both aggregate and own-industry equity returns tends to rise with educational attainment and, surprisingly, is negative for several sex-education groups. We then develop a tractable equilibrium life-cycle model with incomplete markets. We implement the model using the estimated covariance structure and other data in order to evaluate the portfolio choice and welfare implications of hedging with financial assets. There are large equilibrium risk-sharing gains from trading a ”full menu” of group-level assets, exceeding 15,000 dollars in present value for many persons, and a single asset can generate sizable gains for certain demographic groups. The hedging motive has significant consequences for the structure of the optimal portfolio. 1 1

Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and... more Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and separations) and job gains and losses at the employer level. Partly motivated by these theories, we exploit establishment-level data from U.S. sources to study the relationship between worker flows and job flows in the cross section and over time. We document strong, highly nonlinear relationships of hiring, quit and layoff rates to employer growth in the cross section. We also develop a framework for evaluating how well various models and views fit the patterns in the data. Aggregate fluctuations in hires and layoffs are well captured by empirical specifications that impose a tight cross-sectional link between worker flows and job flows. Aggregate fluctuations in quits are not. Allowing the cross-sectional quit relationship to vary with aggregate conditions leads to remarkable improvement in fit, consistent with models of labor market dynamics that assign a major role to endogenous qui...

Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and... more Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and separations), vacancies, and job flows (employer-level employment growth) at the employer level. Using establishment data from multiple sources for the U.S., we show that hiring, quit, layoff, and vacancy rates exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to establishment growth in the cross section. These relationships, notably for vacancy and quit rates, vary with aggregate conditions. We also develop a framework for evaluating how well the implications of various models fit the data. Aggregate variations in hires and layoffs are well captured by models with tight links between worker and job flows. Aggregate variations in quits and vacancies are not. Specifications that allow the micro-level quit relationship to vary with aggregate conditions (consistent with models of endogenous quits) perform remarkably better. Finally, our framework provides methodology for producing a backcaste...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Empirical studies of the impact of changes in ownership of manufacturing plants on productivity (... more Empirical studies of the impact of changes in ownership of manufacturing plants on productivity (e.) have provided limited evidence on how such transactions affect investment in human capital and have been based strictly on U.S. and U.K. data. We attempt to fill these gaps, based on an analysis of matched employer-employee data from over 19,000 Swedish manufacturing plants for the years 1985-1998. The sample covers virtually the entire population of manufacturing plants with 20 or more employees and a probability-based sample of smaller plants. We assess whether there are differential effects on productivity for different types of ownership changes, such as partial and full acquisitions and divestitures, and related and unrelated acquisitions.

Chem Phys, 1985

Electronic quenching of IF B 3Π(0+) was studied in a time resolved laser fluorescence experiment.... more Electronic quenching of IF B 3Π(0+) was studied in a time resolved laser fluorescence experiment. IF (B) deactivation rate constants were determined as a function of vibrational quantum number for the following collision partners: He, Ne, Ar, Kr, Xe, N2, F2, I2, O2, and H2O. Quenching by the noble gases and N2 was extremely slow with all rate constants less than 1×10-14 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for 3≤v'≤8. The quenching rate constants for F2 showed a weak dependence on vibrational quantum number, ranging from (3.4±0.5)×10-12 to (5.2±0.4)×10-12 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for v'=3 and v'=7, respectively. Double exponential IF (B) fluorescence decays were observed with both O2 and H2O indicating two depletion processes occurring over the lifetime of IF (B). The quenching rate constants, extracted from the decays at long times, were (1.4±0.2)×10-12 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for O2 and (7.6±1.6)×10-12 cm3 molecule-1 s-1 for H2O. At early times, the respective deactivation rate constants for O2 and H2O were (8.3±1.4)×10-12 and (2.4±0.7)×10-10 cm3 molecule-1 s-1. A possible quenching mechanism by O2 is discussed. The most efficient quencher was I2 with an estimated rate constant of 3.9×10-10 cm3 molecule-1 s-1.

In principle, the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) which links the establishments in the Annu... more In principle, the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) which links the establishments in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) is ideal for examining the dynamics of firm and aggregate behavior. However, the published ASM aggregates are not simply the appropriately weighted sums of establishment data in the LRD. Instead, the published data equal the sum of LRD-based sample estimates and nonsample estimates. The latter reflect adjustments related to sampling error and the imputation of small-establishment data. Differences between the LRD and the ASM raise questions for users of both data sets. For ASM users, time-series variation in the difference indicates potential problems in consistently and reliably estimating the nonsample portion of the ASM.

This study measures the heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes in the U.S. manuf... more This study measures the heterogeneity of establishment-level employment changes in the U.S. manufacturing sector over the 1972 to 1986 period. We measure this heterogeneity in terms of the gross creation and destruction of jobs and the rate at which jobs are reallocated across plants. Our measurement efforts enable us to quantify the connection between job reallocation and worker reallocation, to evaluate theories of heterogeneity in plant-level employment dynamics, and to establish new results related to the cyclical behavior of the labor market.

This paper describes the Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing (PQEM) database, w... more This paper describes the Prices and Quantities of Electricity in Manufacturing (PQEM) database, which contains plant-level observations on electricity purchases, electricity prices and electricity suppliers for the U.S. manufacturing sector. To construct the database, we link plant-level data on electricity prices and quantities in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) to information on electricity suppliers from the Energy Information Administration and other sources. The resulting database contains about 1.8 million annual observations over the period from 1963 to 2000. purchase level variables. Sections 7 and 8 explain the imputations we used for observations with clearly unreasonable electricity prices. Section 9 discusses the handling of total value of shipments outliers in the PQEM. In Section 10, we describe the distribution of annual plant electricity purchases by utility ownership type.

Page 1. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES RELATIVE WAGE MOVEMENTS AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONSUMPTION Ora... more Page 1. NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES RELATIVE WAGE MOVEMENTS AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF CONSUMPTION Orazio Attanaslo Steven J. Davis Working Paper No. 4771 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH ...

ciqu JucJrIqu © uocc jiu o oriLcc uo o xccq /io b iibp urnX pc dnocq !1qOfIL CXbJ!cj bCWJJ22OU bz... more ciqu JucJrIqu © uocc jiu o oriLcc uo o xccq /io b iibp urnX pc dnocq !1qOfIL CXbJ!cj bCWJJ22OU bz.oA!qcq q'i jpjj © ïàó? P 2'' I D' uq NUfl HC110U VII LJU2 2P014 2CCO1J O ICX GxbLq 9LG JJOQ O fUJJOI2 uq UO JOC 0j IIJC MflOIJJ BfILfl 0j ECOJJOUJTC C9LCJJ

NBER Macroeconomics Annual

We study the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards. T... more We study the variability of business growth rates in the U.S. private sector from 1976 onwards. To carry out our study, we exploit the recently developed Longitudinal Business Database (LBD), which contains annual observations on employment and payroll for all U.S. businesses. Our central finding is a large secular decline in the cross sectional dispersion of firm growth rates and in the average magnitude of firm level volatility. Measured the same way as in other recent research, the employment-weighted mean volatility of firm growth rates has declined by more than 40% since 1982. This result stands in sharp contrast to previous findings of rising volatility for publicly traded firms in COMPUSTAT data. We confirm the rise in volatility among publicly traded firms using the LBD, but we show that its impact is overwhelmed by declining volatility among privately held firms. This pattern holds in every major industry group. Employment shifts toward older businesses account for 27 perce...

This paper develops and implements a framework for quantifying the gains to international trade i... more This paper develops and implements a framework for quantifying the gains to international trade in risky financial assets. The framework can handle may agents, many assets, incomplete markets and limited participation in asset markets. It delivers closed-form analytic solutions for consumption, portfolio allocations, asset prices and the gains to trade. We find enormous gains to trade when asset returns are calibrated to observed risk premia and all agents participate in asset markets. The gains-to-trade puzzle is closely related to, but distinct from, the equity premium puzzle. High risk aversion merely alters the form of the gains-to-trade puzzle, but limited participation in asset markets goes a long way towards addressing both puzzles. We also identify three reasons for limited international risk sharing. First, the requirement that asset markets span the space of national output shocks fails in a serious way. Second, for many countries the cost of using financial assets to hedg...

Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run res... more Guided by a simple theory of task assignment and time allocation, we investigate the long run response to national differences in tax rates on labor income, payrolls and consumption. The theory implies that higher tax rates reduce work time in the market sector, increase the size of the shadow economy, alter the industry mix of market activity, and twist labor demand in a way that amplifies negative effects on market work and concentrates effects on the less skilled. We also describe conditions whereby cross-country OLS regressions yield unbiased estimates of the total effect of taxes, inclusive of indirect effects that work through government spending responses to tax revenues. Regressions on rich-country samples in the mid 1990s indicate that a unit standard deviation tax rate difference of 12.8 percentage points leads to 122 fewer market work hours per adult per year, a drop of 4.9 percentage points in the employment-population ratio, and a rise in the shadow economy equal to 3.8...

We consider three questions related to the choice between war in Iraq and a continuation of the p... more We consider three questions related to the choice between war in Iraq and a continuation of the pre-war containment policy. First, in terms of military resources, casualties and expenditures for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction, is war more or less costly for the United States than containment? Second, compared to war and forcible regime change, would a continuation of the containment policy have saved Iraqi lives? Third, is war likely to bring about an improvement or deterioration in the economic well-being of Iraqis? We address these questions from an ex ante perspective as of early 2003. According to our analysis, pre-invasion views about the likely course of the Iraq intervention imply present value costs for the United States in the range of 100to100 to 100to870 billion. Our estimated present value cost for the containment policy is nearly 300billionandrangesupwardto300 billion and ranges upward to 300billionandrangesupwardto700 billion when we account for several risks stressed by national security analysts. Our analysis also...

We characterize the covariance structure between asset returns and labor income shocks for synthe... more We characterize the covariance structure between asset returns and labor income shocks for synthetic persons defined in terms of sex, education and birth cohort. The correlation of income shocks with both aggregate and own-industry equity returns tends to rise with educational attainment and, surprisingly, is negative for several sex-education groups. We then develop a tractable equilibrium life-cycle model with incomplete markets. We implement the model using the estimated covariance structure and other data in order to evaluate the portfolio choice and welfare implications of hedging with financial assets. There are large equilibrium risk-sharing gains from trading a ”full menu” of group-level assets, exceeding 15,000 dollars in present value for many persons, and a single asset can generate sizable gains for certain demographic groups. The hedging motive has significant consequences for the structure of the optimal portfolio. 1 1

Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and... more Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and separations) and job gains and losses at the employer level. Partly motivated by these theories, we exploit establishment-level data from U.S. sources to study the relationship between worker flows and job flows in the cross section and over time. We document strong, highly nonlinear relationships of hiring, quit and layoff rates to employer growth in the cross section. We also develop a framework for evaluating how well various models and views fit the patterns in the data. Aggregate fluctuations in hires and layoffs are well captured by empirical specifications that impose a tight cross-sectional link between worker flows and job flows. Aggregate fluctuations in quits are not. Allowing the cross-sectional quit relationship to vary with aggregate conditions leads to remarkable improvement in fit, consistent with models of labor market dynamics that assign a major role to endogenous qui...

Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and... more Many theoretical models of labor market search imply a tight link between worker flows (hires and separations), vacancies, and job flows (employer-level employment growth) at the employer level. Using establishment data from multiple sources for the U.S., we show that hiring, quit, layoff, and vacancy rates exhibit strong, highly nonlinear relationships to establishment growth in the cross section. These relationships, notably for vacancy and quit rates, vary with aggregate conditions. We also develop a framework for evaluating how well the implications of various models fit the data. Aggregate variations in hires and layoffs are well captured by models with tight links between worker and job flows. Aggregate variations in quits and vacancies are not. Specifications that allow the micro-level quit relationship to vary with aggregate conditions (consistent with models of endogenous quits) perform remarkably better. Finally, our framework provides methodology for producing a backcaste...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Empirical studies of the impact of changes in ownership of manufacturing plants on productivity (... more Empirical studies of the impact of changes in ownership of manufacturing plants on productivity (e.) have provided limited evidence on how such transactions affect investment in human capital and have been based strictly on U.S. and U.K. data. We attempt to fill these gaps, based on an analysis of matched employer-employee data from over 19,000 Swedish manufacturing plants for the years 1985-1998. The sample covers virtually the entire population of manufacturing plants with 20 or more employees and a probability-based sample of smaller plants. We assess whether there are differential effects on productivity for different types of ownership changes, such as partial and full acquisitions and divestitures, and related and unrelated acquisitions.