The credit channel of monetary policy transmission: evidence from stock returns

This paper offers a novel test of the credit view of the monetary policy transmission mechanism using stock market returns. We identify Fed policy shocks using newspaper accounts and track daily stock prices immediately following the shocks. If the credit channel is important, then firms that are dependent on bank credit and internal funds should receive a relatively greater benefit (loss) from a Fed easing (tightening) than firms with access to nonbank credit at favorable terms. We identify ten policy shocks during the expansion of 1993-94 and the 'credit crunch' period of the 1990-91 recession and find little evidence supportive of an operative credit channel.     

On Prejudice and Socialization: Towards Social Work Action

I begin with the assumption that discriminatory attitudes and behaviour between person and person, group and group, nation and nation, are undesirable. They are undesirable for a number of reasons: the first, that they tend to weaken and fragment the culture-cradle of identity formation in the discriminated-against group, or alternatively that they lead to a defensive in-grownness in that culture which may have a number of consequences—a tight constriction of identity development, or an over-investment in the culture which may lead to isolation and impoverishment in the long run, or defensive projection at the group level on to the dominant culture with the possibility of covert or overt fear or war.     

Risk Analysis,Decision Analysis,Causal Analysis,and Economics: A Personal Perspective from More Than 40 years Experience

I entered the field of risk analysis forty years ago from a background in physics followed by doctoral training and experience in decision analysis. I came into the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) after participating as a committee member in the 1983 National Academies report, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process. The insights and recommendations from this report, and successor reports from 1996 and 2008, merit revisiting on this 40th anniversary. Risk analysis includes risk assessment, a process of summarizing applicable science to inform decisions; and risk management, a process of making informed choices, usually involving multiple stakeholders. Inherent in both is the need to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and differing perspectives and goals. The lessons I have learned include the need for a conceptual separation of risk management from risk assessment, the benefit of an iterative dialogue between these activities, and the wisdom of articulating and assessing what we know, what we want, and what we can do as we seek to understand and manage risks affecting ourselves and those we advise.     

Single Case Probabilities and the Social World: The Application of Popper's Propensity Interpretation

This paper is a re-examination of Popper's propensity interpretation of probability in respect of its potential methodological value in social science. A long standing problem for the (standard) frequency interpretation of probability is that whilst it is able to treat both aggregate and individual phenomena as having measurable properties, it cannot explain the ontological relationship between such concrete individual cases and aggregates. Popper's interpretation treats single cases as both real, but also as realisations of a propensity to occur. The frequency and propensity interpretations are compared and whilst some common objections raised must be upheld, they do not devalue the importance of the propensity interpretation as at least a metaphysical basis for probabilistic claims in social science. However the value of the approach may also lie in its methodological potential. Here I sugest that single case probabilities must be analysed in terms of the anterior probabilities of prior constituent events. In this I move beyond Popper's own programme, but suggest that such a move is theoretically compatible with recent complexity approaches in social science and goes some way toward meeting anti-naturalist concerns about intentionality.     

Authors and audiences: Towards a sociology of case recording

An important aspect of case recording is that it is a social relationship between authors and audiences, as well as a system of information storage and retrieval. From the sociological perspective, three aspects of case recording are reviewed: the social relationship between authors and potential audiences, power relations between them, and the interpretation of reality which takes place within the social relationship of case recording. Consequences of this perspective for case recording within social work and within agencies are reviewed. It is argued that a sociological perspective of case recording both explains and helps to analyse difficulties in the use of case recording in practice.     

The moral bases of social work

Social work's conventional “value-talk” presents a professionally neutral value-system for making moral judgements, but paradoxically neglects the professional social role of making moral judgements on behalf of society. Conventional statements of social work's moral values neglect economic, political, and aesthetic value judgements and issues of logic, rhetoric, and epistemology, which should also be included in value debate. Social work's value codes are not 'basic', because they are not usable in practice, are not distinctive, comprehensive, or universal. Historical and sociological evidence suggests that social workers make moral judgements of their clients on behalf of society. These judgements should be earned out within a more comprehensive and better articulated value system, which is applied in the detail of everyday practice.