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Daily Archives: May 18, 2015

The Evolution of Retirement Wealth

Finance and Economics Discussion Series Divisions of Research & Statistics and Monetary Affairs, Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C. The Evolution of Retirement Wealth. Sebastian Devlin-Foltz, Alice M. Henriques, and John Sabelhaus. 2015-009
“Is the current mix of tax preferences for employer-sponsoredpensionsand individual retirementsaving in the U.S. delivering the best possible retirement-preparedness across and within generations? Using data from the triennial Survey of Consumer Finances for 1989 through 2013 , cohort-based analysis of life-cycle trajectories shows that (1) overall retirement plan participation was relatively stable or even rising through 2007, though participation fell noticeably in the wake of the Great Recession and has remained lower, (2) participation is strongly correlated with income, and the shift in the type of pension coverage occurred within—not just across—income groups, (3) relative to previous cohorts and a counterfactual lifecycle benchmark, the recentdecline inretirementplanparticipationanddefinedcontribution (DC)retirement account balance-to-income ratiosis concentrated among younger families and lower-income families.”

Reddit Now Sharing Notices with Chilling Effects

Chilling Effects Team on May 13, 2015 [Chilling Effects is a project of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.] “We at Chilling Effects are thrilled to share Reddit’s announcement that the site has begun sharing takedown notices with us! Following on the heels of the release of its first transparency report earlier this year,… Continue Reading

Wolfram Language Artificial Intelligence: The Image Identification Project

Stephen Wolfram Blog: “What is this a picture of?” Humans can usually answer such questions instantly, but in the past it’s always seemed out of reach for computers to do this. For nearly 40 years I’ve been sure computers would eventually get there—but I’ve wondered when. I’ve built systems that give computers all sorts of… Continue Reading

Evolving Credit and the U.S. Macroeconomy: 1920-2011

Amir-Ahmadi, Pooyan, Evolving Credit and the U.S. Macroeconomy: 1920-2011 (May 17, 2015). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2607191 “This paper studies evolving macroeconomic consequences of adverse credit spread shocks for the US economy over the past century. The key objective is to characterize and quantify how the credit transmission mechanism has changed in shaping the… Continue Reading

DOT announces Fiat Chrysler public hearing and issues special order

News release: “U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today announced that the Department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) will hold a public hearing to determine whether automaker Fiat Chrysler has failed to remedy safety defects and issue required notices in 20 recalls. During the July 2 hearing, witnesses from NHTSA, the automaker, and the public… Continue Reading

Best Legal Departments 2015

Corporate Counsel – “Two legal departments are fully immersed in the digital age, two maintain a solid presence in the world of bricks and mortar. What’s more, one of them is a nonprofit, which renders many of the concerns of the other three irelevant. Examined from another angle, two of them are resolutely, explicitly multinational;… Continue Reading

Rethinking Financial Deepening: Stability and Growth in Emerging Markets

IMF – Rethinking Financial Deepening: Stability and Growth in Emerging Markets. May 4, 2015. “The global financial crisis experience shone a spotlight on the dangers of financial systems that have grown too big too fast. This note reexamines financial deepening, focusing on what emerging markets can learn from the advanced economy experience. It finds that gains… Continue Reading

Atmospheric changes through 2012 as shown by iteratively homogenized radiosonde temperature and wind data

Atmospheric changes through 2012 as shown by iteratively homogenized radiosonde temperature and wind data (IUKv2) Steven C Sherwood and Nidhi Nishant 2015 Environ. Res. Lett. 10 054007 “We present an updated version of the radiosonde dataset homogenized by Iterative Universal Kriging (IUKv2), now extended through February 2013, following the method used in the original version… Continue Reading