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Private equity has acquired multiple large nursing home chains within the past few years; by 2007, it owned 6 of the 10 largest chains. Despite widespread public and policy interest, evidence on the purported impact of private equity on nursing home performance is limited. In our review, we begin by briefly reviewing the organizational and environmental changes in the nursing home industry that facilitated private equity investments. We offer a conceptual framework to hypothesize the relationship between private equity ownership and nursing home performance. Finally, we offer a research agenda focused on the important parameters of nursing home performance: financial performance, and quality of care.

I find that median wealth plummeted over the years 2007–2010, and by 2010 was at its lowest level since 1969. The inequality of net worth, after almost two decades of little movement, was up sharply from 2007 to 2010. Relative indebtedness continued to expand from 2007 to 2010, particularly for the middle class, though the proximate causes were declining net worth and income rather than an increase in absolute indebtedness. In fact, the average debt of the middle class actually fell in real terms by 25 percent. The sharp fall in median wealth and the rise in inequality in the late 2000s are traceable to the high leverage of middle-class families in 2007 and the high share of homes in their portfolio. The racial and ethnic disparity in wealth holdings, after remaining more or less stable from 1983 to 2007, widened considerably between 2007 and 2010. Hispanics, in particular, got hammered by the Great Recession in terms of net worth and net equity in their homes. Households under age 45 also got pummeled by the Great Recession, as their relative and absolute wealth declined sharply from 2007 to 2010.

Purchasing a home is the largest expenditure many people will make during their lifetime, as well as their greatest source of wealth. There is a homeownership gap between natives and immigrants well documented in the literature. I examine the determinants of homeownership, the value of purchased homes (a measure of potential housing wealth), and the equity owned for those who have purchased a home (a measure of actual housing wealth) for immigrants and natives. When immigrants are separated by citizenship status the homeownership gap between natives and immigrants is shown to be a gap between natives and non-citizen immigrants. Immigrant citizens have ownership outcomes as good or better than natives. Further, the gap reflects a problem in ownership, brought about by age and income distributional differences, not in value or equity for homeowners. All immigrants are predicted to have higher home value and home equity than natives.

Liability of foreignness (LOF) has been one of the central constructs in the field of international business and management. Over the past two decades, a significant body of theoretical and empirical research has accumulated, theorizing on the sources of these LOFs, investigating their magnitude, and prescribing approaches to mitigate these disadvantages. However, much of this research is almost exclusively related to firms expanding their products, services, and operations to other countries as part of their global expansion. The difficulties firms face in foreign product markets is just one dimension of the costs they can face in their attempts to secure resources abroad.

We expand the domain of the LOF construct to include liabilities faced by firms accessing foreign capital markets in light of the increasing integration of capital markets. We identify four sources of LOF in capital markets: regulatory costs, information costs, unfamiliarity costs, and costs arising out of cultural differences. Based on an extensive review of “home bias” in equity markets, we propose four strategies to erase the legitimacy deficits that firms encounter in foreign capital markets: bonding, signaling, adoption of business practices isomorphic with the host country, and certifications and endorsements by third parties. We also offer suggestions for operationalizing and measuring LOF in capital markets as well as several directions for advancing further research on LOF in the context of capital markets.

The paper uses 101 years of Chilean and international financial assets returns to investigate mean-variance optimal portfolio allocations. The key conclusion is that the share of international unhedged investments is substantial even in minimum risk portfolios (20%), unless the period 1980–2002 is assumed to be drawn from a different distribution and previous history is disregarded. In addition to that, the paper finds that mean-variance optimal investors would have generated substantial demand for an asset replicating the return profile of an efficient pay-as-you-go pension scheme. Labour income and departures from log-normality of returns might, however, affect the latter conclusion.

The recent financial crisis triggered the greatest recession since the 1930s and had a devastating impact on households’ wealth and on their capacity to reduce their indebtedness. In the aftermath, it became clear that there is significant room for improvement in property risk management. While there has been innovation in the management of corporate finance risk, real estate has lagged behind. Now is the time to expand the range of tools available for hedging households’ risks and, thus, to advance the democratization of finance. Property equity represents the major asset in households’ portfolios in developed and undeveloped countries. The present paper analyzes a set of potential innovations in real estate risk management, such as price level-adjusted mortgages, property derivatives, and home equity value insurance. Financial institutions, households, and governments should work together to improve the performance of the financial instruments available and, thus, to help mitigate the worst impacts of economic cycles.

Purpose – In this chapter, we advance research on the socioeconomic ranking of religious groups by using both income and wealth to document the rankings of the six major religious groups in the United States – Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, black Protestants, and the religiously unaffiliated – during 2001–2007, a period marked by both catastrophic economic losses and widespread economic gain.

Design/Methodology/Approach – Drawing from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID), we provide descriptive statistics to explore the socioeconomic differences among the six major religious groups. In addition, we note their ownership rates and changes in wealth and income during 2001–2007.

Findings – Overall, these findings point to enduring stratification in the U.S. religious landscape. Based on median net worth, leading into the Great Recession, the six major religious groups ranked in the following order: Jews, Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelical Protestants, the unaffiliated, and black Protestants. At the same time, these findings point to the upward mobility of white Catholics, who increased their income and made the greatest increase in net worth between 2001 and 2007. These data also suggest a decline in the socioeconomic status of the religiously unaffiliated as compared to previous studies.

Research implications – These findings illustrate the degree to which certain religious groups have access to wealth and other resources, and have implications for how the years leading into the Great Recession may have influenced households’ vulnerability to financial shocks.

Originality/Value – We use both income and wealth to examine whether different religious groups experienced any changes in income and wealth leading into the 2008 economic downturn.

This chapter examines dynamic connectedness among emerging Asian equity markets as well as explores their linkages vis-à-vis other major global markets. We find that international equity markets are tightly integrated. Measuring connectedness based on a generalized Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model, more than half of all total forecast error variance in equity return and volatility shocks come from other markets as opposed to country own shocks. When examining the degree of connectedness over time, we find that international stock markets have become increasingly connected, with a gentle upward trend since the Asian financial crisis (AFC) but with a rapid burst during the global financial crisis (GFC). Despite the growing importance of Asian emerging markets in the world economy, we find that their influence on advanced economies are still relatively small, with no significant increase over time. During the past decade, advanced markets have been consistently net transmitters of shocks while emerging Asian markets act as net receivers. Based on the nature of equity shock spillovers, we also find that advanced countries are still tightly connected among themselves while intraregional connectedness within Asia remains strong. By investigating whether uncertainty plays an important role in explaining the degree of stock market connectedness, we find that economic policy uncertainty (EPU) from the US is an important source of financial shock spillover for the majority of international equity markets. In contrast, US financial market uncertainty as proxied by the VIX index drives equity market spillovers only among advanced economies.

This chapter examines how deregulatory fiscal policies undermined federal legislation intended to reduce racial and economic inequality through measures that included wider access to home loans among minority populations. We focus specifically on structural tensions that existed between fostering the goals of economic and racial equality within a political structure that also serves the needs of finance capitalism. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), typically considered a triggering point for the financial meltdown by conservative commentators, was passed to address racial and economic inequalities, yet financial deregulation and the growth of the subprime mortgage industry ended up completely subverting these goals. The unprecedented growth and evolution of the subprime mortgage industry that occurred largely outside of the law's reach helped minorities and other economically disadvantaged groups enter into the housing market. However, a crime-facilitative environment brought on by inadequate regulation resulted in a significant degree of fraud by lenders. While this expanded homeownership among minorities, it eventually pushed them into default and brought chaos to the entire U.S. economy. This chapter details how the collapse of the subprime industry disproportionately impacted minority populations, and exposes how deregulatory policies subverted the effectiveness and reach of the FHA and CRA. The history of the CRA provides a clear example of the contradictory tensions within the U.S. legal system that espouses equality yet ultimately fails those it was designed to help as a consequence of unfettered capitalism.

Policy-makers in OECD countries appear to be increasingly concerned about growing migration pressure from developing countries. At the same, at least within Europe, they typically complain about the low level of internal labor mobility. In this chapter, we try to cast some light on the issues of both internal and external labor mobility. We investigate the link between development and migration and argue, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, that it is likely be nonlinear. More precisely, we find that, in a relatively poor sending country, an increase in income will have a positive impact on the propensity to migrate, even if we control for the income differential with the receiving country, because the financial constraint of the poorest become less binding. Conversely, if the home country is relatively better off, an increase in income may be associated with a fall in the propensity to migrate even for an unchanged income differential. Econometric estimation for Southern Europe over the period 1962–1988 provides substantial support to this approach. We estimate first the level of income for which the financial constraint is no more binding, around $950, and then the level of income for which the propensity to migrate declines, which is around $4,300 in 1985 prices. We therefore predict a steady decline in the propensity to migrate from Southern European countries. Similarly, our results highlight the possibility that the pressure to migrate from Northern African countries and other developing countries may increase with further growth.