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Commercial paper is a short-term debt instrument issued by large corporations. The commercial paper market has long been viewed as a bastion of high liquidity and low risk. But twice during the financial crisis of 2007–2009, the commercial paper market nearly dried up and ceased being perceived as a safe haven. Major interventions by the Federal Reserve, including large outright purchases of commercial paper, were eventually used to support both issuers of and investors in commercial paper. We will offer an analysis of the commercial paper market during the financial crisis. First, we describe the institutional background of the commercial paper market. Second, we analyze the supply and demand sides of the market. Third, we examine the most important developments during the crisis of 2007–2009. Last, we discuss three explanations of the decline in the commercial paper market: substitution to alternative sources of financing by commercial paper issuers, adverse selection, and institutional constraints among money market funds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which focuses on the Commercial Paper Funding Facility (CPFF) of the U.S. Federal Reserve System, as well as the economic role of the commercial paper market. It says that the commercial paper market is being used by commercial banks and financial institutions to acquire short-term external funding. It also mentions that the CPFF was designed to provide additional source of funding to institutions in order to minimize the reinvestment risk.

This paper evaluates an editorial and seven invaluable and interesting review papers for the Journal of Risk and Financial Management (JRFM). The topics covered include the rising complexity of bank regulatory capital requirements from global guidelines to their United States (US) implementation, connections among big data, computational science, economics, finance, marketing, management and psychology, factors, outcome, and the solutions of supply chain finance, with a review and future directions, time-varying price-volume relationship, adaptive market efficiency, and a survey of the empirical literature, improved covariance matrix estimation for portfolio risk measurement, stock investment and excess returns, with a critical review in the light of the efficient market hypothesis, and a cross section analysis of country equity returns, and a review of the empirical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The events following Lehman's failure in 2008 and the current turmoil emanating from Europe highlight the structural vulnerabilities of short-term credit markets and the role of central banks as back-stop liquidity providers. The Federal Reserve's response to financial disruptions in the United States importantly included the creation of liquidity facilities. Using a differences-in-differences approach, we evaluate one of the most unusual of these interventions-the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility. We find that this facility helped stabilize asset outflows from money market funds and reduced asset-backed commercial paper yields significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mortgage market can be portrayed as a complicated machine that processes information and disinformation to help lenders and would-be homeowners to fashion an enforceable and fair set of mutual obligations. The papers in this symposium issue focus on ameliorating cyclical speed-ups and slowdowns in the lender-operated parts of this machine. My discussion focuses on two issues: (1) how transitioning to a gig economy is changing household needs for owner-occupied and rental homes across different age groups; and (2) how to use the legal system to lessen the informational disadvantage that would-be homeowners face in understanding the deals they are offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the contracts at Warner Bros. for two productions by director Arthur Penn as a case study to consider how these agreements shaped production cultures during the emergence of New Hollywood. Through the 1950s, the studio employed production-distribution agreements that used strict controls and regulations to mimic its in-house procedures. But in the 1960s, it preferred short-form joint venture agreements that allowed more direct control in shaping the film's production while turning the producers into self-regulators. As the contracts reveal, Warner Bros. reshaped their business to grant production culture control to producers while also ensuring the studio's corporate role in the New Hollywood landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the role of technology and research and development (R&D) expenditures in the Finnish chemical forest industry (pulp and paper). Three categories of a company's R&D strategy; Trends in Finland's R&D spending; R&D's focus on pulp and paper; R&D investments by related industries; University involvement in pulp and paper related education; Trends in R&D spending in the United States.

Most military installations have the resources available to operate as an independent community. However, immediate access to these resources tends to promote societal disconnection for the civilian military spouse (CMS). This disconnection leaves the CMS with many misconceptions when it comes to certain life skills. The Department of Defense (DoD) has attempted to answer these concerns with the introduction of well being plans to open the door for the CMS to seek personal financial assistance. However, this study found that CMSs preferred to seek financial assistance from formal, nonmilitary resources such as professional financial planner/ counselor and informal financial resources such as family and other military spouses. The findings provided implications for marketing, financial literacy program consistency, and military retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the report of the Representative to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Founded in 1920, NBER works toward increasing economic understanding. It achieves this through programs, projects, working papers, books, periodicals, and its Summer Institute. Among the many programs sponsored by the Bureau are those focusing on Aging, Corporate Finance, and Industrial Organization. During 2000 NBER issued a total of 13 books. Periodicals include the monthly "NBER Digest," and the "Reporter."

The article discusses the exact amount of the money issued by the United States Congress for the financing of the American Revolution. During the revolution, Congress released paper money otherwise called Continental dollars to finance its expenditures. Past literatures have claimed the exact amount spent but they left behind unclear and conflicting estimates. The article traces back the transactions that took place from the enactment to disbursement of the dollars. The article presents supporting tables on estimates and cumulative total net emissions of the continental dollars.

This article discusses a paper by Jong-Hag Choi, Rajib K. Doogar and Ananda R. Ganguly titled "The Riskiness of Large Audit Firm Client Portfolios and Changes in Audit Liability Regimes: Evidence from the U.S. Audit Market," which assessed whether large public accounting firms in the U.S. increase the level of risk in their client investments subsequent to regulatory changes that reduced the auditors' risk. The author credits their work for carefully and meticulously documenting changes in the financial distress characteristics of large client portfolios of auditors in the U.S. over the period of 1985 through 1999. However, he warns it is difficult to discern whether client portfolio litigation risk actually changed over the period examined as the analysis omits factors such as stock price behavior that may mitigate client financial risk.

The article discusses the white paper on electricity storage issued by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' Government Relations Committee (GRC). The government report was made because AIChE's GRC believe that an intermittent and highly variable renewable energy needs massive storage to convert it to steady power. Bernard Lee and David Gushee, authors of the white paper, suggests development and commercialization of massive electricity storage (MES) technology. Among the actions taken by the GRC to move forward the report include working with representatives of other organization, writing to the chair of the Senate Committee on health, Education, Labor and Pensions, writing to the Congress, and asking funds for the implementation of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.

Every year billions of dollars are spent on research grants to produce new knowledge in universities. However, as grants may also affect other research funding, the effects of financial resources on knowledge production remain unclear. To uncover how financial resources affect knowledge production, we study the effects of research spending itself. Utilizing the legal constraints on university spending from an endowment we develop an instrumental variables approach. Our approach instruments for university research spending with time-series variation in stock prices interacted with cross-sectional variation in initial endowment market values for research universities in the United States. Our analysis reveals that research spending has a substantial positive effect on the number of papers produced, but not their impact. We also demonstrate that research spending effects are quite similar at private and public universities. (JEL H5, I2, O3) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this position paper, the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine and the American College of Physicians examine the state of graduate medical education (GME) financing in the United States and recent proposals to reform GME funding. They make a series of recommendations to reform the current funding system to better align GME with the needs of the nation's health care workforce. These recommendations include using Medicare GME funds to meet policy goals and to ensure an adequate supply of physicians, a proper specialty mix, and appropriate training sites; spreading the costs of financing GME across the health care system; evaluating the true cost of training a resident and establishing a single per-resident amount; increasing transparency and innovation; and ensuring that primary care residents receive training in well-functioning ambulatory settings that are financially supported for their training roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a policy paper about the future of funding and care of patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the U.S. The paper was developed by the Ryan White Medical Providers Coalition (RWMPC) and the HIV Medicine Association (HIVMA). The paper highlighted concerns about the future of HIV care and funding as health care and economic situations in the country change. The Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program has been providing HIV-related services.

The press is essential for creating an informed citizenry, but its existence depends on attracting and maintaining an audience. It is unclear whether supply-side effects-including those dictated by the owners of the media-influence how the media cover politics, yet this question is essential given their abilities to set the agenda and frame issues that are covered. We examine how ownership influences media behavior by investigating the impact of RupertMurdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) in August 2007. We collect data on every front-page story and editorial for 27 months, and we compare the difference in political coverage between the New York Times (NYT) and WSJ using a difference-in-differences design. We show that the amount of political content in the opinion pages of the two papers were unchanged by the sale, but the WSJ's front-page coverage of politics increased markedly relative to the NYT. Similar patterns emerge when comparing the WSJ's content to USA Today and the Washington Post. Our finding highlights potential limits to journalists' ability to fulfill their supposed watchdog role in democracies without interference from owners in the boardroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the practicality of the Electronic Data Gathering Analysis and Retrieval (EDGAR) pilot program of the Securities and Exchange Commission in the U.S. Development of the EDGAR pilot program; Preparation for electronic filing using the pilot program; Problems and system issues encountered on the use of the EDGAR pilot program.

The article presents an introduction to the special section of the journal on different aspects of the links between the U.S. and the rest of the world. One of the papers examines the general issue of the sources of output spillovers across countries. Another paper explores alternative explanations for the factors that have attracted the funds needed to finance massive current account deficits of the U.S.

The article provides several announcements as of August 2013, including the Symposium on the Nineteenth-Century Press, the Civil War, and Free Expression's call for papers, the recipients of the Museum of the Confederacy's book award and the Southern Labor Studies Association's financing of the Robert H. Zieger Prize.