Despite the well known benefits from international portfolio diversification international investors still exhibit a great deal of home bias in their equity allocations. Already in the late sixties and early seventies several authors show the large international diversification benefits (See e.g. Grubel, 1968; Solnik, 1974). Since the early seventies financial markets have liberalized, thereby reducing barriers of cross border asset holdings. However, the equity home bias anomaly remains present to date and economists have not been able to fully explain its causes. Not surprisingly, Obstfeld and Rogoff (2001) have singled out the equity home bias as one of the six major puzzles in macroeconomics.
San Diego State University (SDSU) utilizes the Procurement Credit Card (PCC) to reduce the traditional paper and labor-intensive procurement process for small dollar purchases. With the ease of a widely accepted MasterCard credit card, SDSU employees may make walk-in purchases, place telephone orders, place Web orders and receive and confirm purchases.
The procurement credit card should be the primary means to obtain approved goods, supplies or services costing $1,000 and less (including tax and shipping) per transaction. Cardholders are encouraged to use the procurement credit card for low value purchases to achieve cost savings and improve processing time. If use of the PCC is not practical, existing methods such as a standard requisition may be used.
Since the work of Burns and Mitchell (1946), economists who study business cycle fluctuations typically refer to the "business cycle facts" without need to referencea particular episode in a particular country. One of the accepted stylized facts of business cycle movements is that employment and output are strongly positively correlated, although employment lags output by about one quarter. The apparent slow growth of employment in the recoveries following the last two US recessions (i.e., the so-called "jobless recovery" phenomenon) runs counter to this stylized fact. This paper suggestsa possible explanation for this apparently anomalous behavior.
