inequality resource depletion and welfare accounting applications to indonesia and costa rica abstract ahluwalia and chenery noted that the standard measures of gdp growth imply distributional weights that place greater weight on the income of richer income groups and proposed distribution neutral and pro poor alternatives more recently pilot studies by the world resources institute wri have questioned the sustainability of gdp growth and have introduced natural resource modifications to national income accounting to date no studies have undertaken both revisions concurrently creating a revised measure based on gdp but corrected for both distributional bias and resource depletion such a measure is derived in this paper and its impact illustrated with data from indonesia and costa rica the countries studied by the wri

better together signaling interactions in new venture pursuit of initial external capital after new ventures have exhausted the limited financial resources of founders family and friends they often pursue initial external capital to secure investment entrepreneurs can signal about

best of both worlds how embeddedness fit in the host unit and the headquarters improve repatriate knowledge transfer knowledge transfer within multinational enterprises is a source of competitive advantage however we know little about repatriates role in reverse knowledge transfer upon their return to headquarters hq using an organizational embeddedness perspective we conceptualized how embeddedness fit individuals perceived match between their knowledge and skills and the job requirements during the expatriation assignment and upon repatriation predicts repatriate knowledge transfer to test the hypotheses we collected multi wave survey data from 129 repatriates and their supervisors and developed a repatriate knowledge transfer scale the results show that perceived organizational support from hq positively influences embeddedness fit both in the host unit during expatriation and in the hq upon repatriation further embeddedness fit in the hq upon repatriation has a direct effect while embeddedness fit in the host unit during expatriation has an indirect effect on repatriate knowledge transfer via increased communication frequency with the former host unit in addition we found that knowledge transfer is particularly pronounced for repatriates with both high levels of embeddedness fit in the hq upon repatriation and frequent communication with colleagues in their former host unit our results highlight the critical importance of helping expatriates increase their perceived embeddedness fit for reverse knowledge transfer to occur

tastes and technology in a two country model of the business cycle explaining international trade on international financial markets allows people to insure country specific risk and smooth consumption intertemporally equilibrium models of business cycles with trade on global financial markets typically yield international consumption correlations near one and excessive volatility of investment the authors incorporate nontraded goods in the model and find that the implications for aggregate consumption investment and the trade balance are consistent with business cycle properties of industrialized countries however the model driven by technology shocks alone yields counterfactual implications for comovements between consumption and prices at the sectoral level taste shocks produce price quantity relationships more consistent with the data copyright 1995 by american economic association

on the firm level implications of the bank lending channel of monetary policy abstract standard models of the bank lending channel are unable to yield predictions on the differential impact of monetary policy shocks over heterogeneous borrowers this inability has made researchers doubt about the role played by bank credit as a transmission mechanism of monetary policy moreover it has made them reject those models in favor of the balance sheet channel as a transmission mechanism in this paper we show that an augmented version of the bank lending channel that allows for firm heterogeneity but without any role for firms balance sheets reproduces well the dynamics of firm level data our contribution is to show that it is not clear that the bank lending channel should be rejected in favor of alternative theories on the basis of its inability to reproduce firm level data thus there is additional room for econometric tests that can provide support to the bank lending channel

credit constraints and the international propagation of us financial shocks abstract this paper investigates whether credit constraints in the us economy amplify the international propagation of us financial shocks we model the dynamics of the us economy jointly with global macroeconomic and financial variables using a threshold vector autoregression this model captures regime specific dynamics conditional on the severity of credit constraints in the us economy we identify three main episodes of tight credit in us financial history over the past thirty years these occur in the late 1980s in the early 2000s and during the 2007 09 financial crisis we find that us financial shocks are associated with a significant contraction in global economic activity in times of tight credit by contrast there is little impact of us financial shocks on the global economy in normal times this asymmetry highlights an international dimension of the us financial accelerator mechanism

macroeconomic implications of deep habits in banking recent empirical evidence shows that price cost margins in the market for bank credit are countercyclical in the u s economy and that this cyclical behavior can be explained in part from the fact that switching banks is costly for customers i e from a borrower hold up effect our goal in this paper is to study the financial accelerator role of these countercyclical margins as a propagation mechanism of macroeconomic shocks to do so we apply the deep habits framework in ravn schmitt grohe and uribe 2006 to financial markets to model this hold up effect within a monopolistically competitive banking industry we are able to reproduce the pattern of price cost margins observed in the data and to show that the real effects of aggregate total factor productivity shocks are larger the stronger the friction implied by borrower hold up also output investment and employment all become more volatile than in a standard model with constant margins in credit markets an empirical contribution of our work is to provide structural estimates of the deep habits parameters for financial markets

fiscal and monetary policies in complex evolving economies what is the most appropriate combination of fiscal and monetary policies in economies subject to banking crises and deep recessions we study this issue using an agent based model that is able to reproduce a wide array of macro and micro empirical regularities simulation results suggest that policy mixes associating unconstrained counter cyclical fiscal policy and monetary policy targeting employment is required to stabilise the economy we also show that discipline guided fiscal rules can be self defeating as they depress the economy without improving public finances finally we find that the effects of monetary and fiscal policies become sharper as the level of income inequality increases

search frictions credit market liquidity and net interest margin cyclicality the present paper contributes to the body of knowledge on search frictions in credit markets by demonstrating their ability to explain why the net interest margins of banks behave countercyclically during periods of expansion a fall in the net interest margin proceeds from two mechanisms i lenders accept that they must finance entrepreneurs that have lower productivity and ii the liquidity of the credit market rises which simplifies access to loans for entrepreneurs and thereby reinforces their threat point when bargaining the interest rate of the loan

the index of sustainable economic welfare isew as an alternative to gdp in measuring economic welfare the results of the austrian revised isew calculation 1955 1992 abstract although the inadequacy of gdp to measure economic welfare is widely accepted theoretically it is still used as the key indicator for economic policy this article s aim therefore is to give some empirical evidence to the theoretical critique economic welfare or at least its change over time is estimated by the index of sustainable economic welfare isew which takes account of gdp unpaid household labor social costs environmental damage and income distribution the concept of the isew which was originally developed by herman daly and john cobb is entirely reformulated with special regard to questions of inner consistency and clarity in structure as an illustration the methods of the calculation in the austria case study and its results are presented the main result is that gdp and economic welfare as measured by the isew differ significantly up until the 1970s gdp only slightly overestimated the growth of economic welfare but since then it has been completely misleading while gdp continues to rise sustainable economic welfare has been stagnating since the middle of the 1980s the main causes have been growing future welfare reductions increasing income inequality and a stagnation in the value of unpaid household labor as gdp neglects those aspects it systematically misinterprets economic welfare however the isew does not intend to simply replace gdp as a unique welfare measure but should form part of a more holistic social reporting system

growth and the international transmission of business cycles two country single good real business cycle models predict that the cross country correlation of output is smaller than the cross country correlations of consumption and productivity in contrast to the evidence in historical samples the objective of this paper is to reproduce the observed empirical evidence in a two country real business cycle model with endogenous growth central features of the model include a nonmarket sector and international externalities in production the model generates realistic cross country correlations for output consumption and productivity with standard parameter values copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

market structure and the nature of price rigidity evidence from the market for consumer deposits panel data on consumer bank deposit interest rates reveal asymmetric impacts of market concentration on the dynamic adjustment of prices to shocks banks in concentrated markets are slower to raise interest rates on deposits in response to rising market interest rates but are faster to reduce them in response to declining market interest rates thus banks with market power skim off surplus on movements in both directions since deposit interest rates are inversely related to the price charged by banks for deposits the results suggest that downward price rigidity and upward price flexibility are a consequence of market concentration

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

lending relationships and labor market dynamics abstract motivated by a negative link between credit spreads and labor force participation lfp and a positive link between these spreads and unemployment over the business cycle we study the role of lfp as an amplification mechanism of financial shocks in a labor search model with endogenous lfp lending relationships and credit market disruptions amid aggregate productivity and financial shocks that replicate the empirical volatility of lfp and credit spreads the model produces highly volatile unemployment and vacancies countercyclical credit spreads and unemployment and procyclical lfp when we quantitatively match the cyclical behavior of credit spreads the interaction between endogenous lfp and financial shocks gives rise to much sharper vacancy fluctuations and plays a key role in generating quantitatively factual cyclical labor market dynamics

innovation appropriability and the underpricing of initial public offerings using the information asymmetries theory of underpricing we investigate the role of innovation in the underpricing of initial public offerings ipos we develop and test a model in which patents reduce information asymmetries in industries where the link between patents and inventive returns is transparent thereby reducing underpricing conversely patents reflect increased information asymmetries and underpricing in industries where the link is not transparent we examine these relationships in a sample of 1 413 ipos and find strong support for our hypotheses in so doing we make an important theoretical contribution by showing that the ipo market contextualizes firm information abstract from author copyright of academy of management journal is the property of academy of management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder s express written permission however users may print download or email articles for individual use this abstract may be abridged no warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract copyright applies to all abstracts

indicators of sustainable development some lessons from capital theory abstract interest in sustainable development has prompted a search for suitable indicators that might complement or supplant the traditional measures of economic success although there is no agreement about the precise meaning of sustainable development one idea which is increasingly in good currency is that sustainable development requires that the stock of capital that one generation passes on to the next be maintained or enhanced further this stock of capital is seen by some to comprise two elements manufactured capital and natural capital the extent to which these are believed to be substitutes or complements is one factor which separates the neoclassical school from some of its critics a premise of this paper is that if capital theory is relevant to sustainable development then it should also be helpful in developing indicators however even within the normal confines of economics capital theory is not a homogeneous body of analysis therefore an exploration of capital theory and its relevance to sustainable development can be expected to generate various perspectives on those measures most useful for gauging the sustainability of economic activity it is these linkages between capital theory in various schools of thought and possible indicators of sustainable development that are the subject of this paper

uncertain intellectual property conditions and knowledge appropriation strategies evidence from the genomics industry innovating science and technology based firms often endure a sustained period of uncertain intellectual property rights ipr protection before patents could be granted to their valuable knowledge assets this problem is exacerbated as firms increasingly develop their innovations or operate in countries with weak ipr institutional environments but how does ipr uncertainty affect firms strategy toward knowledge appropriation capturing of economic value from their knowledge assets and toward providing access to these knowledge assets drawing on research from the economics of science and intellectual property strategy we examine this question using a novel panel data covering 362 firms and organizations in the knowledge intensive genomics industry based on all genomics patents and matching papers from 1988 to 2005 we find that under uncertain ipr conditions firms reveal and accumulate more knowledge through open science follow on publishing but shift to knowledge appropriation through commercial science follow on patenting when ipr uncertainty is narrowed this effect is most salient when firms develop their knowledge assets or operate under strong ipr institutional regime for highly science based knowledge assets firms continue tapping into open science for access and reciprocity in knowledge acquisition from the scientific community these findings highlight the role of patent grant as a potential lever to shape firms knowledge processes and long term innovative capacity and the emergence of a concerted science strategy employed by firms

inequality as a cause of environmental degradation abstract this paper advances two hypotheses first the extent of an environmentally degrading economic activity is a function of the balance of power between the winners who derive net benefits from the activity and the losers who bear net costs second greater inequalities of power and wealth lead all else equal to more environmental degradation

is there a financial accelerator in us banking evidence from the cyclicality of banks price cost margins abstract we show that price cost margins for us banks are consistently countercyclical even after controlling for credit risk the term structure of interest rates and monetary policy this evidence supports the existence of a financial accelerator in us banking

market entry and international propagation of business cycles abstract in this paper pro cyclical market entry acts as an international transmission mechanism for business cycle shocks in an imperfectly competitive dynamic equilibrium model an expansion in one open economy leads to additional business formation in a parallel large open economy through demand spillovers business formation causes a decline in markups leading to an expansion in employment production and investment in both economies the modeling of the entry decision is critical only when the entry game is modelled as sequential with incumbents enjoying a first mover advantage are markups sufficiently elastic to cause international comovement

adopting knowledge from reverse innovations transnational patents and signaling from an emerging economy is there knowledge adoption of innovations from emerging economies we theorize that to help overcome information asymmetry across countries granting patents to technology in the emerging economy of china can serve as a signal of technology potential and market opportunity to enhance technological knowledge adoption in a developed economy such as the united states the effect may be greater in a complex technology sector with high information asymmetry than in a discrete technology sector and in regions with less developed market intermediaries where information asymmetry is high our difference in differences estimates using 4226 china u s patent dyads and comparable u s patents support our hypotheses

prices output and hours an empirical analysis based on a sticky price model abstract i show that a simple sticky price model based on rotemberg 1982 is consistent with a variety of facts concerning the correlation of prices hours and output it is consistent with the negative correlation between forecastable movements in prices and output as well as the smaller negative correlation between forecastable movements in prices and hours it is also consistent with the positive correlations of unexpected movements in prices output and hours these patterns are harder to reconcile with the flexible price version of the model in particular they require that money respond differently to forecastable and to unforecastable real shocks

institutional regime shift in intellectual property rights and innovation strategies of firms in china this study develops a novel conceptual framework to understand the differential impact of formal institutional regime shift in intellectual property rights on the innovation and patenting strategies of chinese and western firms operating in china we argue that to the extent that chinese firms have been deeply embedded in china s informal institutions they are less responsive to formal institutional changes than western firms operating in china using the major china patent law reform of 2001 as an exogenous event we find results consistent with our key arguments with the strengthening of the previously weak utility model patent protection chinese firms are less likely to apply for such patents to safeguard their innovations than western firms however this difference becomes less pronounced in regions with higher quality intellectual property rights and legal institutions that foster research and development and innovation and when western firms gain longer operational experience in china this s

the international transmission of economic fluctuations abstract this paper suggests that for a wide class of international real business cycle models including models with imperfect competition the traditional channels of international transmission of business cycles through world interest rate and terms of trade variations cannot explain the cyclical response of the canadian economy to innovations in u s output empirically testable quantitative models of the effects on canadian economic activity of shocks to the u s economy are developed and their empirical relevance is tested by comparing impulse responses estimated from vector autoregressions to the quantitative predictions of the theoretical models

market power in banking countercyclical margins and the international transmission of business cycles abstract by introducing an imperfectly competitive banking sector into a standard two country two good rbc model with complete asset markets we study the international transmission of aggregate tfp shocks in an environment with noncompetitive financial intermediation in this model price cost margins in a global loan market are endogenous and countercyclical as a result a positive tfp shock in one country spills over to another through a reduction in the global cost of both credit and externally financed investment the quantitative analysis shows that countercyclical margins on loans play a key role in bringing the predictions of the theory closer to the observed cross country cyclical co movements of consumption employment investment and output recessions are deeper when the cost of credit rises during these economic downturns thus a financial accelerator arises in our framework unveiling the increased importance of stabilization policies in economies where margins in credit markets are countercyclical

a measure of sustainable national income for the netherlands abstract we present calculations on the sustainable national income sni indicator first proposed by hueting which corrects net national income nni for the costs to bring back environmental resource use to a sustainable level using an applied general equilibrium age model specifying 27 production sectors we calculate different variants of sni for the netherlands in 1990 given a set of pre determined sustainability standards the age model is extended with emissions and abatement cost curves based on large data sets for nine environmental themes the model combines the advantages of a top down approach the age model with the information of a bottom up approach the environmental data and data on emissions reductions costs the presented numerical results show that in 1990 dutch sni is about 50 below nni though many uncertainties are still present in the data and the model the enhanced greenhouse effect is the most expensive environmental theme

a great wall of patents what is behind china s recent patent explosion abstract china s patent surge documented in this paper is seemingly paradoxical given the country s weak record of protecting intellectual property rights using a firm level data set that spans the population of china s large and medium size industrial enterprises this paper explores the factors that account for china s rising patent activity while the intensification of research and development in the chinese economy tracks with patenting activity it explains only a fraction of the patent explosion the growth of foreign direct investment in china is prompting chinese firms to file for more patent applications amendments to the patent law that favor patent holders and ownership reform that has clarified the assignment of property rights also emerge as significant sources of china s patent boom these results are robust to alternative estimation strategies that account for over dispersion in the patent counts data and firm heterogeneity

determinants of business cycle comovement a robust analysis abstract this paper investigates the determinants of business cycle comovement between countries our dataset includes over 100 countries both developed and developing we search for variables that are robust in explaining comovement using the approach of leamer amer econom rev 73 1983 31 variables considered are i bilateral trade between countries ii total trade in each country iii sectoral structure iv similarity in export and import baskets v factor endowments and vi gravity variables we find that bilateral trade is robust however two variables that the literature has argued are important for business cycles industrial structure and currency unions are found not to be robust

imitation costs and patents an empirical study it has long been recognised that the costs of imitating new products have an important effect on the incentives for innovation in a market economy as arrow i962 and others have pointed out if firms can imitate an innovation at a cost that is substantially below the cost to the innovator of developing the innovation there may be little or no incentive for the innovator to carry out the innovation in their discussions of the innovation process economists frequently have called attention to the major role played by the costs of imitation but there has been little or no attempt to measure these costs to test various hypotheses concerning the factors influencing them or to estimate their effects in this paper we report some findings of what seems to be the first study of this topic in addition we present data regarding the effects of patents on imitation costs and on the rate of innovation

banking regulation and competition with product differentiation abstract the main motivation for prudential regulation is to increase the solvency of the banking sector however it is usually understood that tighter regulation also leads to more concentration and higher spreads thus these prudential measures are seen as implying a trade off between solvency and competition in this paper we argue that this trade off does not necessarily exist we present a model in which tighter capital requirements lead banks to choose a lower degree of product differentiation potentially inducing more intense competition and lower spreads the model is motivated by the recent evolution of the argentine banking sector

the impact of information on environmental commodity valuation decisions a conceptual model is developed which provides insight into how information affects willingness to pay for environmental commodities a refutable hypothesis of the effects of a specific information type on the magnitude of willingness to pay for an environmental commodity is developed this hypothesis is tested using a contingent valuation method experiment results indicate that information affects willingness to pay in a theoretically plausible manner the results support the contention that information is important for accurate environmental commodity consumer valuations

recruiting for ideas how firms exploit the prior inventions of new hires when firms recruit inventors they acquire not only the use of their skills but also enhanced access to their stock of ideas but do hiring firms actually increase their use of new recruits prior inventions our estimates suggest they do quite significantly in fact by approximately 219 on average however this does not necessarily reflect widespread learning by hiring in fact we estimate that a recruit s exploitation of her own prior ideas accounts for almost half of the above effect with much of the diffusion to others being limited to the recruit s immediate collaborative network furthermore although one might expect the recruit s role to diminish rapidly as her tacit knowledge diffuses across her new firm our estimates indicate that her importance is surprisingly persistent over time we base these findings on an empirical strategy that exploits the variation over time in hiring firms citations to the recruits premove patents specifically we employ a difference in differences approach to compare premove versus postmove citation rates for the recruits prior patents and corresponding matched pair control patents our methodology has three benefits compared to previous studies that also examine the link between labor mobility and knowledge flow 1 it does not suffer from the upward bias inherent in the conventional cross sectional comparison 2 it generates results that are robust to a more stringently matched control sample and 3 it enables a temporal examination of knowledge flow patterns this paper was accepted by kamalini ramdas entrepreneurship and innovation

how do foreign firms patent in emerging economies with weak appropriability regimes archetypes and motives abstract foreign firms patent in emerging economies with weak appropriability regimes at an increasing rate this phenomenon constitutes a paradox since in such a setting foreign firms should have weak incentives to patent in an attempt to resolve this paradox we conducted an inductive analysis of 11 foreign firms that patent in such a setting using the case of china as our empirical context we identify four archetypes of foreign firms and three key antecedents the interaction of which determines which archetype a firm can be subsumed under our study complements the developed economy focus of the extant appropriation literature by adding an international perspective we extend previous econometric studies by identifying salient factors on the firm level that determine the extent to which a foreign firm patents in emerging economies with a weak appropriability regime highlighting that the extent of a firm s motivation to maintain its freedom to operate can supersede imitability concerns we also comment on the practical implications of these contributions for managers of foreign firms highlighting a structural conflict of interest between foreign firms from developed economies and the development goals of an emerging economy we point to the generalizability of our results to a wide range of other emerging economies worldwide

licensing the market for technology abstract in technology based industries incumbent firms often license their technology to potential competitors such a strategy is difficult to explain within traditional models of licensing this paper extends the literature on licensing by relaxing the assumption of a monopolist technology holder competition in the market for technology induces licensing of innovations and incumbent firms may find it privately profitable to license although their joint profits may well be higher in the absence of any licensing a strong testable implication of our model is that the number of licenses per patent holder decreases with the degree of product differentiation

the patent paradox revisited an empirical study of patenting in the u s semiconductor industry 1979 1995 we examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to r d yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid1980s we explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the patenting behavior of 95 u s semiconductor firms during 1979 1995 the results suggest that the 1980s strengthening of u s patent rights spawned patent portfolio races among capital intensive firms but it also facilitated entry by specialized design firms

global banks and crisis transmission abstract we study the effect of financial integration through banks on the transmission of international business cycles in a sample of 18 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009 we find that in periods without financial crises increases in bilateral banking linkages are associated with more divergent output cycles this relation is significantly weaker during financial turmoil periods suggesting that financial crises induce co movement among more financially integrated countries we also show that countries with stronger direct and indirect financial ties to the u s experienced more synchronized cycles with the u s during the recent 2007 2009 crisis we then interpret these findings using a simple general equilibrium model of international business cycles with banks and shocks to banking activity the model suggests that the relation between integration and synchronization depends on the type of shocks hitting the world economy and that shocks to global banks played an important role in triggering and spreading the 2007 2009 crisis

the comovement between output and prices abstract in this paper i analyze the comovement of us prices and output in the postwar period i use a new set of statistics to characterize the comovement between variables the statistics capture important information about the dynamics in the system the estimation procedure does not require assumptions about the order of integration or the types of assumptions needed for var decompositions i find that the comovement between output and prices is positive in the short run and negative in the long run i show that a model in which demand shocks dominate in the short run and supply shocks dominate in the long run can explain these empirical results while sticky price models with only demand shocks cannot

the inequality adjusted human development index a constructive proposal abstract this paper proposes a method to incorporate a concern for distributional inequalities of income education and longevity into the framework of the human development index hdi as it is presently designed by the united nations development programme the paper constructs gini coefficients for a set of 20 developing countries measuring inequalities in annual income educational attainment and life span attainment these calculations are combined with data from the hdi to produce an inequality adjusted human development index iahdi the implications of this proposed index for evaluating and promoting development are considered

competitive conditions among the major british banks this paper reports an empirical assessment of competitive conditions among the major british banks during a period of major structural change specifically estimates of the rosse panzar h statistic are reported for a panel of 12 banks for the period 1980 2004 the sample banks correspond closely to the major british banking groups specified by the british banking association the robustness of the results of the rosse panzar methodology is tested by estimating the ratio of lerner indices obtained from interest rate setting equations the results confirm the consensus finding that competition in british banking is most accurately characterised by the theoretical model of monopolistic competition there is evidence that the intensity of competition in the core market for bank lending remained approximately unchanged throughout the 1980s and 1990s however competition appears to have become less intense in the non core off balance sheet business of british banks

why has the u s economy become less correlated with the rest of the world in this paper we do two things first we document that over the last 40 years the u s business cycle has become less synchronized with the cycle in the rest of the world second we try to explain why this has happened we use a general equilibrium model as a tool to discriminate between two alternative explanations i a change in the nature of real shocks and ii an increase in u s financial integration with the rest of the world our results indicate that financial integration has played the major role in producing the observed changes in international co movement

the extension of international credit by us banks a disaggregated analysis 1988 1994 abstract we use simultaneous equation estimation techniques to analyze decisions made by 35 us banks with respect to credit extended domestically and to credit extended within 16 foreign countries 1988 1994 our results indicate that foreign credit extension by us banks follows the commercial expansion of us businesses abroad and is greater in countries with expanding economies they are inconsistent with the notion that banks trade off credit activities undertaken domestically and abroad

the synchronization of credit cycles abstract this paper proposes a simple econometric procedure to test for the synchronization of credit cycles using a century of data for 14 advanced economies we find that credit cycle synchronization dropped in the early 1920s from initially relatively high levels between the 1920s and the 1970s synchronization was overall low and concentrated within five predominantly regional clusters however synchronization has significantly increased in the post bretton woods era and has become less associated with geographic proximity australia denmark france italy japan norway spain switzerland the uk and the us form a single major credit cycle cluster since the 1970s a smaller cluster is formed by canada the netherlands and sweden while the german credit cycle follows a distinct path using logistic regressions we find that the synchronization of credit and business cycles go hand in hand our findings are especially relevant for the international coordination of macroprudential policy as well as to spur and inform further analysis on credit cycle dynamics

a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence this paper presents a theory of competition among pressure groups for political influence political equilibrium depends on the efficiency of each group in producing pressure the effect of additional pressure on their influence the number of persons in different groups and the deadweight cost of taxes and subsidies an increase in deadweight costs discourages pressure by subsidized groups and encourages pressure by taxpayers this analysis unifies the view that governments correct market failures with the view that they favor the politically powerful both are produced by the competition for political favors

income inequality and pollution a reassessment of the environmental kuznets curve abstract improvements in some measures of air and water quality can accompany rising per capita income as illustrated by the so called environmental kuznets curve for pollution variables which show such a relationship we hypothesize that a more equitable distribution of power contributes to these outcomes by enhancing the influence on policy of those who bear the costs of pollution relative to the influence of those who benefit from pollution generating activities an empirical analysis of international variations in seven indicators of air and water quality supports this hypothesis literacy political rights and civil liberties are found to have particularly strong effects on environmental quality in low income countries

financial integration within europe and the international transmission of business cycles among industrialized countries we exploit a dataset on financial integration within europe to answer a novel question in the international real business cycle rbc literature does financial integration within europe matter for the international transmission of business cycles between the united states and europe we find that it does and that as european countries become more financially integrated among themselves european business cycles start to decouple from those in the united states we show that this is true for three macro indicators of economic activity gross domestic product gdp consumption and investment and for five alternative measures of the degree of financial integration we also show that the effect of trade linkages becomes insignificant once financial factors are accounted for our work has interesting policy implications since it unveils the importance of further integration in the eu to slow down the transmission of aggregate shocks among industrialized nations

information asymmetry and asset prices evidence from the china foreign share discount we examine the effect of information asymmetry on equity prices in the local a and foreign b share market in china we construct measures of information asymmetry based on market microstructure models and find that they explain a significant portion of cross sectional variation in b share discounts even after controlling for other factors on a univariate basis the price impact measure and the adverse selection component of the bid ask spread in the a and b share markets explains 44 and 46 of the variation in b share discounts on a multivariate basis both measures are far more statistically significant than any of the control variables the extent of information asymmetry in the international equity market has become a very important topic the question of whether domestic investors have better information than foreign investors has also become increasingly controversial for instance a few papers argue that domestic investors have a linguistic and cultural advantage brennan and cao 1997 choe kho and stulz 2001 and hau 2001 others argue that foreign investors have an informational advantage because they possess a significant amount of investment experience and expertise seasholes 2000 grinblatt and keloharju 2000

managing valuable knowledge in weak ip protection countries although knowledge assets provide multinational corporations mncs with competitive advantages in foreign markets it can be difficult for firms to protect their knowledge in foreign countries especially countries with weak intellectual property ip protection building on and extending the knowledge management institutional theory and expatriate literatures this article explores whether home country expatriates can substitute for weak ip protection and drive an increase in more and more valuable knowledge transfers to foreign operations located in weak ip protection countries because of their ties to headquarters knowledge of parent firm assets priorities and routines and activities in local operations i argue that home country expatriates can transform the local operation to offer higher protection for parent firm knowledge in weak ip countries in ways that local managers cannot the results from a comprehensive panel of us multinationals suggest that home country expatriates can substitute for weak ip protection but that this effect is contingent on the manufacturing and knowledge capabilities of foreign operations for higher value parent firm knowledge transfers overall this article extends our understanding of the global management and protection of knowledge by mncs by exploring how organizational practices can buffer country level institutional deficiencies for firm knowledge

international real business cycles we ask whether a two country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles with this question in mind we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data the most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries in the data outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions in the model we see the opposite

the price concentration relationship in banking the commonly observed positive correlation between market concentration and profitability may be explained by noncompetitive pricing behavior as argued by the structure performance hypothesis or by the greater efficiency of firms with dominant market shares as argued by the efficient structure hypothesis by examining the price concentration relationship instead of the profit concentration relationship this paper tests the structure performance hypothesis in a manner that excludes the efficient structure hypothesis as an alternative explanation of the results the results strongly support the structure performance hypothesis and are robust with respect to model specification measurement of concentration and econometric technique copyright 1989 by mit press