re testing prebisch singer hypothesis new evidence using fourier quantile unit root test the prebisch singer hypothesis in economics asserts that over time the relative price of primary goods relative to manufactured goods should experience a downward trend to test the hypothesis we

beyond privatization institutional innovation and growth in china s large state owned enterprises abstract this article demonstrates that china s large state owned enterprises soes are not stagnant fossils waiting to die under economic reform policies this sector has undergone large change due to enhanced enterprise autonomy the impact of market forces rapid growth of domestic demand for upstream products strategic integration with the world economy and the state s policy to promote large businesses china s large soes are developing new institutional forms that do not neatly fit into existing patterns china is experimentally changing its institutions through a combination of central policy local initiative and interaction with international investment this presents a challenge to the transitional orthodoxy and to ideas concerning property rights in development economics there is not a universal model of property rights and government action that works best in all circumstances china s experience with the reform of large soes shows the diverse possibilities for effective industrial institutions

foreign investment in the exporting sector welfare enhancing or welfare reducing there has been a considerable amount of debate on whether structural adjustment policies suggested by the imf and the world bank to many primary product exporting nations may be selfdefeating the terms of trade deterioration due to export expansion by any one country may be small enough to be ignored however if several exporters engage in simultaneous export expansion all of them can suffer welfare losses diakosavvas and scandizzo 5 231 64 among others find that the terms of trade of primary commodities have indeed exhibited a downward trend in this century panagariya and schiff 8 address this issue in a partial equilibrium simulation model of the cocoa market they provide examples whereby productivity increases in one exporting country lead to welfare losses for other exporting countries despite the imposition of unilaterally optimal export taxes bhagwati 2 481 85 had shown that optimal trade taxation rules out the possibility of immiserizing growth bandyopadhyay 1 shows that this result does not generalize to the case where two or more exporters have market power hence productivity increases in the exporting sector can be immiserizing even in the presence of optimal export taxes rodrik 11 provides an excellent survey of these issues the concerns expressed in the elasticity pessimism literature the classic papers by prebisch 10 251 73 and singer 12 473 85 addresses these issues have been largely alleviated by the experience of the east asian countries however these concerns remain alive in the context of some primary product exports like cocoa and coffee using a two country free trade model brecher and choudhri 4 181 90 show that the singer prebisch concerns are specially relevant in the context of foreign investment in the exporting sector of primary product exporters the value of the marginal product of foreign capital has to be repatriated to the foreign nation hence a decline in the terms of trade for the host nation is sufficient to guarantee its immiserization the traditional two country models that have been employed to analyze issues in optimal trade taxation do not address the issue of interdependence among different exporting nations in a two country model there is only one exporter of a particular commodity however in reality several nations export the same commodity for instance cote d ivoire ghana and brazil are all

inferred and stated attribute non attendance in food choice experiments we review the current literature on attribute non attendance in stated choice and use data from beef and chicken choice experiments using both inference and the respondents own statements inference is based on panel data analysis by mixed logit models of choice with both discrete and continuous mixtures of coefficients and is conditional on the observed pattern of choice information from respondent statements on non attendance is directly embedded in the specification of the indirect utility function results show no clear winner between the inferential approaches but the inference based on constrained latent class panel models better matches the observed data

trends cycles and asymmetries in the terms of trade of primary commodities from developed and less developed countries abstract the paper examines the prebisch hypothesis that primary product prices relative to the price of manufacturers fall during cyclical downturns by more than they rise during cyclical upturns and that this is an independent explanation of the secular tendency of the net barter terms of trade to move against primary commodities an important distinction is made between primary products exported by less developed countries and those exported by developed countries the greater cyclicality of primary product prices and the long run deterioration in their terms of trade since 1954 are confirmed but there is little support for the prebisch thesis that primary product prices relative to manufacturers are move sensitive on the downswing than the upswing

state capitalism and performance persistence of business group affiliated firms a comparative study of china and india business groups emerged in developing economies through direct or indirect support from the state in order to overcome a variety of institutional voids and or to further state objectives of economic growth however the efficacy of this organizational form and its associated governance structures have been debated given the dual possibility of business groups to allocate resources among its affiliates for cross subsidization or winner picking we argue that elements of the institutional environment comprising of the state s approach to organizations and the political context of these interactions vary across countries thereby influencing business groups resource allocation strategies and affecting the persistence of affiliated firms superior performance contrasting the types of state capitalism in china and india we develop and test our hypotheses we find that the effect of business group affiliation on firms superior performance persistence is stronger in a state led system of state capitalism e g china than in a co governed system e g india and that this divergence of the business group effect is weakened as affiliated firms internationalize our findings have implications for understanding business groups across institutional contexts and the influence of diversity in the types of state capitalism on organizational strategies

testing for trends in the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactured goods abstract this paper joins the statistical debate on the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactured goods by contributing to the methodological discussion and presenting new evidence using data series covering almost the whole of the 20th century using statistical tests that take into account breaks in the series it is found that over the 20th century the relative prices of primary commodities dropped to nearly one third of their level at the beginning of the century in two installments when random shocks led to structural breaks and not in a gradual way as implied by either a deterministic or stochastic trend possible reasons for the structural breaks and their policy implications are discussed

large firms and industrial reform in former planned economies the case of china in china s industrial reform alongside the much studied dynamism of small industries there has been a simultaneous powerful growth of large scale state industry state planning has played an important role in this process through heavy protection from international competition and support for selected enterprises which it was hoped would benefit from economies of scale and scope these enterprises have undergone gradual institutional change with growing foreign investment and slow movement towards multiplant operation this process is one in which there are emerging institutions resembling the modern business corporation albeit with specific chinese features c 1996 academic press limited copyright 1996 by oxford university press

is fairness blind the effect of framing on preferences for effort sharing rules this paper uses a choice experiment to study citizens preferences for effort sharing rules for reducing carbon dioxide emissions for a given global cost and level of emission reduction we study the willingness to pay for various rules that imply different distributions of the cost between eu the us china and africa the focus of this paper is on the use of two different treatments one where the respondents were informed about the country or country group names and one where the names were replaced with anonymous labels a d this allows us to test whether people s preferences for effort sharing rules depend on the framing of the problem we find that the ranking of the rules and the strength of the preferences are not significantly different between the two treatments and hence we find no evidence of ingroup bias in preferences for effort sharing rules c 2011 elsevier b v all rights reserved less

a reexamination of trends in primary commodity prices this paper conducts a reexamination of the prebisch singer hypothesis by employing the unit root test proposed by lee and strazicich 2003 and lee and strazicich 2004 that allow for up to two structural breaks given the higher power of these tests compared to the zivot and andrews 1992 and lumsdaine and papell 1997 tests rejection of the null can be considered as genuine evidence of stationarity the main findings of this paper are that eleven out of twenty four commodity prices are found to be difference stationary implying that shocks to these commodities tend to be permanent in nature the remaining thirteen prices are found to exhibit trend stationary behavior with either one or two structural breaks most of the commodities that do not exhibit difference stationary behavior seem to contain no significant trends there are fewer cases in relation to past studies of commodities that display negative trends thereby weakening the case for the prebisch singer hypothesis

constructive consumer choice processes consumer decision making has been a focal interest in consumer research and consideration of current marketplace trends e g technological change an information explosion indicates that this topic will continue to be critically important we argue that consumer choice is inherently constructive due to limited processing capacity consumers often do not have well defined existing preferences but construct them using a variety of strategies contingent on task demands after describing constructive choice consumer decision tasks and decision strategies we provide an integrative framework for understanding constructive choice review evidence for constructive consumer choice in light of that framework and identify knowledge gaps that suggest opportunities for additional research

role of agriculture in economic development revisited abstract while both malthus and ricardo viewed agriculture as impediments to economic progress mill and marshall argued that the effects of diminishing returns to land could be offset mill emphasized that the progress of civilization such as roads that reduced the cost of bringing products to market and policy improvements such as abolition of the corn laws provided substitutes for farm inputs marshall argued that population growth could for a long time through growth of organization and knowledge offset the effects of diminishing returns had the insights of colin clark dominated the policies of developing countries rather than the implications drawn from the dual sector models and the pessimistic views of prebisch agriculture s contribution to economic development would have been enhanced the efforts to tax agriculture to support import substitution policies reduced rather than increased economic growth agriculture has important contributions to make to economic development but must receive even handed treatment if the possible contributions are to be realized a major failure of all governments has been the unwillingness to recognize that agriculture is a declining industry and to adopt policies that would assist farm people to adjust to the decline in demand for farm labor

market boundaries and product choice illustrating attraction and substitution effects what happens to the share of choices each item receives when the choice set boundaries are extended by adding a new item that is extremely good on one dimension but poor on the others first there is a substitution effect whereby the new item takes choice share mainly from similar items in the set second there is an attraction effect resulting in a general shift of preference toward the added item experimental studies show that choice patterns conflict with current theoretical and common sense ideas about the effect of added alternatives on choice

addressing preference heterogeneity multiple scales and attribute attendance with a correlated finite mixing model of tap water choice unobserved heterogeneity of error scale in choice models is a recent extension of the better investigated issue of heterogeneity of taste intensity it is achieved by fitting choice panel data with specifications that simultaneously handle inter personal variation in scale and taste the aim is to separate differences in preference intensities across respondents from differences in the degree of consistency in choice behaviour or preference discrimination while accounting for correlation between the two another recent substantive issue in choice data analysis is attribute non attendance we develop a finite mixing model to address simultaneously the three issues above we empirically prove the concept on stated preference data related to tap water attributes in a study for industry regulation

coase revisited business groups in the modern economy ronald coase s celebrated query as to why economic actors typically aggregate into entities called firms rather than transacting as individuals in a market has engendered a vigorous stream of research this paper asks a parallel question why is it that in all modern economies firms themselves aggregate into larger entities often more stable than any literature predicts which are here referred to as business groups after establishing some working definitions and discussing the curious conjunction of empirical importance and analytical invisibility of business groups an attempt is made to establish the most significant dimensions along which such groups vary we end with some speculations on the role of these groups in economic development copyright 1995 by oxford university press

recent trends in the terms of trade of jamaica 1955 86 the prebisch singer hypothesis of a long term deterioration in the commodity terms of trade of developing countries has evoked tremendous controversy in the literature most of the empirical work on the terms of trade is devoted to all developing countries this paper is country specific modern time series techniques have been used to test the perbisch singer hypothesis the empirical results for jamaica support the declining terms of trade hypothesis unit root tests indicate that jamaica s terms of trade is trend stationary finally the empirical evidence suggests that the decline in the terms of trade accounted for an annual loss of approximately 1 5 percent in jamaica s gdp

the role of explanations and need for uniqueness in consumer decision making unconventional choices based on reasons this research investigates the interaction between a very common task explaining decisions and an individual difference need for uniqueness nfu on buyer decision making we propose that explaining or providing reasons for decisions shifts the focus from the choice of options to the choice of reasons furthermore buyers who explain their decisions and have high nfu tend to select unconventional reasons and are consequently more likely to make unconventional choices these predictions were supported in a series of studies involving choices between conventional and less conventional options such as whether to switch to a brand on sale whether to select a compromise option and whether to accept a gamble with a possible loss the findings also indicate that the effects of providing reasons are not due to attempts to act rationally or to concerns about being evaluated three boundary conditions on the generalization that high nfu consumers who provide reasons tend to make unconventional choices we

the impact of business group affiliation on performance evidence from china s national champions an important aspect of china s economic reforms has been an ambitious policy to develop 100 or so large internationally competitive business groups very little is known about these national champion groups or the benefits to subsidiary firms of belonging to them this study building from insights and methods used in existing literature examines the performance of subsidiaries affiliated to china s national champion groups our results find that they perform comparatively well we discuss possible reasons for this finding and comment more generally on the important role that business groups now play in china s reform and development

strategy structure and performance of korean business groups a transactions cost approach the authors use the transactions cost approach to analyze the diversification strategy and the resulting structure chosen by korean business groups to overcome market imperfections prevalent in developing countries business groups that have multidivisional struc ture are thought to show superior economic performance because such s tructure reduces transactions costs arising from organizational failure also major korean business groups have a relational structure showing both vertical integration and the characteristics of the conglomerate the authors modify the model of r e caves and m uekusa 1976 used for japan to obtain the empirical result tha t group affiliated firms show superior economic performance copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

the long run determinants of north south terms of trade and some recent empirical evidence abstract this paper reviews some recent evidence of the long run decline in the terms of trade of primary commodities versus manufactures in the context of north south trade this evidence is evaluated in the light of competing explanations of the sources of the observed long run trends in the context of a model of north south trade which includes a general resource labor and capital in the north and specific factors in a dual economy model of the south changes in factor supply sectoral and factoral bias in technical change biased demand conditions changes in the pattern of protection and institutional elements all play a role in determining the evolution of commodity and factor prices the lewis hypothesis of sectoral bias in the pattern of technical change towards temperate agriculture in the north and against tropical agriculture in the south is then reexamined in the light of the recent empirical evidence on terms of trade movements and some sketchy evidence presented on the patterns of bias in technical change in the north and the south the evidence is not consistent with an absolute technical change bias towards temperate agriculture in the north rather the rate of technical change in temperate agriculture is now comparable to that experienced in manufactures so that engel curve effects now assert the major downward pressure on the long run terms of trade between temperate agriculture commodities and manufactures overriding the effects of diminishing returns to natural resources as northern population expands the empirical evidence onbiased technical change in the south is much more sketchy and the evidence on various components of north south terms of trade is more varied

causes of world trade growth in agricultural and food products 1951 2000 a demand function approach the objective of the present study is to analyse the causes of the growth of international agricultural and food trade in volume terms from 1951 to 2000 the results suggest that income growth has been the principal reason for this expansion while exchange rate stability and the real price of agricultural products played only a minor role multilateral trade liberalization and trade costs given their long term stability are not elements that could have stimulated their growth finally the intensive liberalization of trade which took place in various economic regions especially in europe became a key factor in promoting agricultural trade among the countries participating in regional trade agreements the study results also indicate that the determinants of trade growth for these goods were different to those for other goods and other periods

the terms of trade between the united kingdom and british india 1858 1947 abstract the commodity terms of trade of the united kingdom with british india for 1858 1947 are calculated unit value indexes for a sample containing over three quarters of uk india trade indicate a slight improvement for the united kingdom from 1858 to 1917 this improvement was likely attributable to falling transport costs for british imports and was therefore not associated with a decline in india s terms of trade with britain for 1917 47 there was substantial uk terms of trade improvement a rise not due solely to declining transport costs and which ceteris paribus thus implied that india s terms of trade with the united kingdom deteriorated the 1917 47 uk improvement brought the amount of increase for the whole 1858 1947 period to an annual average of almost 1

identifying unmet demand brand preferences and marketplace demand are a reflection of the importance of underlying needs of consumers and the efficacy of product attributes for delivering value dog owners for example may look to dog foods to provide specific benefits for their pets e g shiny coats that may not be available from current offerings an analysis of consumer wants for these consumers would reveal weak demand for product attributes resulting from low efficacy despite the presence of strong latent interest the challenge in identifying such unmet demand is in distinguishing it from other reasons for weak preference such as general noninterest in the category and heterogeneous tastes we propose a model for separating out these effects within the context of conjoint analysis and we demonstrate its value with data from a national survey of toothpaste preferences implications for product development and reformulation are explored

implementing managerial constraints in model based segmentation extensions of kim fong and desarbo 2012 with an application to heterogeneous perceptions of service quality researchers have recently introduced a finite mixture bayesian regression model to simultaneously identify consumer market segments heterogeneity and determine how such segments differ with respect to active regression coefficients variable selection this article introduces three extensions of this model to incorporate managerial restrictions constraints the authors demonstrate with synthetic data that the new constrained finite mixture bayesian regression models can be used to identify and represent several constrained heterogeneous response patterns commonly encountered in practice in addition they show that the proposed models are more robust against multicollinearity than traditional methods finally to illustrate the proposed models usefulness the authors apply the proposed constrained models in the context of a service quality servperf survey of national insurance company s customers

product category familiarity and preference construction marketers often base decisions about marketing strategies on the results of research designed to elicit information about consumers preferences a large body of research indicates however that preferences often are labile that is preferences can be reversed depending on factors such as how the preference is elicited in three studies we examine the effect of familiarity in two preference elicitation tasks choice and matching judgments we provide evidence of an interaction between familiarity and response mode choice or matching in each study in study 3 we test the explanation that preference reversals may occur when the interaction of response mode with product category familiarity leads to systematic changes in attribute weighting

how people respond to contingent valuation questions a verbal protocol analysis of willingness to pay for an environmental regulation abstract this paper investigates what a respondent is thinking when answering a willingness to pay question in a contingent valuation using a think aloud technique from psychology called verbal protocol analysis the willingness to pay responses we observed seem to be constructed from a variety of considerations including an obligation to pay a fair share of the cost of the solution and signaling concern for a larger set of environmental issues the finding that respondents seem to construct their values at the time they are asked rather than reporting a more well defined value is seen as consistent with over two decades of research on the psychology of decision making potential uses of verbal protocols in contingent valuation studies are also discussed

capturing context sensitive information usage in choice models via mixtures of information archetypes abstractthe authors offer a new conceptualization and operational model of consumer choice that allows context sensitive information usage and preference heterogeneity to be separately and simultaneously captured thus transforming the axiom of full information use into a testable hypothesis a key contribution of the proposed framework is the integration of two previously disjointed and often antagonistic research paradigms 1 the economic rationality perspective which assumes stable preferences and full information usage and 2 the psychological bounded rationality perspective which allows context sensitive preferences and information selectivity the authors demonstrate that the two paradigms can and do coexist in the same decision making space even at the level of individual consumer choices the proposed information archetype mixture model is tested in four studies that span different product categories and levels of task complexity the findings have ramifications for choice modeling theory a

adaptive behavior and economic theory the relationship between psychological and economic views of behavior once a subject of heavy dispute is now understood in a very similar way by practitioners of both these disciplines and of our sister social sciences in general terms we view or model an individual as a collection of decision rules rules that dictate the action to be taken in given situations and a set of preferences used to evaluate the outcomes arising from particular situation action combinations these decision rules are continuously under review and revision new decision rules are tried and tested against experience and rules that produce desirable outcomes supplant those that do not i use the term adaptive to refer to this trial anderror process through which our modes of behavior are determined if one is interested in modeling particular decisions in any very explicit way it is obviously necessary to think about rather narrow aspects of an individual s entire set of decision rules his or her personality experimental psychology has traditionally focused on the adaptive process by which decision rules are replaced by others in this tradition the influence of the subject s or as an economist says the agent s preferences this essay uses a series of examples to illustrate the use of rationality and adaptation in economic theory it is argued that these hypotheses are complementary and that stability theories based on adaptive behavior may help to narrow the class of empirically interesting equilibria in certain economic models an experiment is proposed to test this idea

a rational reconstruction of the compromise effect using market data to infer utilities this article explores the possibility that consumers use market data to make inferences about product utilities the argument is made by means of an example based on the compromise effect found in extant experimental data this phenomenon is generally looked at as a manifestation of deviations from rationality in choice however assuming full rationality i describe a decision rule that is based on consumers inferences about their personal valuation of alternatives from the portfolio of market offerings and some information about their own relative tastes through a number of examples i will argue that consumers often use this or similar decision rules to make inferences about utility i then show that the decision rule may generate compromise effects in experiments and that it may be sustainable the compromise effect could therefore be seen as preliminary evidence that consumers make such inferences

choice based on reasons the case of attraction and compromise effects building on previous research this article proposes that choice behavior under preference uncertainty may be easier to explain by assuming that consumers select the alternative supported by the best reasons this approach provides an explanation for the so called attraction effect and leads to the prediction of a compromise effect consistent with the hypotheses the results indicate that 1 brands tend to gain share when they become compromise alternatives in a choice set 2 attraction and compromise effects tend to be stronger among subjects who expect to justify their decisions to others and 3 selections of dominating and compromise brands are associated with more elaborate and difficult decisions

business groups and social welfare in emerging markets existing evidence and unanswered questions abstract this paper reviews existing studies of the role of emerging market business groups a ubiquitous but poorly understood organizational form i first suggest that understanding the definition of business groups is itself an interesting albeit under studied research issue i then argue that the existing evidence suggests that the performance effects of group affiliation are large and generally positive there is substantial evidence that part of this is due to welfare enhancing functions originating in the idea that groups substitute for missing outside institutions but that part is also due to welfare reducing minority shareholder exploitation evidence is lacking on the extent to which groups facilitate rent seeking or the exercise of market power evidence is also lacking on the extent to which groups hamper the future development of markets the paper identifies areas where research is needed before current competition policy experiments in countries like china india and korea can be evaluated

the role of commodity prices in economic recovery the economic model which in my view is most likely to highlight the central problems facing the world economy is the one which looks upon the economic activities of the world as consisting of two large complementary sectors one is the primary sector which supplies food raw materials and energy all of which depend upon man s powers to exploit for his own use the natural resources of the planet the other main sector is the so called secondary sector which consists of the production of finished goods out of the products of the primary sector in a simple approxlmatlon we could refer to these two sectors as agriculture and industry but not all primary products are agricultural there are all the minerals and forms of energy such as coal and oil which are the result of mining what is common to all of them is that they are landbased activities in the production of which natural resources or simply land to use the classical expression play an important role industry on the other hand is dependent of the flows of supplies of primary products for the conversion of which it requires increasing amounts of labor and capital however the availability of labor and capital for industrial purposes cannot really be regarded as an effective limitation in itself except for short periods the conversion capacity of the numerous industries of the world can be treated as given at any one moment as the heritage of the past but over longer periods it can be increased almost indefinitely since on a global scale there are no practical limits to the increased employment of labor whilst the accumulation of capital through additional investment is but a facet of the increase in industrial production and a more or less automatic consequence of the increase in demand for manufactured goods the classical economists adam smith and his followers were undoubtedly on the right track when they made their predictions on the assumption that while the law of increasing returns applies in industry because the productivity of labor depends on the division of labor and the latter in turn depends on the size of the market the law of diminishing returns applies in agriculture because the most favorable opportunities are exploited first and any further enlargement of production implies exploiting the less favorable or less adaptable resources of nature hence their underlying pessimism based on the existence of ultimate limits to primary production which must bring all economic growth sooner or later to an end yet nowhere were the predictions of economists so completely falsified as in the prophecy of malthus and ricardo that with the growth of world population more and more of the world s labor and capital resources would be required to be devoted to agriculture leaving less available for industry and services on the contrary the last two hundred years witnessed despite the enormous population explosion a spectacular diminution of the share of economic resources devoted to agriculture and mining there can be no guarantee that this favorable trend will continue that it was so completely unforeseen was due to the failure to recognize that land saving or natural resource saving technological progress was so much more important quantitatively than the labor saving technical progress in the manufacturing industries this account gives a partial view however since the world production of primary commodities has not grown as fast as would have been required to raise the living standards of the world population at the same rate as those of the industrially developed countries which comprise only one

consumer choice strategies for comparing noncomparable alternatives research on consumer choice has focused on easily comparable alternatives a subset of the choices consumers regularly face this paper outlines the problem and two general strategies for comparing noncomparable alternatives a subset of choices that has been overlooked in the literature experiments are reported that support use of the strategies

skew and attribute non attendance within the bayesian mixed logit model abstract we investigate non attendance to choice set attributes and the accommodation of preference heterogeneity within the mixed logit model we propose a generalisation of the mixed logit enabling the degree of skew of marginal utility distributions to be estimated the implementation is bayesian with the marginal likelihood used as an arbiter of model performance we find strong evidence of skew in the distributions of marginal utilities for most attributes models incorporating skew are preferred in all cases the irrelevance of an attribute to significant numbers of respondents is a possible cause of such skew we test alternative empirical accommodations of self reported attribute non attendance ana and continue to find strong evidence of skew in the distributions of marginal utilities even having accounted for ana we find that contrary to some recent findings respondents who report having ignored an attribute typically do indeed have a zero marginal utility for that attribute

brand retrieval consideration set composition consumer choice and the pioneering advantage recent research on the pioneering advantage has shown that consumers often prefer pioneering brands to follower brands recent research on consumer choice suggests that information about brands is filtered through a series of sequential cognitive processes this study attempts to integrate these two separate lines of research by investigating the effects of pioneering on each stage of the multistage decision process a within subjects longitudinal experiment was conducted to simulate brand order of entry into a new market we also developed a sequential logit model to isolate the direct impact of pioneering on each stage of the decision process while controlling for indirect effects of pioneering on previous stages the results revealed that the pioneering brand vs followers is more likely to be retrieved considered and selected moreover the results revealed that consumers are more likely to bypass consideration set formation when the choice decision is simple vs complex theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed

engineering growth business group structure and firm performance in china s transition economy business groups have received increasing attention from academics interested in interorganizational relations and their impact on firms as part of industrial reform the chinese government began in the mid 1980s to encourage firms to form business groups with structural characteristics that promised to enhance financial performance and productivity using 1988 90 panel data on china s 40 largest business groups and their 535 member firms the study finds that the presence and predominance of interlocking directorates and finance companies in business groups improved the financial performance and productivity of the groups member firms in addition firms in groups with nonhierarchical organizational structures performed better than firms in hierarchical groups suggesting that complete integration into a hierarchical organization is not an optimal strategy

corporate structure liquidity and investment evidence from japanese industrial groups this paper presents evidence suggesting that information and incentive problems in the capital market affect investment we come to this conclusion by examining two sets of japanese firms the first set has close financial ties to large japanese banks that serve as their primary source of external finance and are likely to be well informed about the firm the second set of firms has weaker links to a main bank and presumably faces greater problems raising capital investment is more sensitive to liquidity for the second set of firms than for the first set the analysis also highlights the role of financial intermediaries in the investment process

models for heterogeneous variable selection abstract preference heterogeneity is a major research stream in marketing aimed at quantifying and understanding the diversity of demand for product attributes and attribute levels in experimental settings in which consumers are presented with simple descriptions of product offerings continuous distributions of heterogeneity such as the multivariate normal provide a useful representation of preference however in more complex cases in which respondents have value for only a few of the benefits associated with an offering or cognitive constraints that result in selective attention to a subset of the information available continuous distributions of heterogeneity do not reflect the possibility that a subset of the variables has nonzero effect sizes for different respondents identifying which attributes are used in a brand choice decision is closely related to the statistical procedure of variable selection this article extends variable selection methods to accommodate heterogeneity across consumers

on the costs of a bank centered financial system evidence from the changing main bank relations in japan we examine the effects of bank firm relationships on firm performance in japan when access to capital markets is limited close bank firm ties increase the availability of capital to borrowing firms but do not lead to higher profitability or growth the cost of capital of firms with close bank ties is higher than that of their peers this indicates that most of the benefits from these relationships are appropriated by the banks finally the slow growth rates of bank clients suggest that banks discourage firms from investing in risky profitable projects however liberalization of financial markets reduces the banks market power the close relationship between manufacturing firms and financial institutions in japan has recently been at the center of the debate on the appropriate financial system for the reforming economies of eastern europe as opposed to the anglo saxon separation of finance and industry long term ties between main banks and their client firms involving bank loans bank equity holding and some bank appointed personnel which are common in japan and germany have often been described as a growth oriented financial system that could serve the needs of developing and reformed economiies better than anonymous capital markets modeled after the arnerican and british financial systems the claim that close ties between investmentoriented banks and industrial firms could help overcome the difficulties of relative backwardness dates back to gerschenkron 1962 who investigates european development rosovsky 1961 applies gerschenkron s framework to the analysis of japanese growth more recently aoki patrick and sheard 1994 hoshi kashyap and loveman 1994 and teranishi 1993 among others portray the close ties between finance and industry in japan as an important factor in the international competitiveness of modern japanese

growth welfare and optimal trade taxes a fallacy of composition abstract optimal export taxation rules out the possibility of immiserizing growth in a two country world thus productivity increases in the exporting sector must be welfare improving this paper shows that in a multicountry world such reasoning commits a fallacy of composition simultaneous growth of exporting nations can lead to welfare losses in the presence of unilaterally optimal export taxes also optimal export taxes can decline in response to such growth this result further strengthens the possibility of perverse welfare movements thus standard policy recommendations of increasing productivity in the exporting sector may lead to unintended and self defeating outcomes

trends in the terms of trade of primary commodities 1900 1982 the controversy and its origins primary commodity markets have offered an opportunity for much economic debate on a number of key issues first secularly declining terms of trade of primary commodities are used to explain the widening gap between developing ldcs and developed countries dcs second they are regarded as a contributing factor to the creation of a structural condition of unequal exchange between a dominating industrial center and a dominated agrarian periphery and third they are thought to be a source of instability often causing financial vulnerability to foreign exchange equilibria and fragility to international market institutions

monitoring choice task attribute attendance in nonmarket valuation of multiple park management services does it matter land management in alpine parks provides multifunctional services to separate groups of users choice experiments can be used to derive estimates of value for different management attri butes however little research has been conducted on how frequently respondents ignore attributes used to describe policy management scenarios we fill this gap using an approach that identifies and compares both serial and choice task attribute nonattendance addressing five different visitor types our results indicate that accounting for choice task nonatten dance significantly improves model fit and yield estimates of marginal willingness to pay with a more plausible pattern of signs and greater efficiency jel q24 q51 i introduction the effects of park management policies on outdoor recreation are increasingly coming under public scrutiny alpine park land is among the most valuable land in terms of outdoor recreation park manage ment decisions are often controversial be cause of differences between objectives pursued by conservationists and the tourist industry parkland management agencies find it increasingly difficult to fund all the services needed to facilitate the ever broad ening variety of outdoor recreation activi ties this is further exacerbated by the increasing expectations for high quality recreational experiences by a population of recreationists with a heightened sensitivity to environmental and conservation issues such a situation widens the scope for multiattribute nonmarket valuation meth ods especially for those methods capable of capturing and modeling the preferences of heterogeneous visitors who seek to pursue a variety of activities in the land under study our research reports the results of a study designed to address attribute nonattendance henceforth abbreviated as an a which despite being quite a common decision heuristic has only recently begun to be explored by analysts with this decision heuristic respondents ignore some of the described attributes in their evaluation of alternatives within a given choice task they hence act as if a zero weight were assigned to the ignored attributes in the utility of the respective alternatives we study this issue by using a well known statistical model of discrete choice the multinomial logit mnl model this random utility model is often used for the purpose of multi attribute nonmarket valuation but the effects of accounting for an a are still rela tively unexplored information on an a is commonly collected by questioning each respondent at the end of the sequence of choice tasks respondents are asked to list those attributes that they feel they have

terms of trade shocks and economic performance 1870 1940 prebisch and singer revisited debate over trends in the terms of trade between primary commodities and manufactures their causes and their impact has dominated the literature for more than a century classical economists claimed that the terms of trade of primary commodities should improve since land and natural resources are always in inelastic supply following the great depression a new view emerged what came to be known as the prebisch singer thesis was instead that the terms of trade for primary products had deteriorated up to the 1950s the subsequent literature has almost exclusively and obsessively asked whether a deterioration has actually taken place over the 130 years following 1870 nowhere in this literature has the impact of these terms of trade shocks on long run growth been assessed although it is certainly full of lively speculation and debate this paper fills part of this empirical gap by constructing a country specific panel data base 1870 1940 by documenting terms of trade trends by country and region and finally by estimating the impact of the price shocks on long run economic performance we find the impact to have been asymmetric between center and periphery this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item