did china s tax for fee reform improve farmers welfare in rural areas abstract china enacted a rural tax reform the tax for fee reform tfr in the late 1990s a crucial but unanswered question is whether this reform improved farmers welfare in rural areas this article uses village level survey data from the chinese household income project in order to examine the effect of the tfr on farmers direct and indirect welfare we find no evidence that the direct welfare effects improved farmers net income in contrast the reform appears to have reduced the villages financing capacity and hence to have lowered their overall expenditures these indirect effects have had significant negative impacts on farmers welfare

long run effects of public sector sponsored training in west germany between 1991 and 1997 west germany spent on average about 3 6 bn euro per year on public sector sponsored training programmes for the unemployed we base our empirical analysis on a new administrative data base that plausibly allows for selectivity correction by microeconometric matching methods we identify the effects of different types of training programmes over a horizon of more than seven years using bias corrected weighted multiple neighbours matching we find that all programmes have negative effects in the short run and positive effects over a horizon of about four years however for substantive training programmes with duration of about two years gains in employment probabilities of more than 10 points appear to be sustainable but come at the price of large negative lock in effects

networks of foreign affiliates evidence from japanese micro data the paper provides evidence on the investment patterns of japanese multinational enterprises mnes across countries and industries and analyses the main drivers of japanese fdi location strategies using detailed micro data on japanese parents and affiliates statistics the main stylised facts point to the high degree of concentration of the activity of japanese multinationals and differences in size and productivity depending on parents and affiliates main industry groups the breakdown of affiliate sales by destination markets reveals that japanese mnes establish services affiliates primarily to maximise the proximity to local customers while foreign affiliates in manufacturing sectors tend to engage more with third countries yet some economies emerge as strategic gateways to other destinations in the region the econometric analysis further analyses the drivers of japanese mnes expansion abroad in search of new markets production efficiency and regional or global platforms important factors shaping japanese fdi decisions include firm characteristics and host market specificities such as market size proximity labour costs technology and trade policy barriers the largest and most productive parents are more likely to invest in fdi export platforms particularly in host countries with efficient customs procedures and more favourable services trade and investment regulation distance and comparative advantage in terms of skills and digital infrastructure play a stronger role in intra firm trade while the size of the domestic market and the local regulatory environment are important attractive points for affiliates that sell mostly locally overall the paper stresses the importance of better integration into global production networks and the policy priorities to attract and maximise the benefits of fdi inflows

smuggling and price disparity abstract this paper proposes a model of smuggling consistent with the coexistence of smuggling legal trade and price disparity defined as a domestic price which exceeds is less than the return from legal export import these phenomena have been found to characterize indonesian smuggling a framework is presented in which legal trade is used to cloak smuggling activity with the implication that the greater the volume of legal trade the less the costs of smuggling this model is then used to explain the observation noted above and to show that smuggling may be welfare increasing vis a vis the non smuggling situation and that even if the suppression of smuggling is costless tax revenue maximization may require a positive level of smuggling in addition the model is applied to coffee and rubber exports from indonesia

evaluating social policy by experimental and nonexperimental methods although it is important to establish causal relationships in social policy evaluation the effects are difficult to observe due to sample selection to evaluate the performance of estimators designed to handle sample selection bias we analyse data from a norwegian rehabilitation project with a randomised experimental design the data permit us to compare the performance of different nonexperimental estimators with the experimental results in our case study we find that nonexperimental evaluation based on sample selection estimators with selection terms that fail to meet conventional levels of statistical significance is highly unreliable the difference in difference estimator and propensity score matching estimators perform better in our context jel classification c51 j24 h43 i12

an evaluation of government sponsored vocational training programmes for the unemployed in urban russia this is the first study on the effects of active labour market programs such as training in russia we use the data from the official unemployment register combined with information from the follow up survey in a large industrial city in the year 2000 the method of propensity score matching was applied to learn whether participation in the training programmes increased the monthly salaries of participants the findings suggest that individuals tend to benefit from the participation in the training programmes however one year later this effect disappeared copyright 2005 oxford university press

gravity models of trade based money laundering several attempts have been made in the economics literature to measure money laundering however the adequacy of these models is difficult to assess as money laundering takes place secretly and hence goes unobserved an exception is trade based money laundering tbml a special form of trade abuse that has been discovered only recently tbml refers to criminal proceeds that are transferred around the world using fake invoices that under or overvalue imports and exports this article is a first attempt to test well known prototype models proposed by walker and unger to predict illicit money laundering flows and to apply traditional gravity models borrowed from international trade theory to do so we use a dataset of zdanowicz of tbml flows from the us to 199 countries our test rejects the specifications of the walker and unger prototype models at least for tbml the traditional gravity model that we present here can indeed explain tbml flows worldwide in a plausible manner an important determinant is licit trade the mass in which tbml is hidden furthermore our results suggest that criminals use tbml in order to escape the stricter anti moneylaundering regulations of financial markets

does inflation targeting improve fiscal discipline abstract we explore the performances of inflation targeting it adoption in terms of fiscal discipline fd while most existing studies focus exclusively on the role of fd as a precondition for it adoption using a sample of developing and developed countries we show that it adoption exerts a positive and significant effect on fd a result robust to a wide variety of alternative specifications in addition this effect is statistically significant only in developing countries a result that may fuel the current debate regarding the relevance of it adoption in general and particularly for developing countries

do regions benefit from active labour market policies a macroeconometric evaluation using spatial panel methods dauth w hujer r and wolf k do regions benefit from active labour market policies a macroeconometric evaluation using spatial panel methods regional studies the effect of active labour market policies on all job seekers in a region is assessed using the variation in the participation in these programmes across regions over time the starting point is an augmented regional matching function which is extended by allowing for a heterogeneous search effectiveness parameter for current participants and job seekers who finished a measure recently a spatial dynamic panel data model is estimated by using a quasi ml estimation procedure it is found that job schemes in the non profit sector wage subsidies and advancement of apprenticeships significantly increase the regional number of matches

magic mirror in my hand how trade mirror statistics can help us detect illegal financial flows misreporting tricks of different sorts applied to the transfer of goods between different countries are typically exploited by criminals worldwide for money laundering ends the main international anti money laundering organisations started paying attention to this phenomenon dubbed trade based money laundering tbml a long time ago but the failure to develop appropriate analytical tools has reportedly dogged preventive actions nonetheless literature has widely advocated the possibility that the analysis of inconsistencies in mirrored bilateral trade data could provide some help by building on previous contributions in the field this work sets up a model factoring in the main structural determinants of discrepancies between mirrored data concerning italy s 2010 to 2013 external trade at a highly detailed 6 digit level of goods classification for each partner country point estimates of freight costs are used to net each observation of the corresponding cif fob discrepancy the regression estimates are then deployed in order to compute tbml risk indicators at a country 4 digit product level based on the indicators rankings of countries and product lines can be compiled which may be used for a risk driven search of potential illegal commercial transactions

can training and employment subsidies combat european unemployment active policy evaluation problems methods and results european countries with poorly performing labour markets and labour market institutions conducive to high unemployment also feature considerable expenditures on active labour market policy and such policies are emphasized by the european union s employment strategy however the practice of these programmes evaluation is much less well developed in europe than in the united states we outline key issues facing such evaluation and offer a review and formal assessment of european evaluation studies over the last three decades we find that programme effects are very heterogeneous across types of interventions and target groups that training and job search assistance can be effective and that the young among the unemployed are typically difficult to assist jochen kluve and christoph m schmidt

the effectiveness of targeted wage subsidies for hard to place workers targeted wage subsidies paid to employers are an important element of active labour market policies in germany this article uses propensity score matching to investigate their effect on the employment and unemployment rates of subsidized hard to place workers in a first scenario we estimate the average treatment effect of a subsidy on previously unemployed individuals a second scenario analyses the effects of a subsidy on employment probabilities conditional on taking up employment the third scenario investigates the additional effect of a subsidy on individuals who have participated in a short term training measure beforehand summing up and in line with the literature the results show that subsidies have a favourable effect on the employment prospects of participants

trade misinvoicing the dark side of world trade n this paper we study the determinants of trade misinvoicing we contrib ute to the literature in the following ways rst we present a simple micro economic framework that simultaneously analyses the effect of microeconomicincentives and deterrents on the macroeconomic phenomenon of trade misin voicing this approach takes into account that the nancial incentives for trademisinvoicing determine the decision as to whether and how much exports imports to underinvoice or overinvoice whereas the deterrents to trademisinvoicing only have an impact on the optimal amount of misinvoicing second we test the derived theoretical hypotheses using a rich data set of 86countries over the period 1980 to 2005 trade misinvoicing occurs if the true value of exports or imports deviatesfrom the amount of exports or imports businesses report to the authorities aninteresting literature has emerged that studies the determinants of trade mis invoicing by analysing bilateral trade partner statistics for recent examples fisman and wei 2007 berger and nitsch 2008 farzanegan 2008 trademisinvoicing is typically motivated by nancial incentives for example by ben e ting from a premium at the black market for foreign exchange or by evadingtariffs or taxes while the empirical literature has mainly focused on analysingthe incentives for that nancial malpractice we also test the relevance ofdeterrents to misinvoice i e the risk of detection and costs of punishment the microeconomic framework presented in this paper demonstrates that the nancial incentives for trade misinvoicing such as the black market premium

programme evaluation with multiple treatments this paper reviews the main identification and estimation strategies for microeconometric policy evaluation particular emphasis is laid on evaluating policies consisting of multiple programmes which is of high relevance in practice for example active labour market policies may consist of different training programmes employment programmes and wage subsidies similarly sickness rehabilitation policies often offer different vocational as well as non vocational rehabilitation measures first the main identification strategies control for confounding variables difference in difference instrumental variable and regression discontinuity identification are discussed in the multiple programme setting thereafter the different nonparametric matching and weighting estimators of the average treatment effects and their properties are examined download discussion paper pdf 484 kb

measuring the effect of subsidized training programs on movements in and out of employment despite over two decades of u s experience in operating large scale subsidized training programs for low income and unemployed workers the effects of these programs are still highly controversial the controversy arises from the difficulty of specifying the model of participant outcomes in the absence of training that is necessary in any nonexperimental program evaluation in this paper we suggest that some of these difficulties may be overcome by focusing on a very simple measure of outcomes namely the probability of employment we present a variety of estimates of the effect of training on the probability of employment for the 1976 cohort of adult male participants in the comprehensive employment and training act ceta program our methods range from a simple comparison of pre and post training employment probabilities between trainees and nonparticipants to a fully specified first order markov model of employment probabilities with individual heterogeneity there is consistent evidence across methods that ceta participation increased the probability of employment in the three years after training by from 2 to 5 percentage points classroom training programs appear to have had significantly larger effects than on the job programs although the estimated effects of both kinds of programs are positive we also find that movements in and out of employment for trainees and nonparticipants are reasonably well described by a first order process conditional on individual heterogeneity in the context of this model ceta participation appears to have increased both the probability of moving into employment and the probability of continuing employment

do entrepreneurs create jobs many countries support the creation of new firms such policy is based on the presumption that the total number of jobs increases when a person moves from unemployment or regular employment to self employment in this paper the link between self employment and overall employment is analyzed the empirical analysis based on panel data of swedish counties from 1976 1995 pays particular attention to simultaneity issues the results suggest that self employment may have a significant positive effect on overall employment

effectiveness of sequences of one euro jobs for welfare recipients in germany empirical evidence reveals that german welfare recipients often participate in multiple active labour market programmes almps however evidence on the effectiveness of almps exists mostly for single almp participations so far this article evaluates the sequential participation in almps for welfare recipients in germany based on comprehensive administrative data to control for dynamic selection that arises in the evaluation of sequences using a dynamic causal model and an inflow sample of welfare recipients the article analyses the effects of sequences of a public employment programme called one euro jobs on labour market outcomes for female participants in one euro jobs in the first period especially in west germany the results imply that participating in two consecutive one euro jobs compared with receiving only welfare benefits for two consecutive periods better facilitates integration into regular employment moreover taking part in a one euro job directly after entry into welfare receipt is

financial crises and cross border banking new evidence the surge in cross border banking prior to global financial crises took place not only in the interbank market but also in the retail market e g between banks and their private customers abroad we utilize confidential data to estimate for the first time the effects of banking currency and twin crises on the geography of cross border deposits and loans we show that each crisis type has its own specific effects that these effects themselves lead to sustained increases in cross border banking and that they are different for cross border loans and deposits respectively

financial services global perspectives the purpose of this paper is to discuss the issues related to the deregulation of the financial services sector and the role of multilateral negotiations which has opened up opportunities for the expansion of international financial services the paper analyses various categories of international financial services and highlights those factors that contribute to an increase in the competitiveness of financial institutions in their attempt to increase the supply of international financial services the paper also analyses the complementary role of fdi and trade in international financial services and discusses some of the benefits of fdi in financial services that have led to a more efficient and more competitive financial services industry in the host countries

the travels of a bank deposit in turbulent times the importance of deposit insurance design for cross border deposits we examine the impact of the existence on an explicit deposit insurance di scheme and its design features on bilateral cross border deposits cbd in a gravity model setting we find that both the absolute quality of a country s di and its relative quality vis a vis other countries di generally affect depositor behavior however during systemic banking crises cross border depositors primarily seek countries with the best di schemes similarly during the 2008 2009 great financial crisis the emergency actions taken by the governments which supply and maintain these safe havens have led to substantial relocations of cbd jel f34 g18

the value of corporate philanthropy during times of crisis the sensegiving effect of employee involvement recent research suggests that philanthropy s value to the firm is largely mediated by contextual factors such as managers assumed motives for charity our article extends this contingency perspective using a sensegiving lens by which external actors interpretations of organizational actions may be influenced by the way in which the organization communicates about those actions we consider how sensegiving features in philanthropy related press releases affect whether investors value those donation decisions for the empirical investigation in this study we analyze abnormal returns to announcements by u s fortune 500 firms documenting their donations to hurricane katrina disaster relief in 2005 we expect that in general donation decisions would be controversial given the uncertainty surrounding the hurricane s economic effects at the time however we also propose that announcements emphasizing employee involvement in the donation send investors positive signals about the firm s ability to bounce back from the disaster s adverse effects we find empirical support for the proposed hypotheses and discuss the implications for theory and practice

the determinants of cross border equity flows abstract we explore a new panel data set on bilateral gross cross border equity flows between 14 countries 1989 1996 we show that a gravity model explains international transactions in financial assets at least as well as goods trade transactions gross transaction flows depend on market size in source and destination country as well as trading costs in which both information and the transaction technology play a role distance proxies some information costs and other variables explicitly represent information transmission an information asymmetry between domestic and foreign investors and the efficiency of transactions the geography of information is the main determinant of the pattern of international transactions while there is weak support in our data for the diversification motive once we control for the informational friction we broaden the scope of our results by presenting some evidence linking the results on equity transactions to equity holdings

earnings losses of displaced workers revisited recent literature reviews conclude that job displacement results in sustained earnings losses bruce c fallick 1996 lori g kletzer 1998 and that estimates of the size of those reductions vary with the type of data used in the analysis the industry within which displacement occurs and business cycle conditions the largest estimated losses were obtained using administrative data from pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s louis s jacobson robert j lalonde and daniel g sullivan 1993a the data covered a period of high unemployment in a heavily indus trialized state characterized by disproportionate job losses in manufacturing thus the ability to generalize those results to more favorable economic times and states with a greater reliance on service sector employment has been questioned to address these issues administrative data are used to similarly examine the impact of job displacement on earnings losses of workers in connecticut from 1993 to 2004 the work of jacobson lalonde and sullivan jls also provided important methodologi cal advancement by adapting analytical techniques developed for program evaluation james j heckman and v joseph hotz 1989 to the context of job displacement the same techniques fixed effects and time trend estimators as those used in the original jls publication are initially employed here then the methods are extended to include matching estimators developed since their publication both nearest neighbor estimators of average treatment on the treated att and differenced average treatment on the treated datt are adapted to the context of this study heckman hidehiko ichimura and petra todd 1997 heckman et al 1998 and rajeev h dehejia and sadek wahba 1999 2002 the results presented here for connecticut differ in some ways from those found in the work of jls using data from pennsylvania in the period immediately following job loss regardless of the technique employed earnings reductions for workers displaced through mass layoff range from 32 percent to 33 percent jls reported immediate losses of more than 40 percent six years later using the same estimators as jls earnings reductions in connecticut range from 13 percent to 15 percent they report sustained losses in pennsylvania of 25 percent the smaller long term impacts in connecticut demonstrate that under more ordinary economic times esti mated losses from administrative data lie within the range observed using other data sources this finding resolves a long standing conflict among the results of high quality studies that have used differing data sources to study earnings reductions following job loss 1 using two different matching estimators earnings losses six years after mass layoff are 12 percent the matching estimators compare those who experienced mass layoff to compari sons with the same ex ante probability of the event these smaller losses are consistent with the

do wage subsidies increase employment in subsidized firms this paper examines whether subsidized jobs have contributed to employment in subsidized firms or have merely substituted for non subsidized ones the data set is an unbalanced panel of some 31 000 firms that are followed annually between 1995 and 2002 the analysis is based on difference in differences which is adjusted by regression and matching methods the results indicate that wage subsidies stimulate employment and that the magnitude of the effect is as aimed i also found that subsidies have no sizeable effects on non subsidized firms

job matching temporary public employment and equilibrium unemployment abstract the paper presents a theoretical analysis of the macroeconomics effects of temporary public employment programs relief jobs the framework is a matching model where wages are determined by nash bargains between individual firms and workers public employment programs have a direct job placement effect which tends to reduce unemployment there is also an effect on wage pressure the direction of this effect hinges on whether the programs are aimed at increasing unemployment outflow of reducing unemployment inflow a policy targeted at unemployment outflow has in general ambiguous effects on equilibrium unemployment since the job placement effect and the wage effect work in opposite directions by contrast a policy targeted at unemployment inflow will always reduce unemployment since the job placement effect is reinforced by the induced wage moderation

does active labour market policy increase employment theoretical considerations and some empirical evidence from sweden does active labour market policy increase employment theoretical considerations and some empirical evidence from sweden

real wage determination and labour market policies the swedish experience it is a common view that labor market programs reduce unemployment and restrain wages by increasing the competition for jobs the swedish case is often advanced as a blueprint to follow this article questions the conventional wisdom on the swedish labor market policies it finds empirical evidence in favor of the hypothesis that job creation and training programs weaken the incentives for wage restraint as a consequence it appears likely that labor market programs have strong crowding out effects on regular employment copyright 1991 by royal economic society

earnings and employment effects of continuous off the job training in east germany after unification the effects of continuous off the job training oft for east germans after unification are analyzed in terms of their earnings and employment probabilities using the potential outcome approach to causality as general framework different matching procedures are suggested for the estimation they allow for permanent and transitory shocks that influence oft participation and labor market outcomes the matching procedures also take account of individually different starting dates the data are taken from the german socio economic panel gsoep 1990 1994 this dataset is very informative with respect to factors influencing the participation in training the results show no positive effects of training

effectiveness of active labor market tools in conditional cash transfers programs evidence for argentina summary this paper examines the impact of the program seguro de capacitacion y empleo sce implemented to provide support in skills upgrading job seeking and job placement to eligible beneficiaries of the argentinian conditional cash transfer program plan jefes the sce is an example of a growing trend observed in latin america where labor activation components have been increasingly included into cash transfers programs to support beneficiaries in finding more stable income opportunities despite this growing trend not enough is known regarding the effectiveness of these components especially on job quality in this context this paper sheds light on whether the provision of a comprehensive package of active labor market measures contributes to a successful labor market integration of cash transfers beneficiaries taking advantage of the panel structure of the permanent household survey and exploiting the time variation in the assignment of the program as identification strategy we apply difference in difference estimators to measure the impact on a number of labor market indicators we find that the program affects positively the job quality of participants by increasing the probability of having a formal job and raising hourly wages moreover the intervention is associated with a lower probability of having a low paid job and working an excessive number of hours these effects are however not homogeneous across all groups of participants while the program is more successful among the younger beneficiaries it does not contribute to an improvement in the labor market conditions of female beneficiaries who in fact are the majority of sce participants our results suggest that reducing dependency on monetary transfers through programs such as the sce that are rich in activation components is beneficial for participants labor market trajectories and therefore it constitutes a satisfactory exit strategy to more universal cash transfer programs

evaluating the econometric evaluations of training programs with experimental data this paper takes the results of an employment and training program thatwas run as a field experiment in which the participants were randomlyassigned into a treatment or a control group and compares these results to the estimates that might have been produced by an econometrician who evaluated the program using the same econometric procedures that have been used in the program evaluation literature this comparison shows that many of these econometric procedures fail toreplicate the experimentally determined results and suggests that researchers should be aware of the potential for specification errorsin other nonexperimental evaluations copyright 1986 by american economic association

evaluation of swedish youth labor market programs this paper evaluates two swedish active labour market programmes for youth namely youth practice and labour market training a non parametric matching approach is applied to estimate the average p

the relationship between r d collaboration subsidies and r d performance empirical evidence from finland and germany this study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and r d collaboration in germany and finland we consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments and perform an econometric matching to analyze r d and patent activity at the firm level in general we find that collaboration has positive effects in germany subsidies for individual research do neither exhibit a significant impact on r d nor on patenting but the innovative performance could be improved by additional incentives for collaboration for finnish companies public funding is an important source of finance for r d without subsidies recipients would show less r d and patenting activity whilst those firms not receiving subsidies would perform significantly better if they were publicly funded copyright 2007 john wiley sons ltd

effectiveness of one euro jobs do programme characteristics matter recent german labour market reforms introduced a large scale workfare programme called one euro jobs to activate welfare recipients and improve their employment prospects in programme design leeway is left to regional actors using administrative data and propensity score ps matching this article investigates the association between programme design and effectiveness so as to provide insight on how to increase programme effectiveness first effects of different types of one euro jobs according to planned duration and weekly working hours compared to waiting are estimated second programme types are compared directly to disentangle selection and programme effects as expected lock in effects are larger for participations with a longer planned duration but not for those with longer weekly working hours one euro jobs do not generally increase the employment prospects for east german men beyond 2 years after programme start and longer and more intensive participations even decrease employment prosp

on the accuracy of economic observations do sub saharan trade statistics mean anything matching exporters freight on board fob trade statistics with the corresponding importers cost inventory and freight cif data this paper studies the quality of official information on trade between 36 african countries the author found the disparities in data so great as to make the official trade statistics almost useless for most empirical and policy studies he concluded that a statistics on matching exports and imports vary so much that the data cannot be used to assess the level of trade between african countries b the data are probably equally useless for assessing the direction of trade since the countries that exporters report as the destination of trade often fail to report corresponding imports c the data are inadequate for determining the composition of trade because countries report on different levels of detail and d large persistent apparent differences in trends in intra african trade may simply reflect different degrees of accuracy in country trade data finally the fact that reported fob exports often exceed the corresponding reported imports suggests either that smuggling is widespread or that importers are intentionally underinvoicing because of high african tariffs or quotas

evaluating the impact of r d tax credits on innovation a microeconometric study on canadian firms this study examines the effect of r d tax credits on innovation activities of canadian manufacturing firms over the 1997 1999 period the federal and provincial r d tax credit programs were used by more than one third of all manufacturing firms and by close to two thirds of firms in high technology sectors we investigate the average effect of r d tax credits on a series of innovation indicators such as number of new products sales with new products originality of innovation etc using a non parametric matching approach compared to a hypothetical situation in the absence of r d tax credits recipients of tax credits show significantly better scores on most but not all performance indicators we therefore conclude that tax credits increase the r d engagement at the firm level and that the r d activities induced by fiscal incentives lead to additional innovation output

job creation through public start up assistance this study examines the impact of german public start up assistance programmes administered by the deutsche ausgleichsbank dta on the performance of young firms the empirical analysis is based on firms from the zew entrepreneurship study that either received start up loans in one or more dta schemes or did not receive any funding from the dta at all the paper applies a non parametric matching approach often applied by labour market economists the interesting success measure is the average annual employment growth rate over a six year period and the resulting causal effect is the difference of this measure between the group of subsidized firms and the selected control group firms that did not receive any dta start up loans the empirical analysis shows that dta start up loans significantly improve the average employment growth rate

trade standards and poverty evidence from senegal summary in the debate on trade and poverty it is argued that standards act as trade barriers and cause marginalization of the poor this paper quantifies income and poverty effects of high standards trade and integrates labor market effects by using company and household survey data from the vegetable export chain in senegal we find that exports grew sharply despite increasing standards contributing importantly to rural incomes and poverty reduction tightening standards induced a shift from smallholder contract farming to integrated estate production altering the mechanism through which poor households benefit through labor markets instead of product markets

banking across borders abstract the international linkages between banks play a crucial role in today s global economy existing models explain these links largely on the basis of portfolio theory in which banks diversify lending these models have found limited empirical support and do not speak to several relevant dimensions of the data they do not explain heterogeneity in the degree to which banks operate through foreign affiliates fund their activities abroad or matter for local lending in foreign countries this paper proposes a complementary theory of banking across borders that is based on elements of international trade theory in the model banking across borders arises because countries differ in their relative factor endowments and in the efficiency of their banking sectors based on these differences the pattern of foreign bank asset and liability holdings emerges endogenously this parsimonious model provides a rationale for the observed heterogeneity in foreign bank activities and is consistent with key patterns in the data

a note on the location choice of multinational banks the case of japanese financial institutions abstract there are many studies investigating the location choice of foreign direct investment fdi of us banks nigh et al journal of international business studies 17 1986 59 72 find that the choice does not depend on local banking opportunity this paper examines what factors affect the location choice of japanese multinational financial institutions our results are consistent with previous studies analyzing us banks in that the fdi of the manufacturing industry is an important determinant of the location choice of japanese financial institutions however our results differ from nigh et al in that japanese financial institutions choose their locations at least partially based on the local banking opportunity in the host countries

job machine think tank or both what makes corporate spin offs different one way through which knowledge and technology transfer can take place is through the foundation of new firms by former employees of incumbent private firms in this paper we examine whether knowledge transferred from the incumbent causally affect employment growth and post entry innovation activities of the new firm we focus on start ups for which a new idea a new product technology production process or management concept which the founder developed during her work as an employee was essential for setting up the new business these firms are denoted corporate spin offs using data from german start ups founded in the period from 2005 to 2008 we apply nearest neighbour propensity score matching we find that corporate spin offs outperform other start ups founded by former employees of incumbent private firms that are not based on an essential idea in terms of post entry innovation activities however we cannot show that corporate spin offs benefit from the transferred idea in terms of employment growth we conclude that a transferred idea is primarily an input factor and a stimulus for subsequent post entry innovation activities of corporate spin offs

do the skilled and prime aged unemployed benefit more from training effect heterogeneity of public training programs in germany this study analyses the treatment effects of public training programmes for the unemployed in germany based on propensity score matching methods we extend the picture that has been sketched in previous studies by estimating the treatment effects of medium term programmes for different skill and age groups our results indicate that programme participation has a positive impact on employment probabilities and earnings for almost all sub groups we find little evidence for the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects and the magnitude of the differences is quite small our results thus at least in part conflict with the strategy to provide training increasingly to individuals with better employment prospects

the effectiveness of qualification measures for employed workers an evaluation study for saxony this article investigates whether and to what extent employment policy measures co financed by the european social fund in germany meet their objective specifically it is analysed whether qualification programs for employed workers in the german state of saxony were effective in terms of employment protection to this end a control function approach is implemented which utilizes a unique firm level dataset this model explicitly accounts for unobserved heterogeneity between participating and nonparticipating companies by modelling the participation decision process our results suggest a positive effect of program participation however this positive treatment effect varies considerably across different sub groups of the treatment as well as the comparison group

a microeconometric evaluation of the active labour market policy in switzerland in the second part of the 1990 s switzerland conducted an ambitious active labour market policy almp encompassing a wide variety of programmes we evaluate the effects of these programmes on the individual employment probability of potential participants our econometric analysis uses unusually informative data origi nating from administrative unemployment and social security records we apply a matching es timator adapted for the case of multiple programmes we find substantial positive effects for one particular programme that is a unique feature of the swiss almp it consists of a wage subsidy for temporary jobs in the regular labour market that would otherwise not be taken up by the unemployed we also find large negative effects for traditional employment programmes oper ated in sheltered labour markets for training courses the results are mixed doi 10 1111 1468 0297 00072 download internet appendix pdf 2 590 kb

the location of financial sector fdi tax and regulation policy abstract this paper analyzes how corporate taxation and regulatory requirements affect the location of financial sector fdi we use novel information on new financial services entities established by multinational firms in 83 host countries we find a negative effect of host country taxes on the probability of choosing a particular host location we can also confirm a significant influence of the regulatory environment for example stricter equity capital requirements negatively affect location probabilities our empirical approach allows us to provide new insight in how a policy measure of a given country affects other countries by estimating cross country tax and regulation elasticities

the effectiveness of public sponsored training revisited the importance of data and methodological choices this article revisits the effectiveness of public sponsored training programs for germany accounting for dynamic selection into heterogeneous programs we carefully assess to what extent various aspects of our empirical strategy such as conditioning flexibly on employment and benefit histories the availability of rich data handling of later program participations and further methodological choices affect our estimates our results imply pronounced negative lock in effects in the short run and positive medium run effects on employment and earnings when job seekers enroll after having been unemployed for some time we find that data and specification issues can have a large effect

the determinants of us banking activity abroad abstract the banking industry provides an excellent example of the internationalization of world business and economic interdependencies across countries analysis of the past growth of international banking operations can also prove useful to banks interested in augmenting their current business or expanding their international coverage and to banks who anticipated future competition in their markets from new or strengthened foreign competitors this study provides the most comprehensive examination of the development of us bank branches in other countries is presented and tested in order to facilitate the understanding of the expansion of international banking

is labour market training a curse for the unemployed evidence from a social experiment summary in 1994 a social experiment was conducted in denmark where unemployed applicants for classroom training were randomised into treatment and control groups the data are contaminated by the presence of no shows and crossovers biasing the traditional experimental estimator we interpret our experiment within an economic model of agents maximising outcomes facing different cost regimes and present results interpretable within this model surprisingly we find that classroom training significantly increases individual unemployment rates and decreases employability we discuss possible reasons for this finding and some related policy issues copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd this paper uses data from a social experiment to evaluate the impact of classroom training on the subsequent fraction of time individuals spend in unemployment and in employment and on their wages in doing so we exploit the information from one among only a handful of social experiments conducted in europe on labour market issues social experiments are seen by many as the way to consistently estimate the effect of a policy on an outcome variable of interest the trick is to randomise the selection process itself such that the outcomes in the control group can be used as an estimate of the unobserved counterfactual in this case the outcome of trained individuals in the absence of training however experimental data are often flawed as is the case in the experiment studied in this paper in the present study the data are contaminated by the presence of no shows members of the treatment group who do not show up at the course they signed up for and crossovers members of the control group who end up receiving the treatment they were randomised out of the presence of no shows crossovers and also drop outs is a well known phenomenon in social experiments see heckman et al 1998b 2000 neglecting their presence may seriously bias the estimates of the parameter of interest simply because they constitute the very phenomenon that the experiment is designed to eliminate namely non random selection 1 in the experiment studied in this paper only 52 of

fdi versus exports evidence from german banks abstract we use a new bank level dataset to study the fdi versus exports decision for german banks we extend the literature on multinational firms in two directions first we simultaneously study fdi and the export of cross border financial services second we test recent theories on multinational firms which show the importance of firm heterogeneity helpman e melitz m j yeaple s r 2004 export versus fdi american economic review 94 1 300 316 our results show that fdi and cross border services are complements rather than substitutes heterogeneity of banks has a significant impact on the internationalization decision more profitable and larger banks are more likely to expand internationally than smaller banks they have more extensive foreign activities and they are more likely to engage in fdi in addition to cross border financial services

evaluating the german mini job reform using a natural experiment increasing work incentives for people with low income is a common topic in the policy debate across european countries the mini job reform in germany had a similar motivation we carry out an ex post evaluation to identify the short run effects of this reform our identification strategy uses an exogenous variation in the interview months in the socio economic panel study soep which allows us to distinguish groups that are affected by the reform from those who are not to account for seasonal effects we additionally use a difference in differences did strategy descriptives show that there is a post reform increase in the number of mini jobs however we show that this increase cannot be causally related to the reform since the short run effects are very limited only single men seem to react immediately and increase secondary job holding

labor market slack and the wage curve abstract the unemployment rate might not serve as an accurate measure of labor market slack when analysing countries with large scale labor market programs we replicate and extend the wage curve for east germany the results are in favor of the incorporation of such policy measures

exporting financial institutions management via foreign direct investment mergers and acquisitions we test the relevance of the new trade theory and the traditional theory of comparative advantage for explaining the geographic patterns of international m as of financial institutions between 1985 and 2000 the data provide statistically significant support for both theories we also find evidence that the u s has idiosyncratic comparative advantages at both exporting and importing financial institutions management