clearinghouse banks and banknote over issue abstract the paper presents a model of banks as clearinghouses of private debt where money is used as the means of payment implications of the model include i the private provision of banknotes or a discount window may be needed to avoid the insufficient debt clearing that results from an inflexible currency stock and ii an uncontrolled total money stock may result in a multiplicity of equilibria including an inflationary banknote over issue

technological and organizational change in automobile production spatial implications 1 schoenberger e 1987 technological and organizational change in automobile production spatial implications reg studies 21 199 214 the origins and implications of recent technological and organizational changes in the automobile industry are examined the nature of competition in the industry is linked to the adoption of flexible automation technologies in production this it is argued may foster the spatial re integration of production in contrast to earlier decentralizing trends an effect that may be reinforced by the move to just in time principles of production organization implications for regional development are considered with cautions stressed concerning the meaning of spatial proximity and the firm s ability to construct agglomeration economies away from traditional industrial centres schoenberger e 1987 changements technologiques et organisationnels dans la production automobile implications spatiales reg studies 21 199 214 les origines et les implications des recents changem

determinants of the structure of u s foreign trade 1958 1976 abstract the heckscher ohlin model with three direct factor inputs is borne out for u s net exports of manufactures in annual cross section regressions for 1958 1976 the coefficient on unskilled labor became significantly more negative over the period and there is evidence that the negative sign on physical capital may reflect the inclusion of natural resource industries further analysis based upon 1960 and 1970 census years suggests the importance as well of skill and technological variables calculations of the total factor requirements of u s trade uphold the leontief paradox for 1958 but not for 1972

productivity and efficiency of us gas transmission companies a european regulatory perspective on both sides of the atlantic the regulation of gas transmission networks has undergone major changes since the early 1990s whereas in the us the long standing regime of cost plus regulation was complemented by increasing pipe to pipe competition most european countries moved towards incentive regulation complemented by market integration we study the productivity development of a panel of us interstate companies using data envelopment analysis and malmquist productivity indices results are presented for changes in productivity as well as for several convergence tests the results indicate that taking productivity and convergence as performance indicators regulation has been rather successful in particular during a period where overall demand was flat however we argue that a benchmarking based regulation might have brought about stronger convergence lessons for european regulators are twofold first the us analysis shows that benchmarking of european transmission operators would be possible if data were available second our results suggest that in the long run market integration and competition are alternatives to the current european model

regulatory performance analysis case study britain s electricity industry the success or failure of the privatisation and liberalisation of electricity supply industries has more often been judged in terms of process than of outcomes in this paper in contrast this performance is assessed in terms of the performance of its associated system of regulatory governance taking the uk s electricity supply industry between 1989 and 2000 as case study initially a vertical cross section of the regulation system gives a finding matrix for the various stakeholders involved and identifying winners and losers from the standpoint of funding flows next a horizontal cross section provides the environmental distributive allocative dynamic and productive efficiencies grid for this system the survey shows that the performance of the british esi regulation system produced benefits although not for all stakeholders and not as fairly as possible the chosen path did not seem sustainable and failed to respect intergenerational transfers as a way of fostering sustainability and equity it was unable to underpin simultaneous improvements in efficiencies over time while redistributing industry s funding flows among the players in a regressive manner

asymmetric price responses market integration and market power a study of the u s natural gas market we studied the market performance at selected representative natural gas trading hubs in the u s and documented different price behaviors among various hubs with nymex prices as the competitive benchmark we found empirically that the spot price responses at some trading hubs were systematically asymmetric thus demonstrating a market advantage by either buyers or sellers we further found that the presence of market power was a very plausible explanation for this price behavior at some hubs

a note on international trade and market structure as exports become an increasing part of industry sales the determinants of a firm s international position become increasingly important tests have supported single factors such as product life cycle lutz and green 1983 as well as multi factor models to explain the determinants of industry imports and exports stern and maskus 1981 harkness and kyle 1975 baldwin 1971 this study also presents a multi factor analysis of the determinants of u s trade patterns this study utilized the spi strategic planning institute data set which allows research at the business unit product line level results indicate that productivity and product development are the principal characteristics of high export percentage business units these findings are especially true for nonconsumer industries thus to the degree that business are concerned over the short term costs of product development direct or indirect for example insurance government aid may be required to promote u s export industries

the eclectic paradigm of international production a restatement and some possible extensions this article reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the eclectic paradigm of international production over the past decade and restates its main tenets the second part of the article considers a number of possible extensions of the paradigm and concludes by asserting that it remains a robust general framework for explaining and analysing not only the economic rationale of economic production but many organisational and impact issues in relation to mne activity as well

malmquist indices of productivity change in the uk gas industry before and after privatization the uk government s privatization programme was justified in terms of potential efficiency gains this paper concentrates on measures of technical efficiency in the regions of the uk natural gas industry before and after privatization and the associated regulatory changes it uses non parametric frontier analysis and malmquist indices to show that the rate of productivity growth increased significantly after privatization however the differences in technical efficiency amongst regions remain suggesting that failure to break up the industry has sacrificed potential gains from direct competition or indirect competition through yardstick regulation

corporate failure prediction in the european energy sector a multicriteria approach and the effect of country characteristics this study examines the development of corporate failure prediction models for european firms in the energy sector using a large dataset from 18 countries the construction of the models is based on a multiple criteria decision aid mcda approach taking into account both ordinal criteria and nominal country sector effects the analysis is based on different modeling specifications first traditional financial variables are examined which are then extended with additional country level data related to the economic and business environment as well as data about the energy efficiency policies of the countries and the characteristics of their energy markets and networks the results indicate that energy related attributes have high discriminating power and add valuable information compared to the other attributes

a cluster analysis study based on profitability and financial indicators in the italian gas retail market in the european union the natural gas market is increasingly being liberalized the liberalization process is aimed at leading to lower prices and higher volumes and hence higher consumer welfare this paper focuses on the changes in performance in the natural gas retail market by analyzing the profit and financial position of the companies concerned over the first three years following the market liberalization the balance sheets of 105 italian companies in this sector are analyzed after which a cluster analysis is performed employing the most significant performance indexes the companies are then analyzed within each cluster with respect to age size geographical location and business diversification the results of our analysis show that the majority of companies attained a high level of performance although this positive outcome was mitigated by the gradual decrease of the average values of performance indicators during the period concerned the companies that achieve the best performances belong to longstanding business groups are medium large sized and are located in the north of the country regarding business diversification in the first two years the specialised companies outperformed the diversified companies

an analysis of technology productivity and regulatory distortion in the interstate natural gas transmission industry 1977 1985 the purpose of this paper is to provide the first comprehensive firm level analysis of cost structures and production in the interstate pipeline industry during the transition from price regulation to partial deregulation 1977 85 the regulatory changes during this period were numerous and complex we do not attempt to isolate the impact of any single change in regulation rather we examine how the regulatory environment as a whole affected the industry our study is based on a newly constructed panel of twenty four interstate pipeline firms we give particular attention to the impact of output change technical change scale economies and non optimal input allocation on total factor productivity growth and the implication of the 1978 natural gas policy act partial price decontrol relative to total wellhead price decontrol for residential commercial utility and industrial consumers of natural gas and for the transport industry itself 1998 john wiley sons ltd

the bullionist controversy theory and new evidence the bullionist controversy in the united kingdom is one of the first debates about the determination of the price level and the exchange rate under a paper money standard despite the importance of the debate in the development of monetary theory there remains little empirical evidence that uses modern multivariate time series techniques the evidence that does exist provides support for the anti bullionist position the purpose of this paper is to review the debate and develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that is capable of capturing key features of the 19th century british financial system the model is estimated using bayesian procedures to test the competing hypotheses the paper provides support for the bullionist position

us natural gas markets how efficient are they in this communication we discuss some key features of the natural gas cash and futures markets for natural gas in the usa we also summarize some important and interesting problems in these markets for example the market does not appear to be informationally efficient throughout the usa this lack of efficiency has been addressed by the establishment of a second futures contract market there is also a very active unregulated derivatives market in which options and swaps are bought and sold although the market has changed significantly to better respond to changes in market conditions there are still problems in the way that pipeline space is allocated by pipeline companies who still own the pipe to those companies that have rights to this space there are also problems in that prices for gas and transport are not transparent to many buyers and sellers moreover there are also important idiosyncracies and industry practices that impede progress none the less the different parts of the industry with different interests and expertise and the regulatory authority continue to work at crafting rules to improve business behaviour and performance

henry thornton and the development of classical monetary economics students of nineteenth century economics have held henry thornton in high esteem since his rediscovery by jacob viner and friedrich hayek in the 1920s thornton has been praised for the sophistication of his macroeconomic thinking a for the extent to which he developed ideas later associated with giants such as knut wicksell and j m keynes however the consensus has been that he had little effect on the development of british classical monetary economics i show that the consensus is wrong by demonstrating that thornton affected the course of classical thinking in important ways particularly through his influence on members of the banking school thornton was not simply a precursor of modern thought but was one of the dominant figures of classical monetary economics

profit productivity and price differential an international performance comparison of the natural gas transportation industry the objective of this paper is to evaluate the performance of natural gas transportation utilities focusing on the three key strategic performance measures of profit productivity and price differential we propose a methodology that expresses the three performance measures in a unified single equation using the edgeworth index the proposed methodology is applied to an international comparison of the performance of 28 natural gas transportation utilities operating in eight countries in which the business environments differ greatly the empirical results show the possible causes of performance differences and may shed some light on the direction of regulatory policy especially for developing countries that have relatively short histories in the natural gas industry such as korea

government spending interest rates prices and budget deficits in the united kingdom 1701 1918 abstract the british data from the early 1700s through wwi provide an unmatched opportunity for studying temporary changes in government purchases temporary increases which appeared mainly as wartime spending raised long term interest rates but significantly increased the growth rates of money and prices only during suspensions of the gold standard 1797 1821 and 1914 1918 temporary changes in military spending accounted for the bulk of budget deficits over the sample of more than 200 years i found only two major non war deficits one associated with compensation payments to slaveowners in 1835 1936 and the other with a dispute over the income tax in 1909 1910 interest rates did not react much to these exogenous deficits

an analysis of cost efficiency in swiss multi utilities this study presents an empirical analysis of the cost efficiency of a sample of swiss multi utilities operating in the distribution of electricity natural gas and water the multi utilities that operate in different sectors are characterized by a strong unobserved heterogeneity therefore the measurement of their performance poses an important challenge for the regulators the purpose of this paper is to study the potential advantages of recently developed panel data stochastic frontier models in the measurement of the level of efficiency for multi utility companies these models are estimated for a sample of 34 multi output utilities operating from 1997 to 2005 the alternative models are compared regarding the cost function slopes and inefficiency estimates for the inefficiency estimates the correlation between different models and the effect of econometric specification have been analyzed the results suggest that the inefficiency estimates are substantially lower when the unobserved firm specific effects are taken into account

everybody merges with somebody the wave of m as in the energy industry and the eu merger policy abstract almost all the main european energy companies have recently shown an unprecedented activism on financial markets and the wave of m as seems far from being over a sound understanding of the wave can provide hints on the future developments of the market and the effects on merger policy these operations are explained by several reasons ranging from the pan european players strategy to the creation of national champions from the objective to merge gas and electricity businesses convergence mergers to the aim of re building a vertical dimension of the industry after liberalization in face of such a broad range of motivations merger policy has to be applied consistently to each case and case law is developing to better address energy specific issues still the characteristics of the energy industry may allow for more economic insight and a longer term perspective in merger cases in order to guarantee that energy and merger policy are leading to the same objectives through different tools

rediscounting under aggregate risk abstract this paper compares three institutions that offer an elastic currency open market operations a discount window and a private banknote issuing clearinghouse in an economy with financial markets otherwise hampered by a lack of liquidity when this economy is subject to aggregate financial shocks these alternative forms of central banking are shown to differ in their implications for risk sharing interesting implications include i central bank losses and monetary innovations that are part of an efficient equilibrium and ii desirable quantity restrictions at the discount window

an empirical assessment of the swedish bullionist controversy in the eighteenth century a fierce political debate broke out in sweden about the causes of an extraordinary depreciation of the currency more specifically the deteriorating value of the swedish currency was discretionarily blamed on monetary causes e g the overissuing of banknotes or nonmonetary causes such as balance of payments deficits this paper provides a comprehensive empirical assessment of this so called swedish bullionist controversy the results of vector autoregressions suggest that increasing amounts of paper money did give rise to inflation and a depreciation of the exchange rate conversely nonmonetary factors were probably less important for these developments

the product life cycle and the export position of the united states the present study analyzed trade in 4 digit level manufacturing categories over time for 4 nations including the united states to ascertain the relevance of the product life cycle theory of such trade the level of technological input was controlled for the result indicate that the theory has at least some explanatory relevance for 3 of the 4 countries including the united states

a unified framework for monetary theory and policy analysis search theoretic models of monetary exchange are based on explicit descriptions of the frictions that make money essential however tractable versions of these models typically make strong assumptions that render them ill suited for monetary policy analysis we propose a new framework based on explicit micro foundations within which macro policy can be studied the framework is analytically tractable and easily quantifiable we calibrate the model to standard observations and use it to measure the cost of inflation we find that going from 10 percent to 0 percent inflation is worth between 3 and 5 percent of consumption much higher than previous estimates

multinational companies and international trade the impact of intrafirm shipment on u s foreign trade 1977 1982 this paper presents new data on the trading activities of multinational companies estimates of intrafirm shipments are developed for 1977 and 1982 from trade data contained in the u s government benchmark surveys of direct foreign investment the paper shows that intrafirm shipments comprised a significant share of u s international trade and contributed to the deficit pressure on the u s trade balance

international manufacturing strategies of u s multinationals a conceptual framework based on a four industry study drawing upon complementary streams of research from the international production and manufacturing strategy literature a conceptual framework was developed that identifies the major internal and external factors that may influence a firm s international manufacturing configuration imc decisions the framework was then examined using sixteen companies drawn from four distinct industry sectors the findings indicate that a firm s competitive priorities expressed as the differential emphasis placed on four key manufacturing performance priorities in addition to other key variables such as market orientation experience and product characteristics play important roles in the development of imc strategies

the product life cycle theory empirical evidence this paper presents 3 empirical tests of the product life cycle theory based on u s trade data and on a relatively new data series providing information about a larger number of products and at a lower level of aggregation than the data used previously the results of the tests strongly support the hypothesis that industrial product groups behave in the manner predicted by the product life cycle theory on world markets in the case of individual products however the results provide less support for the theory the policy implication is that development strategies should rely on industrial sectors rather than on individual commodities

productivity changes in the gas and fuel corporation of victoria abstract the study reveals that the total factor productivity in the gfcv continued to increase throughout the study period except for a brief period between 1983 84 and 1984 85 which was mainly the result of the decline in the industrial demand for gas and a decelerated growth rate in residendial demand the productivity gains were found to be highly sensitive to the rates of depreciation and discount rates assumed the estimated terms of trade suggest that the increase in gas prices was lower than the increase in the aggregate input prices the gfcv paid particularly to capital and labour however while the price index of reticulated gas increased to 2 17 the purchase price declined to 0 96 over the study period the productivity gains by the gfcv seem to have been shared with its customers

the riksbank emergency finance policy experimentation and sweden s reversal of fortune abstract at the beginning of the 18th century sweden was an imperial power that had just sustained a century of modest economic growth in 1800 sweden s empire was gone after a series of military defeats real gdp per capita had fallen to the same level as the early 1600s in other words the 18th century witnessed the end of the swedish empire and a startling reversal of economic progress in this paper i propose a possible explanation for both of these outcomes first i argue that sweden s limited fiscal capacity played an important role the creation of the riksbank should have facilitated government borrowing and military spending as the bank of england did for the british however the riksbank was not designed or equipped for this role i document the constraints on financing national defense through the riksbank and argue that the bank was ill equipped to finance an adequate national defense this explains the reversal of the empire second when the hats took power in the riksdag in 1739 they used the riksbank to give loans to firms which were financed through the issuance of bank notes the objective was to increase investment and economic activity i find no evidence that these loans had any effect on real gdp per capita however the resulting inflation has a negative and significant effect on output during the period of inconvertible paper money the combined evidence suggests that hat policy contributed to the decline in economic activity during the reversal of fortune

offshore sourcing reaction maturation and consolidation of u s multinationals the authors conducted a quasi longitudinal investigation of u s multinationals r d manufacturing offshore sourcing strategies and resultant global market performance implications utilizing comprehensive data collected by the 1977 1982 and 1989 benchmark surveys of u s direct investment abroad hypotheses were tested in a path analytic framework despite increased competition at home and abroad causing their global market share positions to weaken in recent years u s multinationals have maintained and even may have improved their global consolidated profitability levels by skillfully exploiting their technological prowess through technology transfer and off shore sourcing rapidly changing roles of u s parent firms and their foreign affiliates in technology development and global sourcing relationships portend a maturing yet arduous shift toward a global rationalization

the payments system liquidity and rediscounting in an economy where fiat money serves both as a medium of exchange and the means by which debts are cleared it is shown that nonoptimal equilibria of constrained liquidity may arise optimality may be restored by temporary expansions of the monetary base e g an active central bank discount window copyright 1996 by american economic association

performance based regulation of the electricity supply industry in hong kong an empirical efficiency analysis approach this paper presents an empirical efficiency analysis approach to analyze the efficiency and performance of utilities and its effects on prices under the price cap performance based regulation pbr model a data envelopment analysis dea like frontier based method is used to compute the total factor productivity with the malmquist productivity index results of case studies support the use of the approach to account for the relation of the x factor and the pbr model on the two power utilities in hong kong s electricity supply industry

modes of foreign entry a transaction cost analysis and propositions a frontier issue in international marketing is the appropriate choice of entry mode in foreign markets the objective of this paper is to offer a transaction cost framework for investigating the entry mode decision this framework provides 1 a theoretical basis for systematically interrelating the literature into propositions 2 propositions about interactions which resolve the apparently contradictory arguments advanced to date specifically the paper illustrates the feasibility of clustering 17 entry modes into the degree of control the mode provides the entrant proposes that the most appropriate i e most efficient entry mode is a function of the tradeoff between control and the cost of resource commitment advances testable propositions delimiting the circumstances under which each mode maximizes long term efficiency

the relationship between offshore sourcing and innovativeness of u s multinational firms an empirical investigation in increasingly complex global competition u s multinational firms have stepped up imports under items 806 30 and 807 00 of the tariff schedules of the united states as a part of offshore sourcing of components and finished products to serve the u s market