dairy tariff quota liberalization contrasting bilateral and most favored nation reform options we develop a highly disaggregated tariff line source differentiated partial equilibrium model of u s specialty cheese imports to investigate alternative reform options for tariffrate quotas a mixed complementarity framework is used to represent bilateral and multilateral tariff quota administration methods within the u s dairy industry the impact of liberalizing u s specialty cheese imports via bilateral and multilateral tariffrate quota expansions out of quota tariff cuts and simultaneous liberalization scenarios is evaluated we find that the path of liberalization is quite different depending on the reform approach undertaken the results have important policy implications in the agricultural negotiations

competition and corporate performance are people right to think that competition improves corporate performance my investigations indicate first that there are some theoretical reasons for believing this hypothesis to be correct but they are not overwhelming furthermore the existing empirical evidence on this question is weak however the results reported here based on an analysis of around 670 u k companies do provide some support for this view most important i present evidence that competition as measured by increased numbers of competitors or by lower levels of rents is associated with a significantly higher rate of total factor productivity growth

size age and firm growth in an infant industry the computer hardware industry in india abstract in contrast to the existing studies on the relationship of firm growth with size and age of the firm which typically focus on relatively mature industries in developed economies this study analyses firm growth patterns for an infant industry in a developing economy it is found that a age positively impacts growth which is the opposite of the result in previous studies b as in previous studies current size negatively impacts growth but the magnitude is much higher and c lagged size negatively impacts growth suggesting that fixed factors become a hindrance to growth in rapidly growing infant industries

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

a theory of firm growth learning capability knowledge threshold and patterns of growth abstract this paper focuses on the dual role of r d knowledge generation and the technological competence enhancing effect of r d and its implication for the endogenous evolution of r d productivity and the pattern of firm growth in particular based on the evolution of firm specific r d productivity or technological competence this paper derives a simple r d based model of firm growth capable of explaining various aspects of firm growth the model proposes three prototype patterns of firm growth depending on both firm and industry specific characteristics the former includes firm specific technological competence enhancing capability and the initial level of technological knowledge and the latter includes industry specific r d appropriability specifically firms with low technological competence enhancing capability tend to follow a convergent growth pattern in which firm growth gradually declines while firms with high technological competence enhancing capability tend to exhibit either a sustained or a vicious growth pattern depending on the initial size of their technological knowledge stock an empirical analysis of unique data on firm growth and technological capability provides supportive evidence for the role of technological competence enhancing capability in conditioning the pattern of firm growth

technological regimes and schumpeterian patterns of innovation this paper proposes that the specific pattern of innovative activities in an industry can be explained as the outcome of different technological learning regimes a technological regime is defined by the particular combination of technological opportunities appropriability of innovations cumulativeness of technical advances and properties of the knowledge base building upon the distinction between schumpeter mark i and schumpeter mark ii industries this paper provides empirical estimates of the relationships between indicators of the schumpeterian patterns of innovation concentration of innovative activities stability in the hierarchy of innovators and importance of new innovators and indicators of the variables defining technological regimes

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

commodity trade and international risk sharing how much do financial markets matter abstract this paper evaluates the social gains from international risk sharing in some simple general equilibrium models with output uncertainty a simulation model calibrated to selected moments of u s and japanese data estimates the incremental loss from a ban on international portfolio diversification to be on the order of 0 20 percent of output per year even the theoretical gains from asset trade may disappear under alternative sets of assumptions on preferences and technology the paper argues that the small magnitude of potential trade gains may help explain the apparently inconsistent findings of empirical studies on the degree of international capital mobility

macroeconomic consequences of farm support policies agricultural protectionism is a basic factor underlying the u s trade deficit third world debt and global underemployment yet despite the seriousness of the problem and attention given to it by many researchers little progress has been made in formulating and implementing policies to deal with it the scholars and experts here assembled present for the first time a quantification and analysis of the impact upon the world economy of reduction or elimination of agricultural protectionism they question why give the magnitude of the problem inferior policies endure despite the weight of evidence that they have failed the answer they derive is that there is no general understanding of the true cost of the failure and therefore it is necessary to initiate reform from outside agricultural circles

dynamic equilibrium with liquidity constraints this article studies an intertemporal economy with liquidity constrained and unconstrained individuals we use a stopping time approach to solve the finite horizonconstrained consumption portfolio problem with constant relative risk aversion and to examine the structure of equilibrium the impact of the constraint on the optimal consumption and the financing portfolio is assessed the equilibrium state price density is related to the exercise boundary of an american style contingent claim with nonlinear payoff this stopping time characterization enables us to prove the existence of an equilibrium and can be implemented numerically properties of equilibrium bond and stock returns are examined copyright 2003 oxford university press

on the relationship between firm size and export intensity export marketing literature supports the view that firm size is positively related to export intensity although the empirical findings have been mixed a number of theoretical arguments are used to support this proposition i e international marketing economies of scale limited managerial and financial resources of small firms decisionmaker s risk perception based on a large survey of the italian manufacturing industry the article falsifies the proposition and challenges some widely held assumptions in export marketing literature

corporate growth and industrial structures some evidence from the italian manufacturing industry this work analyses the properties of corporate growth in a large longitudinal sample of italian manufacturing firms in particular it focuses on the statistical properties of growth rates and on the influence of proxies for relative efficiency upon relative growth in line with previous work the emergence of fat tails in growth rate distributions and the idiosyncratic nature of autocorrelation coefficients confirm the existence of a structure in the growth process richer than the one normally assumed by the gibrat law hypothesis and suggest the presence of firm specific drivers of growth at the same time there is a remarkable puzzle concerning the absence of any negative relationship between size and growth variance and only weak influences of relative efficiencies upon growth dynamics

financial integration and the wealth effect of exchange rate fluctuations abstract recent years have witnessed a large increase in international financial integration in the form of largely offsetting cross holdings across countries we assess how such financial leverage affects the international transmission of monetary shocks and find that it leads to sizable welfare differentials that far exceed the impact due to nominal rigidities we document the relevance of the exact nature of holdings with bond holdings associated with larger effects than equity holdings the impact of financial leverage on welfare is also sensitive to the extent of exchange rate pass through and the substitutability between goods produced in different countries

the role of portfolio constraints in the international propagation of shocks we study the comovement among stock prices and exchange rates in a three good three country centre periphery dynamic equilibrium model in which the centre s agents face portfolio constraints we characterize equilibrium in closed form for a broad class of portfolio constraints solving for stock prices terms of trade and portfolio holdings we show that portfolio constraints generate wealth transfers between the periphery countries and the centre which increase the comovement of the stock prices across the periphery we associate this excess comovement caused by portfolio constraints with the phenomenon known as contagion the model generates predictions consistent with other important empirical results such as amplification and flight to quality effects copyright 2008 wiley blackwell

the relationship between firm growth size and age estimates for 100 manufacturing industries this study uses a sample of all firms operating in 100 manufacturing industries to examine some aspects of firm dynamics it finds that firm growth the variability of firm growth and the probability that a firm will fail decrease with firm age it also finds that firm growth decreases at a diminishing rate with firm size even after controlling for the exit of slow growing firms from the sample gibrat s law therefore fails although the severity of the failure decreases with firm size copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

age size growth and survival uk companies in the 1980s this paper examines growth and survival amongst quoted and unquoted u k companies in the period 1975 85 and compares the results with earlier u k and u s studies an examination of death rates shows that smaller companies had higher death rates but the largest and smallest companies were least vulnerable to takeover careful attention is therefore paid to problems of sample selection bias it is shown that smaller companies grew faster than larger companies that gibrat s law does not hold amongst smaller firms that age is negatively related to growth and that these results are not an artifact of sample selection bias copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

pses and the mix of measures to support farm incomes summary and conclusions in summary the mix of support provided to agriculture does matter when pses are to be cut across the board reductions in individual components of pses will have different implications for output exports land values and employment in different countries these differences can be systematically related to the type of instruments used to support agriculture for example cutting subsidies on an input such as fertilizer can result in greater long run reductions in output exports and employment in agriculture than would cuts in output subsidies of equal magnitude these differences may make it attractive for countries engaging in partial liberalization to change the mix of subsidies even as they reduce their aggregate pse in so doing they may be able to lessen or even eliminate some of the deleterious effects of reduced farm support for example the united states could maintain the demand for farm labour while cutting its aggregate pse in half by shifting the mix of farm support towards selected input subsidies by contrast there appears to be little incentive for substituting export subsidies for output subsidies under the pure pse approach proposed by professor tangermann et al this is because such a switch would have to be accompanied by further reductions in budgetary outlays in order to avoid exceeding the pse target agreed in negotiations

r d appropriability opportunity and market structure new evidence on some schumpeterian hypotheses one of the largest bodies of literature in the field of industrial organization is devoted to the interpretation and testing of several hypotheses advanced by joseph schumpeter 1950 concerning innovation and industrial market structure one set of hypotheses focuses on the role of firm size as a determinant of r d spending and the rate of technological advance another set focuses on the effect of market concentration on r d and technological advance in this paper we reexamine the latter set of hypotheses at the industry level using new data on r d appropriability and technological opportunity collected by levin et al 1984 in a survey of r d executives in 130 industries

an asset pricing view of external adjustment abstract recent literature has argued that conventional measures of external sustainability the trade balance and current account are misleading because they omit capital gains on net foreign asset positions we adjust the definition of the current account to include the capital gains and discuss how this may affect our thinking about external adjustment and sustainability we do so in the context of a two country macro finance model of pavlova and rigobon 2008a that allows exploration of the interconnections between equilibrium portfolios and external accounts dynamics we calibrate the model and find that it generates several testable implications some of which have already been validated empirically first we establish dynamic properties of the capital gains adjusted current account and show that they are fundamentally different from those of the conventional current account second we find that capital gains have a stabilizing effect on the trade balance and the current account finally we demonstrate that in response to a shock the conventional and the capital gains adjusted current accounts may move in opposite directions

international portfolios capital accumulation and foreign assets dynamics despite the liberalization of capital ows among oecd countries equity home bias remains sizable we depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias transaction costs that impede international diversi cation and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk sharing so that there is little incentive to hold diversi ed portfolios we show that the interaction of the following ingredients generates a realistic equity home bias capital accumulation shocks to the e ciency of physical investment as well as international trade in stocks and bonds in our model domestic stocks are used to hedge uctuations in local wage income terms of trade risk is hedged using bonds denominated in local goods and in foreign goods in contrast to related models the low level of international diversi cation does not depend on strongly countercyclical terms of trade the model also reproduces the cyclical dynamics of foreign asset positions and of international capital ows

global models applied to agricultural and trade policies a review and assessment the continuing process of global integration bears implications for farmers and related supplying and processing industries in all parts of the world but also for the rest of the world economy an assessment of agricultural and trade policy impacts is bound to be complex and is often supported by quantitative modeling analysis this article provides an assessment of the present state of applied modelling in the area of trade and agricultural policies we provide in this paper a comparative assessment of alternative modelling approaches considering a total of 16 partial equilibrium and general equilibrium models the assessment includes theoretical modelling foundations datasets employed and institutional aspects such as model maintenance and dissemination of results a typology of models is provided by structuring the assessment along a clear set of evaluation criteria

asset prices and exchange rates in this paper we study the implications of introducing demand shocks and trade in goods into an otherwise standard international asset pricing model trade in goods gives rise to an additional channel of international propagation through the terms of trade absent in traditional single good asset pricing models the inclusion of demand shocks helps overturn many unrealistic implications of existing international flnance models in which productivity shocks are the sole source of uncertainty our model generates a rich set of implications on how stock bond and foreign exchange markets co move we solve the model in closed form which yields a system of equations that can be readily estimated empirically our estimation validates the main predictions of the theory

do small plants grow faster evidence from the taiwan electronics industry abstract the relationships between plant size age labor productivity and growth rates are examined for a sample of taiwan electronics plants plant growth is negatively related to both size and age and positively related to labor productivity

efficiency of alternative policies for the ec s common agricultural policy the common agricultural policy cap of the european community ec is facing a crisis from budgetary and political pressures this study analyzes the relative efficiency of four policy options discussed at the recent emergency summit in brussels including a price reduction coresponsibility levies production controls and a two price plan these are assessed in terms of their efficiency in achieving producer welfare a two price plan is superior to a production quota only at lower producer income goals a price reduction policy is more efficacious than a coresponsibility levy but both are shown to be inferior to either quotas or a two price plan

international business cycles with endogenous incomplete markets backus kehoe and kydland 1992 baxter and crucini 1995 and stockman and tesar 1995 find two major discrepancies between standard international business cycle models with complete markets and the data in the models cross country correlations are much higher for consumption than for output while in the data the opposite is true and cross country correlations of employment and investment are negative while in the data they are positive this paper introduces a friction into a standard model that helps resolve these anomalies the friction is that international loans are imperfectly enforceable any country can renege on its debts and suffer the consequences for future borrowing to solve for equilibrium in this economy with endogenous incomplete markets the methods of marcet and marimon 1999 are extended incorporating the friction helps resolve the anomalies more than does exogenously restricting the assets that can be traded

home bias in open economy financial macroeconomics standard theory would predict that investors hold a well diversified portfolio of equities across the world but despite the process of financial globalization investors still hold a disproportionate share of local equities in their portfolio the equity home bias french and poterba 1991 we review the various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon in the context of recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that have allowed to incorporate sophisticated international portfolio choices in standard two country general equilibrium models we refer to this literature as open economy financial macroeconomics we focus on three broad classes of explanations i hedging motives in frictionless financial markets real exchange rate and non tradable income risk ii asset trade costs in international financial markets such as transaction costs differences in tax treatments between national and foreign assets iii informational frictions and behavioural biases these recent developments raise the need for new portfolio facts beyond the equity home bias and we will present some new evidence on cross border asset holdings across different types of assets equities bonds and bank lending we also present some new micro data on institutional holdings of equity at the fund level these data should inform macroeconomic modelling of the open economy and a growing literature of models of delegated investment

portfolio and welfare consequences of debt market dominance the ability to issue debt that pays in units of the domestic good leads a country to accumulate a large and negative net foreign asset position while maintaining a positive position in equity this debt market advantage also helps to explain the weak relationship between the real exchange rate and relative consumption our stylized model matches the key facts about the u s international portfolio the u s real exchange rate and explains nearly 50 of the observed variation in the valuation effects we find that taxing bond market transactions increases the volatility of the exchange rate capital flows and allocations in contrast taxing equity positions stabilizes the exchange rate and capital flows while having little impact on the allocation lastly the paper describes a global solution method for portfolio problems under incomplete markets

challenges in quantitative economic analysis in support of multilateral trade negotiations abstract a wide range of economic analysis of agricultural trade liberalization was performed prior to and during the uruguay round of trade negotiations views differ as to the effectiveness of this research although most would agree that it became less relevant as the negotiations progressed this paper reviews the contributions of economists to the trade liberalization debate with an emphasis on the quantitative assessment of multilateral agricultural trade liberalization with a new round of agricultural trade negotiations scheduled to begin in 1999 it is crucial that the quantitative work required to support these negotiations begin in the near future the authors conclude that the uruguay round outcome provides numerous challenges and opportunities in analyzing the traditional agenda of agricultural trade liberalization in addition new issues will be added to the agenda of the next round of negotiations these include trade and the environment competition policy and intellectual property rights it is important that economists begin to develop a research agenda that can address these issues and become activists in addressing these topics in public forums

cross border returns differentials were the u s to persistently earn substantially more on its foreign investments u s claims than foreigners earn on their u s investments u s liabilities the likelihood that the current environment of sizeable global imbalances will evolve in a benign manner increases however we find that the returns differential of u s claims over u s liabilities is far smaller than previously reported and importantly is near zero for portfolio equity and debt securities for portfolio securities we confirm our finding using a separate dataset on the actual foreign equity and bond portfolios of u s investors and the u s equity and bond portfolios of foreign investors in the context of equity and bond portfolios we find no evidence that the u s can count on earning more on its claims than it pays on its liabilities finally we reconcile our finding of a near zero returns differential with observed patterns of cumulated current account deficits the net international investment position and the net income balance jel codes f3

on the sources and significance of interindustry differences in technological opportunities abstract the set of technological opportunities in a given industry is one of the fundamental determinants of technical advance in that line of business we examine the concept of technological opportunity and discuss three categories of sources of those opportunities advances in scientific understanding and technique technological advances originating in other industries and in other private and governmental institutions and feedbacks from an industry s own technological advances data from the yale survey on industrial research and development are used to measure the strength of various sources of technological opportunity and to discern interindustry differences in the importance of these sources we find that interindustry differences in the strength and sources of technological opportunities contribute importantly to explanations of cross industry variation in r d intensity and technological advance

the effects of trade liberalisation abstract the liberalisation of agricultural trade has been an important component of the uruguay round of multilateral trade negotiations under the gatt a considerable amount of research effort has been expended on estimating the costs of agricultural protectionism most of this activity has been based on a partial equilibrium framework with conventional quantification of the distributive benefits and costs to be expected from liberalisation attempts at general equilibrium analysis have been fewer but provide evidence of the economy wide gains from the removal of protection whilst these analyses have had a powerful influence on the nature of the political discussions on agricultural trade policy they have not helped define the details of politically acceptable alternatives to current agricultural supports the reasons are the technical economic data and statistical problems which restrict the interpretation of results to broad generalisations and the failure of analyses to focus on the most important political concerns indicating these concerns may help define the focus of future research but it is doubted if conventional economic analysis has very much more to offer

financial intermediation international risk sharing and reserve currencies abstract i model the equilibrium risk sharing between countries with varying financial development the most financially developed country takes greater risks because its financial intermediaries deal with funding problems better in good times the more financially developed country consumes more and runs a trade deficit financed by the higher financial income that it earns as compensation for taking greater risk during global crises it suffers heavier losses its currency emerges as the reserve currency because it appreciates during crises thus providing a good hedge i provide evidence that financial net worth plays a crucial role in understanding this asymmetric risk sharing jel e44 f14 f32 g01 g15 g21

equilibrium asset prices and exchange rates abstract in a two country two good world we construct an intertemporal international general equilibrium for two logarithmic representative agents financial markets are fully integrated and independently incomplete the equilibrium expected rate of change of the exchange rate increases with the differential of interest rates and the volatility of the domestic equity markets and decreases with the covariance between domestic and foreign equity markets the equilibrium volatility of the exchange rate is the sum of the volatilities due to idiosyncratic factors in the financial markets and a term that represents the difference of weights in the common international factor

the technological competencies of the world s largest firms complex and path dependent but not much variety firm specific technological competencies help explain why firms are different how they change over time and whether or not they are capable of remaining competitive data on more than 400 of the world s largest firms show that their technological competencies have the following characteristics 1 1 they are typically multi field and becoming more so over time with competencies ranging beyond their product range in technical fields outside their distinctive core 2 2 they are highly stable and differentiated with both the technology profile and the directions of localised search strongly influenced by firms principal products 3 3 the rate of search is influenced by both the firm s principal products and the conditions in its home country however considerable unexplained variance suggests scope for managerial choice these findings confirm the importance of complexity and path dependency in the accumulation of firm specific technological competencies and show that managers are heavily constrained in the directions of their technological search they also show the limits of the notion of competition through variety given that the same specific field of technological competence is often essential to the development of a range of possible product configurations technological imperatives still exist

international capital flows abstract the surge in international asset trade since the early 1990s has lead to renewed interest in models with international portfolio choice we develop the implications of portfolio choice for both gross and net international capital flows in the context of a simple two country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model we focus on the time variation in portfolio allocation following shocks and resulting capital flows endogenous time variation in expected returns and risk which are the key determinants of portfolio choice affect capital flows in often subtle ways the model is consistent with a broad range of empirical evidence an additional contribution of the paper is to overcome the technical difficulty of solving dsge models with portfolio choice by developing a broadly applicable solution method

efficient redistribution through commodity markets efficiency in redistribution is measured in terms of deadweight loss generated per dollar of economic surplus transferred between consumers and producers of a commodity by means of market intervention the implications of supply and demand elasticities for efficiency in redistribution are examined with special attention to the comparison of production control and deficiency payment programs the results may be used to aid in the evaluation of commodity programs and as a basis for consideration of the hypothesis that observed policies are efficient given the political power of interest groups

the risk premium and long run global imbalances this study proposes that heterogeneous household portfolio choices within a country and across countries offer an explanation for global imbalances we construct a stochastic growth multi country model in which heterogeneous agents face the following restrictions on asset trade first the degree of us equity market participation is higher than that of the rest of the world second a fraction of households in each country maintains a fixed share of equity in its portfolios in our calibrated model which matches the us net foreign asset position and the equity premium the average us household loads up more aggregate risk than the average foreign household by investing in risky assets abroad and issuing risk free assets as a result the us is compensated by a high risk premium and runs trade deficits even as a debtor country the long run average trade deficit in our model accounts for 50 of the observed us trade deficit

competition imitation and growth with step by step innovation is more intense product market competition and imitation good or bad for growth this question is addressed in the context of an endogenous growth model with step by step innovations in which technological laggards must first catch up with the leading edge technology before battling for technological leadership in the future in contrast to earlier schumpeterian models in which innovations are always made by outsider firms who earn no rents if they fail to innovate and become monopolies if they do innovate here we find first that the usual schumpeterian effect of more intense product market competition pmc is almost always outweighed by the increased incentive for firms to innovate in order to escape competition so that pmc has a positive effect on growth second that a little imitation is almost always growth enhancing as it promotes more frequent neck and neck competition but too much imitation is unambiguously growth reducing the model thus points to complementary roles for competition anti trust policy and patent policy

the evolution of intraindustry firm heterogeneity insights from a process study in this study we propose a process framework for understanding the evolution of intraindustry firm heterogeneity drawing on a longitudinal study of the development of the cellular telephone servi

the external wealth of nations measures of foreign assets and liabilities for industrial and developing countries abstract although capital flows are closely monitored surprisingly little is known about the accumulated stocks of foreign assets and liabilities held by various countries especially in the developing world this paper constructs estimates of foreign assets and liabilities and their equity and debt subcomponents for a sample of 67 industrial and developing countries it characterizes the stylized facts of international balance sheets and asks whether there are trends in net foreign asset positions and shifts in debt equity ratios over time finally it explores the sensitivity of estimated stock positions to the treatment of valuation effects not captured in balance of payments data

asset stock accumulation and the sustainability of competitive advantage reply authors reply to comments regarding their paper dierickx i k cool 1989 asset stock accumulation and the sustainability of competitive advantage management sci

current accounts in debtor and creditor countries the authors reexamine a classic question in international economics what is the current account response to a transitory income shock such as a temporary improvement in the terms of trade a transfer from abroad or unusually high production to answer this question they construct a world equilibrium model in which productivity varies across countries and international borrowing and lending take place to exploit good investment opportunities despite its conventional ingredients the model generates the novel prediction that favorable income shocks lead to current account deficits in debtor countries and current account surpluses in creditor countries evidence from thirteen oecd countries broadly supports this theoretical prediction

reconsidering agri environmental policy permitted by the uruguay round agreement agri environmental policies are increasingly being used to redress the balance between jointly produced agricultural and environmental outputs and are permitted by the uruguay round ur agreement with the general provision that they not distort trade in this paper we argue that any market consequences of efficient welfare enhancing agri environmental policies should not be considered trade distorting to consider them so is inconsistent with economic efficiency and with ecological integrity social cost benefit analysis cba is a more appropriate test and guide of trade consistency for agri environmental policies and using trade effects as the test may not enhance social welfare moreover specific provisions in the ur agreement restricting payments under agri environmental policies to opportunity costs are not warranted on economic efficiency grounds and consign the environment to a status subsidiary to agricultural output

firm dynamics in manufacturing and services a broken mirror this article represents a first attempt in exploring firm dynamics in the service industry as a whole a huge body of empirical literature is focused on manufacturing firms while only recent contributions shed some light in selected services sectors using a unique data set from the italian national institute for social security inps we compare the patterns of entry growth and survival performance of firms belonging to the manufacturing and to the service industry it turns out that industry dynamics in services in terms of stylized facts seem to mirror the one in manufacturing moreover the positive impact of firm size on survival is reduced when age is controlled for suggesting the existence of a learning mechanism more pronounced in manufacturing than in services copyright 2007 oxford university press

free trade old and new challenges the paper analyses the old and new challenges to the theory and policy of free trade the old challenges have sought to undermine the case for free trade by citing one or another type of market imperfection thus the postwar period has seen two such challenges factor market imperfections were analysed in the 1950s to 197os product market imperfections in the i980s the new challenges are twofold one comes from the demands for fair trade as a precondition for free trade the other from the concern that free trade while efficient immiserises the unskilled in the richer countries having given a harry johnson lecture four years ago in london i was startled to be invited to give yet another one today but then i recalled his unmatched productivity his articles continued to be published even after his death the pipelines in several journals being full of them it is only appropriate then that he be honoured many times over also in these days of preoccupation with increasing returns to scale such a proliferation of lectures in the memory of a great economist is doubly fitting since harry johnson was in the english tradition of taking his theory from the real world s problems and then taking it back to talk penetratingly about them i thought it appropriate to address the earlier johnson lecture to the threats posed currently to the multilateral trading system by increasing resort

consumption and portfolio policies with incomplete markets and short sale constraints the infinite dimensional case abstract we employ a martingale approach to study a dynamic consumption portfolio problem in continuous time with incomplete markets and short sale constraints we introduce a notion of minimax local martingale and transform the dynamic problem into a static problem of maximizing expected utility over the consumption bundles that satisfy a single budget constraint formed using that measure we establish the existence of and characterize the minimax local measure provide sufficient conditions for the dynamic consumption portfolio problem to have a solution and relate the optimal policies to the solution of quasi linear partial differential equation

global models of trade in agriculture and related environmental modelling a review and assessment the continuing process of global integration bears implications for farmers and related supplying and processing industries in all parts of the world but also for the rest of the world economy an assessment of agricultural and trade policy impacts is bound to be complex and is often supported by quantitative modeling analysis this article provides an assessment of the present state of applied modelling in the area of trade and agricultural policies we provide in this paper a comparative assessment of alternative modelling approaches considering a total of 16 partial equilibrium and general equilibrium models the assessment includes theoretical modelling foundations datasets employed and institutional aspects such as model maintenance and dissemination of results a typology of models is provided by structuring the assessment along a clear set of evaluation criteria

why are exchange rates so smooth a household finance explanation abstract empirical moments of asset prices and exchange rates imply that pricing kernels are almost perfectly correlated across countries otherwise observed real exchange rates would be too smooth for high sharpe ratios however the cross country correlation among macro fundamentals is weak we reconcile these facts in a two country stochastic growth model with heterogeneous households and a home bias in consumption in our model only a small fraction of households trade domestic and foreign equities we show that this mechanism can quantitatively account for the smoothness of exchange rates in the presence of volatile pricing kernels and weakly correlated macro fundamentals

the role of knowledge in r d efficiency past research has recognized that both demand and capability influence the allocation of r d resources scholars have had an easier time getting a grip on demand than on capability while it has been recognized that knowledge is an important part of capability to date formalization of knowledge and its role in r d activity has been unsatisfactory this paper models the role of knowledge in r d various sources of such knowledge are considered the model throws a different light on analyses that employ a knowledge capital stock and also illuminates the dual private and public nature of technological knowledge

learning and the sources of corporate growth this paper explores the link between learning and corporate growth by developing different models of learning and showing that they produce observably different models of corporate growth using data on the growth of a number of firms in the us automobile industry during the 20th century we compare these different models of growth in an effort to identify the major sources of learning which these firms seem to have relied on although there are interesting differences between growth processes before and after the second world war the basic conclusion that we are drawn to is that learning in this sector is largely unsystematic and opportunistic

a critical assessment of supply demand models of agricultural trade we offer a critical assessment of static deterministic reduced form supply demand sd models of agricultural trade a commonly used and well documented model has significant limitations no explicit treatment of factor mobility between farm and nonfarm sectors nonzero profits in some sectors no substitutability among feedstuffs in livestock sectors violation of the law of one price small marketing margins for some commodities and incomplete coverage of the agricultural sector such limitations have significant impacts on the magnitude and direction of projected world price and welfare changes we believe agricultural policy analysis should first focus on the remediation of these limitations before proceeding to more complex issues like dynamics and uncertainty

on trees and logs abstract in this paper we contrast the main workhorse model in asset pricing theory the lucas 1978 tree model lt model to a benchmark model in financial equilibrium theory the real assets model ra model it is commonly believed that the two models entail similar conclusions since the lt model is a special case of the ra model but this is simply wrong implications of these models can be strikingly at odds indeed under the widely used log linear specification of households preferences we show that for a large set of initial endowments the lt model even with potentially complete financial markets admits only peculiar financial equilibria in which the stock market is completely degenerate in that all stocks offer the same investment opportunity and yet allocation is pareto optimal we investigate why the lt model is so much at variance with the ra model and uncover new results on uniqueness of financial equilibria and introduction of portfolio constraints obtaining in the lt model but not in the ra model