the limits of explanation testing the internalization theory of the multinationial enterprise the paper explores the difficulties of testing the internalization approach in the modern theory of the multinational enterprise the structure of the theory is elaborated and the conclusion drawn that testing cannot occur at the most general theoretical level but that the theory requires careful restricting assumptions to be placed on it to allow rigorous testing several empirical circumstances would constitute refutation if they could be shown to hold however the use of unconventional cases or outliers does not constitute disproof more rigour is required in formulating and testing the theory but the current verdict on the theory must be not disproven

the pricing of durable exhaustible resources partial or total durability characterizes a large class of exhaustible resources hotelling s r percent rule will apply to a durable resource produced in a competitive market but will not apply if the resource is produced in a monopolistic market however the r percent rule does not mean that price is steadily rising it is shown that in general the competitive market price will fall initially as the stock in circulation increases and later will rise as the stock decreases and eventually depreciates toward zero after production ceases accounting for durability may thus help explain the u shaped long term price profiles observed for many resources 11 references 3 figures

nonrenewable resource scarcity nonrenewable resource theory often is summarized by hotelling s rule this paper reviews theoretical extensions and empirical investigations of resource extraction models observed data are often inconsistent with the hotelling rule suggesting that other characteristics of nonrenewable resource supply including exploration heterogeneous ore quality technological progress and capital investment are important determinants of the dynamic behavior of resource prices given the persistent recurrence of concern about nonrenewable resource scarcity measures of nonrenewable resource scarcity and the empirical evidence for the time trends of those measures are reviewed finally the implications of nonrenewable resource scarcity for economic growth are examined

natural resource prices will they ever turn up abstract natural resource theory predicts that natural resource rents should increase over time however technical progress in resource extraction environmental constraints or great natural abundance could result in stagnant or declining product prices thus there is no theoretical reason to believe that product prices will rise in the near future the prediction of product prices by time series methods is shown to depend critically upon whether the series are modeled as difference or trend stationary dickey fuller and lagrange multiplier tests are used to show that the series are difference stationary long and short sample series are tested trend stationary modeling strongly predicts rising resource prices the result from difference stationary modeling is that there is only a weak supposition that natural resource prices will rise

discrimination competition and loan performance in fha mortgage lending this study tests for the presence of prejudicial or noneconomic discrimination on the part of mortgage lenders by evaluating the performance of home mortgage loans the approach differs from that of previous studies of loan performance in that it is based on the proposition that noneconomic discrimination should be more pronounced in less competitive lending environments while statistical discrimination should not using a rich set of fha insured loan records and measures of local market concentration to proxy the competitive environment we test for the prediction of better loan performance by minority borrowers relative to white borrowers in more concentrated markets we argue that this approach substantially reduces the potential for omitted variable bias that has cast a shadow on previous studies of lending discrimination results fail to reject the null hypothesis of no noneconomic discrimination

exporting does sales volume make a difference this research examines the effect that the size of a firm has on export activities perceived problems in exporting and attitudes toward exporting the results indicate that broad generalizations concerning the size of firms and exporting appear to be inappropriate

importer behavior the neglected counterpart of international exchange international exchange is a two sided coin involving exporters and importers however a systematic search of the academic literature reveals a striking imbalance while exporter behavior has been extensively studied importer behavior remains a largely neglected area of study even though importers are playing an ever more important often dominant role in consummating trade transactions in this article we assert that this neglect stems from two critical but flawed assumptions the first is that exporters are the driving force behind international trade transactions and the second is that importers follow the neoclassical economics theory of rational choice in international sourcing

explaining the international intensity and global diversity of early stage technology based firms abstract early stage technology based firms are confronted with the complexity of foreign markets and global competition from their earliest stages of development not only must technology entrepreneurs keep pace with ever changing technology based product offerings but they must also simultaneously stay abreast of competitors and industry trends in multiple countries we surveyed 75 small technology based firms in ontario to evaluate their international activities and try to explain both the intensity of their foreign sales the percent of total sales coming from foreign sources as well as the global diversity of the markets in which they operate the number of major regional areas from which they derive revenue our findings suggest that resources necessary to pursue international sales have an important impact on both foreign market intensity and diversity in contrast however attitudes towards foreign markets helped to explain international intensity but not global diversity additionally firm age was positively associated with global diversity but not international intensity these findings support the notion of small technology firms being instant internationals but suggest that proceeding to the next step achieving global diversity requires significantly greater time and resources in line with prior empirical research these firms tended to increase their international intensity and diversity as they became larger in contrast with what the literature suggests however firms utilizing strategic alliances were no more active internationally than those not using strategic alliances finally government assistance helped to explain the international intensity of these firms but not the global diversity these results help managers researchers and shapers of public policy better understand the international activities of early stage technology firms given the relationship between attitudes and international intensity there appears to be some opportunity associated with trying to influence the attitudes of ceos regarding initial expansion into international markets for firms to become globally diverse however there is a greater dependency on the availability of resources as well as accumulated business experience managers should recognize the pattern this suggests and perhaps be leery of becoming too globally diverse too quickly overall the relationship between size and foreign activities suggests that growth opportunities are linked to international markets although some broad relationships are suggested regarding the need for collaboration and government support further research is necessary to understand the use of strategic alliances as well as government assistance in both international market intensity and global diversity

credit and banking structure asian and african american experience in los angeles this paper considers whether the paucity of bank branches in heavily african american communities and the lack of a robust africanamerican banking sector may be among the factors impeding these communities economic development while activists often claim that these factors reduce credit flows in african american communities there are reasons to think that such claims may lack merit for one thing technological advances have permitted banks to make loans geographically distant from their branch offices and also have allowed many nonbanks to enter credit markets further many immigrants especially from east asia have succeeded on the basis of informal financial arrangements nurtured in ethnic enclaves therefore informal intraethnic resources not banks per se may be the key to ethnic groups access to credit and capital ethnic enclaves are of undoubted historical importance for many ethnic groups but they may no longer be an important forn of social organization roger waldinger 1993 timothy bates 1997 in turn has shown that successful asian american small businesses rely more on equity capital and formal financial institutions credit than on family or lending circle funds are formnal banking structures important in minorities access to credit this question is answered here by examining recent experience in multi ethnic los angeles los angeles has seen a sizable inflow of asian immigrants who no longer cluster in the inner city but have been expanding into suburban communities several asian ethnoburbs wei li 1997 have arisen in part due to the formal economic institutions spawned by ethnic business networks including many asian american banks yu zhou 1996 dymski et al 1998 suggest the termn ethnobank to denote banks that are owned or controlled by members of ethnic minority groups and which primarily provide financial services to ethnic businesses and residents why might ethnobanks play a special role in ethnic communities economic activities until the civil rights era etimic banks fell into two categories african american banks focused on customers left unserved because of segregation and racial discrimination lisa ammons 1996 while asian american banks supported exportimport activities peter kwong 1987 civilb rights laws and desegregation made mainstrea banks more accessible to minority customers before deregulation and the informationprocessing revolution banks delivered credit and other financial services through multipurpose branches these solved the principal agent problems inherent in credit contracts by building up localized knowledge rooted in sustained bank customer relationships but banks have increasingly established centralized loandecision processes emphasizing standardized public information not informal private information for many banks bank branches are now primarily venues for selling financial products not hubs for gathering information and making loan decisions consequently banks now open and maintain branches in what angela chang et al 1997 ternm rational herding pattems t discussants robert avery federal reserve board elijah brewster federal reserve bank of chicago darryl getter u s naval academy sonya williams stanton ohio state university

empirical investigation of the long term movement of resource prices a preliminary report abstract this note reports the results of an investigation into the long run movements of natural resource prices and their relationship to interest rates and extraction costs the results do not support the equilibrium type hotelling rule but rather a more general asset market approach

evidence on discrimination in mortgage lending much of the controversy about whether mortgage lenders discriminate against minorities can be explained in terms of the confusion about how to define discrimination based on the legal definition careful studies of loan denial rates such as that done by the federal reserve bank of boston represent an appropriate method for testing for discrimination by lenders based on that study it is quite clear that lenders discriminate the fact that minorities have higher default rates on average than whites is irrelevant to the interpretation of the race coefficient in such models nonetheless more research on and discussion about the relationship between the race of the applicant and delinquencies defaults and losses would be desirable

determinants of the low sme loan approval rate in croatia the paper proposes a new methodological framework for investigating consistency in loan assessment decisions and determinants of loan approval based on structural equation modelling and covariance structure analysis we focus on a governmental sme loan programme in croatia and investigate possible reasons for low loan approval rate that occurred in spite of interest rates subsidisation and sufficient supply of the loan funds the novelty of the methodological approach taken is that it enables simultaneous investigation of the determinants of the loan approval and testing for consistency in the loan assessment decisions which need not be assumed we test several hypotheses about consistency in the loan approval decisions and lending preferences in croatia the empirical findings reject overall consistency of criteria but indicate a preference toward smaller loans among all sme loan requests banks preferred smaller firms that requested smaller loans the results suggest that individual banks differ in their criteria and in their loan size preferences and that there is no positive correlation between the bank s size and its loan size preference

impact of ownership on the international involvement of smes this paper analyses the relationship between the internationalisation strategies of smes and types of ownership different types of ownership affect firms and this in turn will influence the internationalisation strategy adopted using a sample of spanish smes our results show that internationalisation is negatively related to family ownership and positively related to corporate ownership we have also observed that the presence of a corporate blockholder in family firms encourages internationalisation these results support the idea that ownership type influences the decision to internationalise

the relationship between firm size and export behavior revisited many academic studies and government leaders are asking small and medium sized firms to become more involved in exports unfortunately the role that can be played by smaller firms is unclear despite the vast number of studies on size and export behavior discrepancies in study findings and the absence of variance statistics prevent researchers from understanding the importance of size this study has sought to examine the direct and indirect effects of firm size by examining three dimensions of export behavior propensity of export countries exporting to and export attitudes for 14 072 canadian manufacturers the results indicate that while firm size is positively related to all dimensions of export behavior its importance is limited as the amount of variance explained is modest

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

scarcity efficiency and disequilibrium in resource markets possible interpretations of the concept of scarcity in extractive resource markets are presented and then related to traditional economic ideas of efficient patterns of resource use sources of inefficiency in resource markets are then considered with the main emphasis being on disequilibrium various simple models of disequilibrium suggest that resource markets are more stable if traders expectations are based on quantity rather than price information so that the provision of such information increases efficiency

commodity and developing country terms of trade what does the long run show recently the debate surrounding the commodity net barter terms of trade and the terms of trade of developing countries has entered a new phase in this journal spraos i980 presents evidence of a stable declining commodity terms of trade and sapsford i985 although fl nding instability in the work of spraos argues in support of the stable declining terms of trade hypothesis grilli and yang i988 henceforth gy also provide evidence supporting this view and state the implications of this finding for developing country terms of trade a major contribution of gy is a published set of data on the main price indices with a high degree of consistency for the whole century 1 however cuddington and urzua i989 in thisjournal illustrate that the hypothesis of a secular deterioration in the commodity terms of trade is not robust to the alternative claim that there was a once and for all shift in commodity prices in the period i920 i after taking this shift into account these authors find little evidence to support the view of a secular decline 2 this debate has important implications for the prebisch singer hypothesis of a stable declining commodity terms of trade see for instance prebisch i 950 it also has implications for both development and stabilisation strategies adopted by commodity dependent developing countries a central issue in this analysis is the order of integration of the commodity terms of trade a time series is said to be integrated of order o i o if its mean and variance are constant or roughly speaking if the series is stationary a time series is said to be i n if the series requires first differencing n times before a stationary series is obtained alternatively if adding a time trend is sufficient to induce stationarity the series is termed trend stationary a trend stationary series implies that the variable in question simply adjusts around a constant growth path but an i i series is truly non stationary and displays very different properties a commonly cited example of an 1 i series is the random walk the order of integration of a single time series is related to the idea of cointegration of a number of time series consider two variables x and y that are not themselves i o but are of the same order of integration if the residuals from regressing x on y or vice versa are i o or roughly speaking if the residuals are stationary it can be concluded that the two variables are cointegrated in turn this implies that there is some form of equilibrium

natural resource economics under the rule of hotelling abstract natural resource stocks held in situ are physical assets equilibrium in the assets market requires that their rates of return be such that their owners are just willing to hold on to them rather than invest elsewhere i discuss a number of factors relating to the evolution of extraction costs to the durability of the resource to market structure and to uncertainty that are important in correctly characterizing the rate of return on holding exhaustible natural resource stocks the emphasis is put on how those factors can potentially help bridge the gap between the basic hotelling s rule of natural resource exploitation and the historical behaviour of the flow price of a number of resources i also highlight some theoretical and empirical issues that need further attention

price expectations ore quality selection and the supply of a nonrenewable resource abstract economic models of depletion imply that the present value price of a resource and the quality of extracted ore should be directly related the empirical evidence is that in the short run the average quality of extracted ore and in some cases metal output decline in response to a price increase this paper examines a model of extraction with heterogeneous ore quality within a deposit and revised price expectations in which this seemingly paradoxical supply response is rationalized as the outcome of ore quality selection which maximizes the present value of the mine

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

trends and cycles in the net barter terms of trade a new approach this study has two objectives first it uses time series techniques including unit root tests to reexamine the classic prebisch singer hypothesis that the relative prices of primary commodities in terms of manufactured goods are characterized by secular deterioration second commodity price movements are decomposed into permanent and cyclical components using the beveridge and nelson 1981 technique the latter information is valuable when assessing the viability of commodity stabilization funds and formulating countercyclical macroeconomic policy responses to commodity booms and busts copyright 1989 by royal economic society

an investment model of natural resource markets over the last decade there has been an increasing interest in natural resource economics to some extent this can be ascribed to a general concern with the environment but an important cause was the large price increases for resources in the early 1970s the observed price jumps can be understood as a belated recognition of the scarcity of resources but they can also be viewed as shortor medium term phenomena arising from demand shocks and in the case of petroleum cartelization in markets with slow supply responses a jump in demand or a drop in foreign supplies would result in a sharp immediate price increase even in the absence of any long term resource scarcity the purpose of the present analysis is to try and assess the absolute and relative importance of these two potentially distinctive features of resource markets depletability and slow supply adjustment most of the empirical analysis in the literature examines resource markets from the hotelling 1939 asset market perspective by comparing observed price paths to the equilibrium price path in its simplest form the hotelling model leads to the rule of equality between interest rates and rates of resource price growth however the seminal empirical study by barnett and morse 1963 was not supportive of the hotelling rule and later studies by heal and barrow 1980 1981 smith 1981 and feige and geweke 1979 have provided only limited support the current study provides an alternative approach to testing for depletability in a formulation that also allows for consideration of the inelasticity of supply in the short and intermediate term we do this by concentrating upon the production side of the market and using an adjustment cost1 or investment model of resource production the resulting model seems fairly successful in describing the behaviour of at least three of the metals considered with evidence for both the adjustment cost hypothesis and for depletability there is however also evidence for a technological progress effect that has in the past outweighed the depletability effect and can explain the failure of resource prices to follow the hotelling path section i of the paper develops the adjustment cost model and section ii presents the empirical analysis section iii considers the policy implications of the depletability and adjustment factors

mortgage lending in boston interpreting hmda data the home mortgage disclosure act was enacted to monitor minority and low income access to the mortgage market the data collected for this purpose show that minorities are more than twice as likely to be denied a mortgage as whites yet variables correlated with both race and creditworthiness were omitted from these data making any conclusion about race s role in mortgage lending impossible the federal reserve bank of boston collected additional variables important to the mortgage lending decision and found that race continued to play an important though significantly diminished role in the decision to grant a mortgage copyright 1996 by american economic association

an empirical investigation of the factors influencing exporting success of brazilian firms one hundred and fifty two brazilian companies that were exporting in 1978 were interviewed again six years later in 1984 to determine the factors that were correlated with the continuance of exporting firm characteristics export management practices and manager perceptions were each found to be correlated with exporting success thus supporting the basic contention that it is possible to predict export performance firms that discontinued exporting relied more on the brazilian government export incentives possibly to be competitive in international markets without making the necessary structural changes thereby raising important questions about the long run impact of the brazilian export programs

the prebisch singer hypothesis four centuries of evidence we employ a unique data set and new time series techniques to reexamine the existence of trends in relative primary commodity prices the data set comprises 25 commodities and provides a new historical perspective spanning the seventeenth to the twenty first centuries new tests for the trend function robust to the order of integration of the series are applied to the data results show that eleven price series present a significant and downward trend over all or some fraction of the sample period in the very long run a secular deteriorating trend is a relevant phenomenon for a significant proportion of primary commodities 2010 the president and fellows of harvard college and the massachusetts institute of technology

asset specificity and foreign market entry mode choice of small and medium sized enterprises the moderating influence of knowledge safeguards and institutional safeguards according to transaction cost economics tce reasoning firms choose equity as opposed to non equity foreign market entry modes to safeguard specific assets the present paper contextualizes the well researched relationship between asset specificity and foreign market entry mode choice by introducing knowledge safeguards international experience host country networks and imitation and institutional safeguards property rights protection and cultural proximity as alternative mechanisms for securing a firm s specific assets testing our hypotheses on a sample of 206 small and medium sized enterprises we find that knowledge safeguards and institutional safeguards weaken the effect of asset specificity on the choice of equity foreign market entry modes contextualizing the relationship between asset specificity and foreign market entry mode choice helps to enhance our understanding of the scope conditions of tce based entry mode studies and beyond

customs related transaction costs firm size and international trade intensity customs are generally perceived as a time consuming impediment to international trade however few studies have empirically examined the determinants and the impact of this type of government imposed transaction costs this paper analyses the role of firm size as a determinant of customs related transaction costs as well as the effect of firm size on the relationship between these costs and the international trade intensity of firms the results of this study indicate that customs related transaction costs repress international trade activities of firms even at low levels of these costs the paper identifies transaction related economies of scale simplified customs procedures and advanced information and communication technology as main determinants of customs related transaction costs it is shown that when these factors are taken into account firm size has no effect on customs related transaction costs policy implications are considered for firm strategy and public policy

small firm internationalisation unveiled through phenomenography phenomenography is proposed here as a qualitative methodology for investigating how owner managers practise internationalisation in small firms and it is applied in an empirical study of internationalising owner managed small australian wineries the findings show a common internationalisation activity cycle but four qualitatively different ways in which these owner managers practise internationalisation we reveal that this variation in owner manager internationalisation practices is determined by their understandings of internationalisation which produce differences in the ways activities within their internationalisation activity cycle are orchestrated in particular phenomenography has enabled new insights into the multiplicity of firm internationalisation practices not able to be captured through other qualitative methodologies such as ethnography or semiotics as they are not designed to capture such variation based on our findings we propose an understanding based theory to explain the idiosyncratic nature of owner managed small firm internationalisation furthermore we suggest that phenomenography used independently or in conjunction with other qualitative methodologies also has potential to reveal the varying practices of internationalising large mnes by enabling an investigation of the collective or shared understanding of firm internationalisation within mnes finally we point out how phenomenography can be extended beyond firm internationalisation practices to investigate other topics within international business

estimating the competitive storage model with trending commodity prices we present a method to estimate jointly the parameters of a standard commodity storage model and the parameters characterizing the trend in commodity prices this procedure allows the influence of a possible trend to be removed without restricting the model specification and allows model and trend selection based on statistical criteria the trend is modeled deterministically using linear or cubic spline functions of time the results show that storage models with trend are always preferred to models without trend they yield more plausible estimates of the structural parameters with storage costs and demand elasticities that are more consistent with the literature they imply occasional stockouts whereas without trend the estimated models predict no stockouts over the sample period for most commodities moreover accounting for a trend in the estimation imply price moments closer to those observed in commodity prices our results support the empirical relevance of the speculative storage model and show that storage model estimations should not neglect the possibility of long run price trends

returns to scale adjustment costs and the optimal investment of the mining firm abstract this paper analyses the optimal investment programme of a competitive mining firm for two different technologies and capital adjustment costs in the first part the case of a variable proportions technology with decreasing returns to scale is studied and it is concluded that under the assumption of a constant mineral price a first stage in the exploitation period of the deposit will occur in which capital stock is increasing in the second part the optimal investment programme is determined when there are constant returns to scale and hotelling s rule governs the dynamics of the mineral price

evaluating export promotion programmes uk overseas trade missions and export performance this paper examines the extent to which firms knowledge and structural characteristics as well as firms behaviour in foreign markets following trade mission participation impacts upon trade mission success and export performance the findings suggest that 1 a diversification strategy in terms of export markets benefits future expansion into new foreign markets 2 specific knowledge about the targeted markets should be acquired prior to participating in the trade missions 3 communication with potential business partners should be established prior to participating in the trade missions and 4 the business relationships established before and during the trade missions should be cultivated through regular contacts using not only communication technology but also regular visits in summary overseas trade missions contribute to the generation of incremental sales in foreign markets by enhancing the relationship building process between business partners

born international smes bi level impacts of resources and intentions the katz and gartner 1988 model describes four central properties of emerging organizations resources intention exchange and boundary while designed as a general model for organizations the approach has the potential to explain the early lives of born international firms in this study boundary is used to define the central sampling frame two other properties resources and intention are evaluated in terms of their impact on the fourth property exchange measured as a firm s export growth and intensity given the inherent presence of two levels of analysis in emerging organizations intention and resources are evaluated at both the individual and the organizational level a sample n 47 of young born international firms in the indian software industry was studied using a questionnaire results of the analysis are mixed for resources at both the individual and firm level variables intention is significant at the individual level but not the firm level contrary to other studies these findings suggest that during the early stages of firm development owner not firm characteristics play a pivotal role in performance especially exports the speculation is that this occurs because in early stages firms are relatively disorganized relative to the owner

adjustment costs uncertainty and the theory of investment the case of non renewable natural resources abstract this paper examines the effects of mineral price and extraction cost uncertainty on the investment program of a competitive resource extracting industry that faces convex costs of adjustment the results show that depletion of mineral reserves will slow down if the marginal adjustment cost function is concave or linear whereas the effect will be ambiguous if the function is convex

primary commodity prices manufactured goods prices and the terms of trade of developing countries what the long run shows the authors revisit in this article the empirical foundation of the alleged secular decline in the prices of primary commodities relative to those of manufactures they use a newly constructed index of commodity prices and two modified indexes of manufactured good prices and find that from 1900 to 1986 the relative prices of all primary commodities fell on trend by 0 5 percent a year and those of nonfuel primary commodities by 0 6 percent a year they thus confirm the sign but not the magnitude of the trend implicit in the work of prebisch but even the more limited secular decline shown by their relative price indexes may be magnified by an incomplete account of quality improvements in manufactures they then show that the evolution of terms of trade of nonfuel primary commodities is not the same as that of the net barter terms of trade of non oil exporting developing countries finally they find that despite the decline that has probably occurred during the current century in the terms of trade of nonfuel primary commodities the purchasing power of total exports of these products has increased considerably similarly the fall that may have occurred after world war ii in the net barter terms of trade of developing countries seems to have been more than compensated for by the steady improvement in their income terms of trade

trends in natural resource commodity prices an analysis of the time domain abstract this paper attempts to reconcile the theoretical predictions of increasing real prices for nonrenewable natural resource commodities obtained from hotelling style models with the empirical findings of falling prices for these commodities a theoretical model for relative price movements is derived for the case of exogenous technical change and endogenous change in the grade of ores mined the model suggests a u shaped time path for relative prices the implied price movements are tested for all the major metals and fuels and the model parameters are found to be statistically significant for 11 out of the 12 commodities tested

the influence of the management team s international experience on the internationalization behaviors of smes why are some small and medium sized enterprises smes more successful in selling outside their domestic markets than are other smes in the same industry although the traditional explanation is that firms can gain valuable knowledge and resources as they become older and larger small and young firms are not necessarily disadvantaged if they develop other mechanisms to acquire the requisite knowledge and resources we examine the role of the management team s international experience as such a mechanism for the internationalization of canadian software product firms we show that internationally experienced management teams have a greater propensity to develop foreign strategic partners and to delay less in obtaining foreign sales after start up and that these behaviors are associated with a higher degree of internationalization

variable long term trends in mineral prices the ongoing tug of war between exploration depletion and technological change abstract this paper explores the use of low frequency band pass filters for describing long run trends in real mineral commodity prices this approach has the advantage of allowing long run trend rates to evolve gradually over time rather than assuming that they are constant perhaps with occasional structural breaks over time this is a flexible way of capturing the ongoing tug of war between exploration depletion and technological change over 100 mineral and commodities stretching back to the late 19th or early 20th century are considered the variety of lr trends is astonishing but very few increase monotonically contrary to the prediction of the basic hotelling model some decline monotonically as predicted by prebisch and singer some have the u shaped pattern predicted by pindyck 1978 heal 1981 and slade 1982 others have changed direction up to three times in the period since 1900 the tug of war continues with exhaustion nowhere in sight

the competitive characteristics of u s manufacturers in the machine tool industry this paper examines the competitive characteristics of u s manufacturers in the machine tool mt industry after several decades of decline this industry has recently shown signs of a modest but sustained recovery empirical evidence from a national survey of 104 mt producers suggests that the revival of this sector has been driven by a combination of factors including renewed export involvement improved customer support and better product design although most mt companies are small to medium sized enterprises smes the survey data show that very small smes are poorly represented in the recovery thrust of the industry as a whole our principal conclusion is that the mt industry has been following an export led path toward stabilization but that certain types of small producers are unlikely to thrive for very long the most serious problems facing small producers include shrinking local markets import competition shortages of skilled labor and cyclical demand

measuring racial discrimination with fair housing audits caught in the act a survey technique called a fair housing audit provides a direct measure of racial discrimination in housing this paper examines the econometric issues raised by audit data measures the discrimination uncovered by a 1981 boston study and tests hypotheses about the causes of discrimination the estimated level of discrimination is high black housing seekers are told about 30 percent fewer available housing units than are whites the hypothesis tests indicate that the primary cause of this discrimination is that housing agents illegally promote their economic interests by catering to the racial prejudice of their current or potential white customers