smoking drinking and income in an effort to increase understanding of the alcohol income puzzle the finding that drinking appears to lead to higher income this paper presents maximum simulated likelihood estimates of a system of limited dependent variables governing smoking and drinking patterns and income with all else held constant moderate drinking is associated with 10 percent higher income and heavy drinking associated with 12 percent higher income than drinking abstention smoking is associated with larger effects on income than drinking single equation estimates suggest smokers earn 8 percent less than nonsmokers and the smoking penalty rises to 24 percent after correcting for endogeneity

selecting suitable compensation plans of executive stock options theoretical and empirical works have emphasized that executive stock option plans play an important role in compensation management and corporate governance owing to the incentives to increase firm stock price and volatility levels this study not only proposes models of executive stock options and constructs value matched financial variables for comparing the incentive effects towards these options but also develops an empirical study exploring the characteristics of executive stock options and suitable compensation management for companies this investigation examines the daily value and compares incentive effects of six kinds of executive stock options with the empirical data of tsmc the world s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry which is listed on the tse and nyse empirical results indicate that purchased options would be the best choice for companies that are unsuitable to undertake risky investments while the relative indexed options are appropriate for bear markets and good for companies

the finance growth link in latin america this paper analyzes the relationship between financial development and economic growth in latin america with a granger causality test and impulse response functions in a panel vector autoregression var model with annual observations from a sample of 18 countries from 1962 to 2005 it is shown that while economic growth causes financial development financial development does not cause economic growth this finding is robust to different model specifications and different financial indicators interestingly when the sample is divided according to different income levels and institutional quality there is two way causality between financial development and economic growth only for the middle income group and for countries with stronger rule of law and creditor rights the impulse response functions show that a shock to financial development has a positive impact on economic growth only for these subsamples but the net effect of financial development on growth is relatively small during the 1980s most latin american countries suffered from distorted financial systems in this decade the government kept interest rate controls allocated credit arbitrarily and deterred the expansion of security markets and the creation of new financial institutions edwards 1999 nonetheless there has been a significant improvement on the levels of financial development in the region while credit to the private sector as a share of gross domestic product gdp in the latin american region was on average 12 in the 1960s it grew to an average of 29 in the early 2000s 1 even though latin american countries experienced significant financial reforms in the 1990s that promoted financial deregulation and the growth of the stock market financial development indicators show that the region is financially underdeveloped when compared to other emerging regions 2 therefore lack of financial depth may be a barrier to better economic performance in latin america the link between financial development and economic growth is complex because the direction of causation between the two variables may run both ways theoretical and empirical analyses support causality running from financial development to economic growth supply leading hypothesis but there is also evidence that economic growth causes financial

the extent and determination of performance related pay systems in scandinavian countries the incidence of performance related pay prp varies substantially across countries using individual worker level data it is the intention of this paper to examine initially the extent to which institutional factors across denmark sweden and finland affect the coverage of performance related pay it then identifies the types of workers and firms that choose this form of payment system within each country the initial findings suggest that institutional factors within countries play a role in determining the extent to which the adoption of prp systems varies across countries although this is far clearer for finland than between denmark and sweden for example the results also show that there are significant differences across scandinavia in terms of the workers who choose prp systems and the firms who adopt them strong support is found for the previously identified and positive relationship between firm size and use of prp

financial development and the fdi growth nexus the malaysian experience this article examines the fdi growth nexus in the small open economy of malaysia by controlling for the level of financial development financial development is proxied by a composite index which is a summary measure of four financial development indicators using time series data from 1965 to 2004 the results show that fdi and financial development are positively related to output in the long run the impact of fdi on output is enhanced through financial development to supplement these findings we assess the causal relationships between the variables using the recent causality tests available in the literature the results indicate that economic growth causes fdi growth in the long run but no feedback relationship is observed

the monetary approach to exchange rate determination under rational expectations the dollar deutschmark rate abstract this paper reformulates the monetary approach after ascertaining that a money demand function with a partial adjustment mechanism had more empirical support than a money demand function which assumed instantaneous stock adjustment the resulting exchange rate equation is estimated by two rational expectations techniques the parameter estimates are reasonable and are robust to the estimation technique used to different specifications of the driving processes and to changes in the estimation period the structural model outperforms the random walk model and its own unconstrained equivalent a pure time series equation in outof sample forecasts

can learning affect exchange rate behavior the case of the dollar in the early 1980 s this paper demonstrates that a change in parameters of the money market that is not immediately understood will affect the behavior of exchange rate forecast errors while the market is learning the analysis is applied to the behavior of u s dollar german mark forecast errors during the early 1980 s when the market appeared to systematically underpredict the strength of the dollar consistent with this observation empirical estimates of implied forecast errors based upon bayesian learning suggest that forecast errors would have been on average negative during the period as the market came to realize the increase in u s money demand

union power cost of job loss and workers effort the authors hypothesize that the effectiveness of external threats in raising workers effort is mediated by among other labor market conditions the presence or absence of a powerful union in particular they argue that because powerful unions reduce the potency of the external threat of job loss by making it more difficult for employers to dismiss workers the pace of work is less responsive to such a threat in strongly unionized plants than in weakly unionized plants the results of an analysis of data from the 1990 workplace industrial relations survey in britain support this hypothesis the analysis also yields evidence that effort is increased where workers are rewarded individually according to results and where there are various communication channels between workers and management

employment rents and the incidence of strikes a new measure of labor market tightness on workers behavior the employment rent is modeled as a determinant of workplace conflict an empirical estimate of the employment rent workers expected cost of job loss is calculated it is argued that the cost of job loss affects strike incidence this relationship is tested by estimating an econometric model of strike incidence for the united states from 1955 to 1983 the cost of job loss is shown to explain a large percentage of the variation in strike incidence the cost of job loss is a far superior explanatory variable than the unemployment rate which is commonly used in strike models copyright 1987 by mit press

incentives pay and performance a study of australian employees the paper analyses the determinants of self reported work effort using a 1988 survery of australian employees while controlling for the endogeneity of the firm s choice of incentives and pay it is found that direct incentive schemes have predicted effects and the efficiency wage hypothesis is supported pay and work effort are positively correlated two efficiency wage models are tested akerlof s gift exchange model and work discipline arguments regarding monitoring difficulties and threats of dismissal the latter argument is broadly consistent with the data

industrialization electricity consumption and co2 emissions in bangladesh this paper investigates the relationship between industrialization electricity consumption and co2 emissions in case of bangladesh using quarter frequency data over the period of 1975 2010 the ar

does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

estimating short and long run relationships a guide for the applied economist many applied economists face problems in selecting an appropriate technique to estimate short and long run relationships with the time series methods this article reviews three alternative approaches viz general to specific vector autoregressions and the vector error correction models as in other methodological controversies definite answers are difficult it is suggested that if these techniques are seen as tools to summarize data as in smith 2000 often there maybe only minor differences in their estimates therefore a computationally attractive technique is likely to be popular

empirical evidence on the relation between stock option compensation and risk taking abstract we examine whether executive stock options esos provide managers with incentives to invest in risky projects for a sample of oil and gas producers we examine whether the coefficient of variation of future cash flows from exploration activity our proxy for exploration risk increases with the sensitivity of the value of the ceo s options to stock return volatility eso risk incentives both eso risk incentives and exploration risk are treated as endogenous variables by adopting a simultaneous equations approach we find evidence that eso risk incentives has a positive relation with future exploration risk taking additional tests indicate that eso risk incentives exhibits a negative relation with oil price hedging in a system of equations where eso risk incentives and hedging are allowed to be endogenously determined overall our results are consistent with esos providing managers with incentives to mitigate risk related incentive problems

railway development from the japanese occupation period to the present using kaohsiung city as an example abstractthis study intended to discuss the interactive influence of the emergence transformation and decline of the railway in kaohsiung port on urban development the population the activities and the economy in the region during the period of 1895 2010 from the perspectives of urban planning railway development population and industry this study used the crossover analysis method and used the factors of railway development and urban planning within a fixed time period to explore the chain dependence relationship among the industry the population the regional economy and the railway stations in kaohsiung city this study found that urban planning economic development railway development and industry have an interactive influence on the overall urban development urban planning promotes the rapid growth of the population and economic development propels the growth and shaping of the regional economy thus increasing employment opportunities in addition the railway development process moves

on the export led growth hypothesis the econometric evidence from china the export led growth hypothesis is tested by estimating an augmented growth equation on the basis of times series data from china the granger no causality procedure developed by toda and yamamoto journal of econometrics 66 1995 was applied to test the causality link between exports and economic growth in a var system three distinct features in this paper stand out compared to earlier studies on china first we have gone beyond the traditional two variable relationship by building a var model in the production function context to avoid a possible specification bias second we follow riezman whiteman and summers empirical economics 21 1996 to test the export led growth hypothesis while controlling for the growth of imports to avoid producing a spurious causality result third we test the sensitivity of causality test results under different lag structures along with the choice of optimal lags in particular the methodology developed by toda and yamamoto 1995 is expected to improve the stan

on the nexus of financial development economic growth and energy consumption in china new perspective from a gmm panel var approach abstract this paper studies the endogenous relationships among financial development energy consumption and economic growth in china by applying a gmm panel var approach with a panel data of 30 chinese provinces over the period 1996q1 2015q4 financial development is measured by six individual indicators and by a comprehensive indicator obtained through the pca method we also account for regional heterogeneity by dividing our sample into three regions eastern region central region and western region we underline our findings in three aspects first financial development measured by most individual indicators m2 credit revenue of the insurance industry and stock market value and the comprehensive one has a significantly negative impact on economic growth second energy consumption can significantly contribute to economic growth in all regions while no feedback effect is found except in the western region this result is further supported by the granger causality tests last financial development in the sense of m2 credit stock turnover and the comprehensive indicator can significantly lessen energy consumption in all regions but this inhibitory effect is found to be largest in the western region followed by the eastern region and be smallest in the central region the granger causality tests confirm further the existence of heterogeneity across regions a bidirectional granger causality between the two variables is found in the eastern region a unidirectional granger causality running from energy consumption to financial development is identified in the central region and no significant causal relationship shows up in the western region our findings provide valuable policy implications for china heading for a green economic growth

bounds test approach to cointegration and causality between nuclear energy consumption and economic growth in india abstract this paper attempts to examine the dynamic relationship between economic growth nuclear energy consumption labor and capital for india for the period 1969 2006 applying the bounds test approach to cointegration developed by pesaran et al 2001 we find that there was a short and a long run relationship between nuclear energy consumption and economic growth using four long run estimators we also found that nuclear energy consumption has a positive and a statistically significant impact on india s economic growth further applying the toda and yamamoto 1995 approach to granger causality and the variance decomposition approach developed by pesaran and shin 1998 we found a positive and a significant uni directional causality running from nuclear energy consumption to economic growth without feedback this implies that economic growth in india is dependent on nuclear energy consumption where a decrease in nuclear energy consumption may lead to a decrease in real income for a fast growing energy dependent economy this may have far reaching implications for economic growth india s economic growth can be frustrated if energy conservation measures are undertaken without due regard to the negative impact they have on economic growth

indexed executive stock options abstract we design and derive a pricing model for an executive stock option with a strike price indexed to a benchmark and investigate its valuation and incentive implications in both up and down markets the indexed option filters out common risks beyond the executive s control thereby increasing the efficiency of incentive contracts the indexed option has a different payoff structure and much lower initial value than a traditional option incentive effects of the indexed option also differ from those of traditional options we design an optional penalty function to reduce the payoff if executives manipulate specified model parameters such as volatility

does financial development affect growth this article contributes to the literature on the relationship between financial development and economic growth in three ways it utilizes recently developed techniques for generalized methods of moments gmm one step estimation with dynamic panel models it focuses exclusively on a sample of developing countries and it uses as proxies for financial development variables which capture both banking sector and stock market effects the results provide evidence based on a panel of annual data for 30 developing countries that while the stock market variables are positively and significantly related to growth their presence results in the standard banking sector variables credit to the private sector and liquid liabilities having negative effects on growth

profit sharing and standard setting in production and procurement management this paper deals with the interaction between procurement and production management the production costs crucially depend on the materials components and subassemblies purchased by the procurement department and on the effort expended by the production department an agency model is utilized based on the scanlon atkinson plans which share gains from production cost improvement after attaining pre specified cost standard the materials quality is used to adjust the cost standards for the prodcution department it is shown that in both the first best and second best cases profit sharing compensation is always preferred to fixed salary by the risk averse principal comparing with the first best case the principal has to provide a greater sharing pool in order to induce the managers efforts and each manager in fact works less hard in the second best case the agents compensations are tied to their positions as well as their risk attitudes when all principal lacks a costless benefits the most from s

financial development economic growth and banking sector controls evidence from india this paper uses newly collected data from the reserve bank of india to examine the effects of various types of banking sector controls on the process of financial deepening with the exception of a lending rate ceiling these controls are found to influence financial deepening negatively independently of the well known effect of the real interest rate exogeneity tests suggest that financial deepening and economic growth are jointly determined thus policies which affect financial deepening may also have an influence on economic growth the role of banking sector controls in the process of economic development has received considerable attention in the literature the traditional approach due to mckinnon i973 and shaw i973 postulates that government intervention in the pricing and allocation of loanable funds dubbed financial repression inhibits financial development by depressing real interest rates see

financial deepening trade openness and economic growth in latin america and the caribbean this contribution investigates the causal interactions between financial deepening trade openness and economic growth in 13 latin american and caribbean countries we construct a composite indicator for financial deepening and use it to detect granger causality within a modified vector autoregressive vector error correction model var vecm framework we find almost no evidence for the popular hypothesis of finance led growth evidence of bidirectional finance growth causality is stronger but mostly instable in the long run most results indicate a demand following or insignificant causal relationship between finance and growth there is also no evidence that finance indirectly induces growth via the channel of trade openness hence policies that prioritize financial and trade sector development cannot be supported

implication for cities of the liberalizing national economies in twenty first century for cities the liberalization of national economies and the creation of a global economy have profound and far reaching implications global capitalist restructuring has been a key force in reshaping cities during the late1980s 1990s and 2000s it has demanded the production and use of new information technologies and in doing so has forged new relationships among new technologies and new spatial forms and processes in cities technological innovation and territorial restructuring have also deeply modified cities emerging socio economic systems at the centre of change are the three major global cities new york tokyo and london sassen 1993 other cities that have been affected by the liberalization and creation of a global economy are found mainly in newly industrializing asian countries such as seoul singapore and hong kong bombay mexico city and cities in south america are among countries in the developing world that have experienced some change in their economies in response to changing wo

nuclear energy consumption and economic growth in nine developed countries this article attempts to test the causal relationship between nuclear energy consumption and real gdp for nine developed countries for the period 1971 2005 by including capital and labour as additional variables using a modified version of the granger causality test developed by toda and yamamoto 1995 we found a unidirectional causality running from nuclear energy consumption to economic growth in japan netherlands and switzerland the opposite uni directional causality running from economic growth to nuclear energy consumption in canada and sweden and a bi directional causality running between economic growth and nuclear energy consumption in france spain the united kingdom and the united states in spain the united kingdom and the usa increases in nuclear energy consumption caused increases in economic growth implying that conservation measures taken that reduce nuclear energy consumption may negatively affect economic growth in france japan netherlands and switzerland increases in nuclear energy consumption caused decreases in economic growth suggesting that energy conservation measure taken that reduce nuclear energy consumption may help to mitigate the adverse effects of nuclear energy consumption on economic growth in canada and sweden energy conservation measures affecting nuclear energy consumption may not harm economic growth

reassessment of the finance growth nexus in the presence of structural breaks this article investigates empirically the causality between financial development and economic growth for 11 sample countries in a structural break framework via minimum lagrange multiplier unit root test and hsiao s causality test we find most of the series can be more accurately characterized as a segmented trend stationary process around structural breaks as opposed to a stochastic unit root process which has important implications for policy makers to formulate long term development strategy and short run stabilization policies as well as for academics to carry out cointegration analysis besides we find different causality patterns in sample countries which depart from those found in the existing literature highlighting that it might be unreliable to apply only conventional unit root test and inappropriate to take the first difference of the series to achieve stationarity all of which might result in model misspecification our analysis also provides some evidence on the source of the mixed res

non linearity between finance and growth abstract we present a simple model which establishes a non linear and possibly non monotonic relationship between financial development and economic growth applying a threshold regression model to king and levine s q j econ 109 1993 83 data set we find evidence consistent with the theoretical model

the role of expectations in stabilization policy abstract this paper develops and tests a theory of the process by which private agents in an economy form expectations about government policy agents form and update their beliefs about the true state of government policy in a bayesian fashion the credibility of a policy is defined to be the subjective probability that the government is pursuing a reform policy rule the credibility of a reform of monetary or exchange rate policies is a function of the parameters of both monetary and fiscal policies the theory is applied to the chilean and argentine exchange reforms of the late 1970 s

natural gas consumption and economic growth in pakistan abstract natural gas is a dominant fuel in pakistan it offers the cheapest and a cleaner alternative source of energy this paper examines the relationship of natural gas consumption and economic growth in pakistan we include capital labor and exports in the model with multivariate framework the ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration and innovative accounting approach are employed to investigate the dynamic causality relationships among the variables we find the existence of long run relationship among the variables natural gas consumption capital labor and exports are positively affecting economic growth in pakistan furthermore we support the natural gas consumption led growth hypothesis and suggest that natural gas conservation policies may retard economic growth

financial development and growth in sub saharan africa do legal origin and cfa membership matter this article examines whether relations between legal origin financial development and economic growth that hold worldwide hold in british and french legal origin sub saharan africa ssa as well we also test for the differential impacts on financial development and on growth of communaute financiere africaine cfa currency union membership within french legal origin ssa our panel regressions and descriptive measures agree with the findings of british legal origin advantage with respect to financial development in addition financial development contributes positively to economic growth in british legal origin ssa as it does worldwide within french legal origin ssa we find that currency union constraints tend to hinder financial development in cfa countries beyond the negative impacts of french legal origin moreover contributions to the growth of various indicators of financial development in french legal origin ssa are negative or insignificant irrespective of cfa membership

industry wage differentials and efficiency wages a dissenting view with south african evidence abstract does industry wage dispersion constitute evidence of either efficiency wages or rent sharing comparison of the industry wage premia of whites and africans in south africa casts doubt upon the rent extraction and the gift exchange explanations of the industry wage structure unions combined with union threats fail to explain the data other explanations unobserved ability compensating differentials and the shirking monitoring and turnover models are rejected here as they have been before remaining possibilities are expense preference theory and internal equity rules implications for future research are pointed out

learning and the volatility of exchange rates abstract this paper investigates the implications for the volatility of exchange rates of specifying market uncertainty as parameter uncertainty private agents learn by means of bayes rule about a parameter of the stochastic process generating the exogenous variables learning is shown to magnify the reaction of exchange rates to random shocks to the market fundamentals this magnification effect of learning can explain the rejections of the econometric tests on the variance bounds and on the absence of bubbles that have been reported in the literature

financial development and economic growth international evidence the importance of the relationship between financial development and economic growth has been well recognized and emphasized in the field of economic development 1 although recent writings on this subject seem to accept the hypothesis that financial development is crucial for successful economic growth 2 patrick asked the critical question which sector financial or real leads in the dynamic process of economic development patrick identified two possible patterns in the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth in the first growth induces an expansion of the financial system 3 according to this view called demand following the lack of financial growth is a manifestation of the lack of demand for financial services as the real side of the economy develops its demands for various new financial services materialize and these are met rather passively from the financial side in the second pattern the expansion of the financial system precedes the demand for its services channeling scarce resources from small savers to large investors according to relative rates of return the financial sector precedes and induces real growth the deliberate establishment and promotion of financial institutions in many less developed countries ldcs might reflect this belief in the supply leading relationship between the two developments a natural question then concerns the direction of causality between financial development and economic growth patrick asserted that the direction of causality changes over the course of development in his view financial development is able to induce real innovation type investment before sustained modern economic growth gets under way and as the process of real growth occurs the supply leading impetus gradually becomes less important and the demand following financial response

does financial development lead economic growth a vector auto regression appraisal using a vector autoregression var approach several hypotheses are re examined suggested by the literature concerning the relationship between financial development and economic growth investment and productivity the models use quarterly time series data from ten oecd countries and china innovation accounting or variance decomposition and impulse response function analysis is applied to examine interrelationships between variables in the var system and therefore differs from the more usual granger causality approach in particular it examines the relationship between financial development proxied by total credit at best weak support is found for the hypothesis that financial development leads economic growth

altering the terms of executive stock options abstract we examine the practice of resetting the terms of previously issued executive stock options we identify properties of reset options develop a model for valuing resettable options and characterize the firms that have reset options we find the vast majority of options are reset at the money resulting on average in the strike price dropping 40 our valuation model suggests that resetting has only a small impact on the ex ante value of an option award but the ex post gain can be substantial finally we find resetting has a strong negative relation with firm performance even after correcting for industry performance

the timing of option repricing we investigate whether executive stock option repricings are systematically timed to coincide with favorable movements in the company s stock price for a sample of 236 repricing events we observe sharp increases in stock price in the 20 day period following the repricing date in addition repricing dates tend to either precede the release of good news or follow the release of bad news in the quarterly earnings announcements since information about stock option repricing is not generally released to the public around the repricing date these findings suggest that ceos opportunistically manage the timing of the option repricing date

is there a wage bonus from drinking unobserved heterogeneity examined while the result that drinkers earn more than abstainers has been remarkably persistent only one paper in the literature on drinking and earnings has been written where individual fixed effects are included this study improves the current literature by utilizing a much longer panel and focuses on the low end of drinking while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity with the inclusion of individual specific effects it is found that while ols specifications yield a positive significant coefficient on current drinking even when a rich set of covariates is controlled for including individual fixed effects renders the coefficient statistically insignificant

testing for bubbles in exchange markets a case of sparkling rates this paper investigates the possibility that the observed deviations of major bilateral exchange rates from values implied by market fundamentals are a consequence of rational asset market bubbles when a new econometric methodology for detecting asset market bubbles is used the joint hypothesis of no bubbles and stable autoregressive processes for relative money supplies and real incomes is rejected for the dollar deutsche mark and dollar pound ratesusing monthly data over the period 1973 82 additional tests for coefficient stability and for lack of cointegration between exchange rates and market fundamentals suggest that the bubble findings must be interpreted with care

financial liberalisation stockmarkets and economic development abstract during the 1980s and 1990s many developing countries dcs have been engaged in far reaching reforms of their financial systems liberalising them and making them more market oriented this liberalisation involving inter alia financial de repression has been inspired partly by the work of the mckinnon 1973 and shaw 1973 m s school this paper suggests that in addition to financial de repression there has been a major new element in the development of dc financial systems in recent years the establishment and fast expansion of stockmarkets these markets have played a key role in the internal as well as external financial liberalisation processes in leading dcs further the paper finds that the actual behaviour of these markets in many countries has led to outcomes which undermine the effects of the higher real interest rates arising from financial de repression

a note on the electricity growth nexus in lao pdr abstract this paper investigates the relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in laos by applying the ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration and granger causality tests our results confirm the existence of a long run relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth in addition we found unidirectional causality running from economic growth to electricity consumption in the long run supporting the conservation hypothesis

ruling out divergent speculative bubbles abstract the growth in the empirical literature on testing for divergent in mean speculative bubbles indicates that existing theoretical arguments for ruling out such price paths are not sufficiently compelling here we strengthen the case for ruling out explosive or implosive bubbles a priori by filling in two gaps first we demonstrate why divergent stochastic bubbles arising from purely extrinsic uncertainty as in blanchard 1979 cannot be equilibria in a monetary optimizing model second we show why existing arguments for ruling out implosive price bubbles are insufficient in some cases and we provide stronger arguments

financial development and economic growth the role of stock markets utilizing time series methods and data from five developed economies we examine the relationship between stock market development and economic growth controlling for the effects of the banking system and stock market volatility our results support the view that although both banks and stock markets may be able to promote economic growth the erects of the former are more powerful they also suggest that the contribution of stock markets on economic growth may have been exaggerated by studies that utilize cross country growth regressions

are wages too low empirical implications of efficiency wage models firms may pay efficiency wages to enhance productivity the conventional presumption is that efficiency wages are inefficiently high because they lead to unemployment that is also inefficiently high government policies that lower wages raise output using a simple and general efficiency wage model this paper finds a necessary and sufficient condition for the opposite conclusion if the condition holds wages are inefficiently low leading to productivity that is also inefficiently low it is the high wage policies that raise output even if they also lower employment published empirical results support the condition no evidence is found for the conventional presumption

environmental kuznets curve in an open economy a bounds testing and causality analysis for tunisia the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis posits that in the early stages of economic growth environmental degradation and pollution increase however as a nation reaches a certain level of incom

carrots and sticks pay supervision and turnover the efficiency wage model ewm has been advanced as an explanation for large and persistent wage differentials the shirking version of the ewm assumes a trade off between self supervision and external supervision the turnover version assumes turnover is costly to the firm variation across firms in the cost of monitoring shirking or turnover then is hypothesized to account for wage variations across firms for homogeneous workers using a new sample of firm data this paper presents empirical evidence of the trade off of wage premiums for supervisory intensity and turnover little evidence is found to support either version of the ewm

the legal environment banks and long run economic growth this paper examines the relationship between the legal system and banlding development and traces this connection through to long run rates of per capita gdp growth capital stock growth and productivity growth the data indicate that countries where the legal system 1 emphasizes creditor rights and 2 rigorously enforces contracts have better developed banks than countries where laws do not give a high priority to creditors and where enforcement is lax furtherrnore the exogenous component of banking development the component defined by the legal environment is positively and robustly associated with per capita growth physical capital accumulation and productivity growth this paper addresses two questions first do crosscountry differences in the legal rights of creditors the efficiency of contract enforcement and the origin of the legal system explain cross country differences in the level of banking development second do better developed banks cause faster economic development that is is the component of banking development defined by the legal environment positively associated with long run rates of economic growth capital accumulation and productivity growth examining the relationship between the legal system and banking development is valuable irrespective of issues associated with long run growth first banks may influence the level of income per capita and the magnitude of cyclical fluctuations bernanke and gertler 1989 1990 second many economists stress that understanding the evolution of legal and financial systems is essential for understanding economic development north 1981 engerman and sokoloff 1996 consequently quantitative information on the relationship between the legal environment and banks will improve our understanding of business cycles and the process of economic development furthermore examining the causal links between banks and economic growth has both conceptual and policy implications on the conceptual front a long literature debates the importance of banks in economic development starting as early as bagehot 1873 economists have argued that better banks banks that are better at identifying creditworthy firms mobilizing savings pooling risks and facilitating transactions

interdependence of the banking sector and the real sector evidence from oecd countries this article investigates the validity of the credit view hypothesis in eleven oecd organization for economic cooperation and development countries over the period 1987 qi to 2003 qiii the existence of a long run relationship between the banking sector and the real sector is supported by cointegration test results for some of the countries in the sample granger causality tests show the leading role of the banking sector in the real sector thus supporting the credit view hypothesis whereas for other countries the same tests indicate no interdependence

the effect of social capital on post earthquake reconstruction programmes in nantou county taiwan an assessment the study aims through an examination of social capital on post earthquake reconstruction programmes to assess the impact of government s programmes on integrated community development and to draw policy implications to this end the study explores the programmes implemented by the government in the communities of nantou county after the earthquake the findings show that of the three measurements infrastructure improvement satisfied most respondents in the three survey areas but in lugu township and in nantou city further improvements are needed in unemployment reduction and respondents betterment

firms choice of method of pay using data from the bls industry wage survey the author tests the theory that firms choose their methods of pay by balancing the gains from more precise links between performance and pay against m

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

evidence on incentive effects of subjective performance evaluations the authors investigate the effect of managerial performance evaluation styles on employee work effort using panel data on 4 080 employees in a swiss unit of an international company for the period 1999 2002 they test two hypotheses using paid and unpaid overtime work as effort indicators the company applies two performance based remuneration mechanisms an individual surprise bonus and one in which salary is affected by the extent to which an individual has reached personalized targets the authors hypothesize that effort is higher in departments in which individual performance evaluations are more flexible over time as well as when surprise bonuses are used more frequently both hypotheses are supported and the estimated effects are substantial increases in rating flexibility or bonus payments by one standard deviation above the mean increase average overtime hours by more than 20 the findings are robust and suggest that surprise bonuses and flexible performance evaluations over time provide ef

incentives allocation and labour market reforms during transition the case of urban china 1986 1990 has the reform process in china resulted in the introduction of incentives directed at a more efficient allocation of resources using data on individual earnings in urban liaoning province for the period 1986 1990 and a wage equation approach we address this issue in the context of labour market reforms focusing specifically on returns to education our results indicate that failure to address the issue of endogenous selection of more able individuals into state owned enterprises soes can severely bias returns downwards unlike in soes returns in collective owned enterprises coes increased the latter having been allowed to grow out of the plan more quickly and subject to more competition in factor and product markets we conclude that decentralization without competition is unlikely to result in the introduction of an efficient incentive mechanism the more administratively determined regular wages are one avenue for increased returns we find evidence of differentiated bonuses in coes but

a quantitative reassessment of the finance growth nexus evidence from a multivariate var abstract the long run relationship between financial development and economic growth is examined in a multivariate vector autoregression var framework using 10 sample countries difficulties surrounding the cross country regressions and bivariate time series studies are outlined the long run financial development and output relationships are identified in a cointegrating framework through tests of over identifying restrictions we find bi directional causality between financial development and economic growth in all the sample countries conclusions that stand distinct from those in the existing empirical literature we attribute our findings to i analysis of a higher dimensional system ii a new method of identifying the long run economic relationships and iii a new approach to long run causality testing

asymmetric impacts of insurance premiums on the non oil gdp some new empirical evidence abstractin this paper we study the influence of insurance premium on the non oil gross domestic product in saudi arabia we implement the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags the results sho

energy consumption and economic growth the experience of african countries revisited abstract the aim of this paper is to re examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth for seventeen african countries in a multivariate framework by including labor and capital as additional variables we apply the variance decomposition analysis due to pesaran and shin pesaran m h and shin y generalised impulse response analysis in linear multivariate models economics letters 1998 58 17 29 to evaluate how important is the causal impact of energy consumption on economic growth relative to labor and capital the results of our multivariate modified granger causality analysis due to toda and yamamoto toda h y and yamamoto t statistical inference in vector autoregressions with possibly integrated process journal of econometrics 1995 66 225 250 tend to reject the neutrality hypothesis for the energy income relationship in fifteen out of the seventeen countries in contrast results of our variance decomposition analyses show that in eleven out of the seventeen countries energy is no more than a contributing factor to output growth and not an important one when compared to capital and labor labor and capital are the most important factors in output growth in fifteen out of the seventeen countries however these results should be interpreted with care as they may not be sufficiently robust enough to support the inference that energy consumption plays a minor role in the economic growth of african countries

learning and the exchange rate exchange rate responses to money announcements in the early 1980s abstract the paper develops a monetary model of exchange rate determination with transitory monetary shocks and bayesian learning the model implies that exchange rate responses to monetary surprises are time varying and asymmetric furthermore the two variables become increasingly negatively correlated as beliefs converge an empirical section reexamines the evidence of dollar exchange rate responses to monetary announcements in the 1979 1984 period during which two monetary reforms took place in the usa there is strong support for the presence of learning behavior during the october 1979 to october 1982 period in the german mark and japanese yen equations

does option compensation increase managerial risk appetite this paper solves the dynamic investment problem of a risk averse manager compensated with a call option on the assets he controls under the manager s optimal policy the option ends up either deep in or deep out of the money as the asset value goes to zero volatility goes to infinity however the option compensation does not strictly lead to greater risk seeking sometimes the manager s optimal volatility is less with the option than it would be if he were trading his own account furthermore giving the manager more options causes him to reduce volatility managers with convex compensation schemes play an important role in financial markets this paper solves for the optimal dynamic investment policy for a risk averse manager paid with a call option on the assets he controls the paper focuses on how the option compensation impacts the manager s appetite for risk when he cannot hedge the option position on one hand the convexity of the option makes the manager shun payoffs that are likely to be near the money under the optimal policy the manager either significantly outperforms his benchmark or else incurs severe losses furthermore in examples of optimal trading strategies asset volatility goes to infinity as asset value goes to zero yet option compensation does not strictly lead to greater risk seeking as asset value grows large or if the evaluation date is far away the manager moderates asset risk for example if the manager has constant relative risk aversion crra asset volatility converges to the merton constant as asset value goes to infinity in some situations the manager actually chooses a lower asset volatility than he would if he were investing on his own because the leverage inherent in his option magnifies his exposure to the asset volatility in addition with all constant or decreasing absolute risk averse utility functions from the hyperbolic absolute risk averse hara class giving the manager more options causes him to reduce asset volatility in the crra case for example the manager targets a fixed volatility for his personal

causality between financial development and economic growth an application of vector error correction and variance decomposition methods to saudi arabia this article makes an attempt to test the possible directions of causality between financial development and economic growth which were labelled by patrick 1966 as the supply leading and demand following hypothesis saudi arabia is taken as a case study the methods applied are the error correction and variance decompositions techniques including the most recently developed long run structural modelling lrsm pesaran and shin 2002 which by imposing exactly identifying and overidentifying restrictions on the cointegrating vector has taken care of a major limitation of the conventional cointegrating estimates in that they were atheoretical in nature to the best of our knowledge there has not been any study on this issue with the application of the techniques that incorporate lrsm the stability of the functions has also been tested by cumulative sum cusum cumulative sum of squares cusumsq and chow test chow tests our findings based on the above mentioned rigorous techniques tend to s

too much of a good incentive the case of executive stock options abstract using a utility maximization framework i show that the incentive to increase stock price does not always increase as more options are granted keeping the total cost of his compensation fixed granting more options creates greater incentives to increase stock price only if option wealth does not exceed a certain fraction of total wealth beyond this critical level granting more options actually reduces incentive effects and becomes counterproductive in addition stock options also create incentive to reduce increase idiosyncratic systematic risk these incentive effects are sensitive to the choice of exercise price

the monetary approach to exchange rate in an efficient foreign exchange market tests based on volatility the variance bounds on exchange rate movements implied by the monetary approach to exchange rate in an efficient foreign exchange market is shown to be violated by sample data the paper also presents evidence showing that the forecast errors implied by the monetary model can be forecasted using historical data the results are interpreted to suggest either the incompatibility of the monetary approach with sample data or an inefficient foreign exchange market or both models of exchange rate determination based on the monetary approach to the balance of payments imply when coupled with an interest rate parity relation and the assumption of an efficient foreign exchange market that exchange rates are related to a long average of money stocks differentials 1 2 the long average is analogous to the difference across countries of the long average of expected future money stocks which was supposed to characterize the price level of a single country see e g sargent and wallace 20 since long averages are known to have certain smoothing properties it appears that the observed volatility of exchange rates may be inconsistent with these models thus alternative tests of the models may be produced which rely on those properties the aim of this paper is to determine if the observed volatility is consistent with those properties the paper is the first to use tests based on the volatility of the exchange rate in an efficient market model of the monetary approach the first set of tests is based on the property of implied variance bounds for exchange rate movements and the second set consists of the more familiar efficient market tests of forecastability the empirical results violate these two sets of tests of the model thus casting doubt on the model even though the claim that exchange rates are too volatile has been commonly made few direct attempts have been made in the past to determine the validity of the claim some studies have presented estimates of variances of spot and forward rates but lacking an objective criterion to determine what constitutes

self selection and the power of incentive schemes an experimental study we examine how self selection of workers depends on the power of incentive schemes and how it affects team performance if the power of the incentive schemes is increased in a laboratory experiment we let subjects choose between low powered team incentives and high powered individual incentives we observe that subjects exhibiting high trust or reciprocity in the trust game are more likely to choose team incentives when exposed to individual incentives subjects who chose team incentives perform worse if both the unobservable interdependency between their efforts and their incentive to cooperate under team incentives are high

the energy growth nexus in thailand does trade openness boost up energy consumption the nexus between trade openness and energy demand is hot topic of discussion among academicians and researchers and numerous studies are available in existing literature while investigating the nexus between trade openness and energy demand this paper explores the relationship between energy consumption trade openness and economic growth in case of thailand in doing so we have applied bayer and hanck cointegration approach to test whether the long run relationship exists between the variables our results confirm the presence of cointegration between the variables energy consumption stimulates economic growth trade openness adds in economic growth the causality analysis reveals that energy consumption granger causes economic growth and in resulting economic growth granger causes energy consumption trade openness and energy consumption are interdependent i e trade openness granger causes energy consumption and in return energy consumption granger causes trade openness this paper openness up new directions for policy making authorities in thailand to design a comprehensive energy and trade policies to sustain economic growth for long run

the worker discipline effect a disaggregative analysis the authors test for the presence of a worker discipline effect wherein macroeconomic conditions influence worker effort and examine interindustry variation in its strength an employment function analysis is first used to find evidence of a worker discipline effect in the majority of u s three digit manufacturing industries a factor analysis of industry firm and labor market characteristics is then used to identify several underlying factors by which industries can be distinguished the authors find that the strength of the worker discipline effect is positively and significantly correlated with the degree to which industries have secondary characteristics copyright 1990 by mit press

financial development and economic growth views and agenda this critique argues that the preponderance of theoretical reasoning and empirical evidence suggests a positive first order relationship between financial development and economic growth the body of work would push even most skeptics toward the belief that the development of financial markets and institutions is a critical and inextricable part of the growth process and away from the view that the financial system is an inconsequential sideshow responding passively to economic growth many gaps remain however and the paper highlights areas in acute need of additional research

fractionalization and long run economic growth webs and direction of association between the economic and the social south africa as a time series case study recent cross sectional growth studies have found that ethnolinguistic fractionalization is an important explanatory variable of long run growth performance in the present article we follow the ca