nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

regulatory reform and productivity growth in the uk s public utilities the reforms in the regulation of the uk nationalised industries over the last decade are examined and the extent to which they have been successful in achieving one of their declared aims that of increasing the efficiency of the enterprises operations is considered to achieve this the productivity performance of nine of the largest enterprises over the last twenty years was analysed the results show that the rate of productivity growth has been significantly higher during the 1980s compared with the preceeding decade it is concluded that a large part of the observed upturn in productivity is a result of changes in efficiency

contagion during the greek sovereign debt crisis abstract we examine the impact of news about greece and news about a greek bailout on bank stock prices in 2010 using data for 48 european banks we identify the twenty days with extreme returns on greek sovereign bonds and categorise the news events during those days into news about greece and news about the prospects of a greek bailout we find that except for greek banks news about greece does not lead to abnormal returns while news about a bailout does even for banks without any exposure to greece or other highly indebted euro countries this finding suggests that markets consider news about the bailout to be a signal of european governments willingness in general to use public funds to combat the financial crisis sovereign bond prices of portugal ireland and spain respond to both news about greece and news about a greek bailout

economic policy uncertainty and sovereign credit rating decisions panel quantile evidence for the eurozone we employ a panel quantile framework that quantifies the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative factors across the conditional distribution of sovereign credit ratings in the eurozone area we find that regulatory quality and competitiveness have a stronger impact for low rated countries whereas gdp per capita is a major driver of high rated countries a reduction in the current account deficit leads to a rating or outlook upgrade for low rated countries economic policy uncertainty impacts negatively on credit ratings across the conditional distribution however the impact is stronger for the lower rated countries in other words the creditworthiness of low rated countries takes a much bigger hit than that of high rated countries when european policy uncertainty is on the rise

further reflections on hidden unemployment an examination of the off flows from the claimant count in the north west of england one of the most significant set of papers to come out of the portfolio of regional studies association publications in recent years has concerned the exposure of the levels of hidden unemployment in many of the old industrial areas of britain see for instance labour market adjustment in areas of chronic industrial decline the case of the uk coalfields regional studies 30 7 1997 627 640 the authors of these papers christina beatty and stephen fothergill have generated a debate that has uncovered major implications for the way the regional problem is measured perceived and tackled although these are important in terms of regional economic development strategies and policies it remains to be seen how the failure to count the real levels of unemployment will impact on the review of regional policy assisted areas the designation of european structural fund areas and the successful introduction of such initiatives as the new deal and welfare to work underpinning and deepening the rigour of t

productivity and competitiveness although this article is about much more than uk manufacturing manufacturing is a bell wether for the whole economy because it is the key tradable sector accounting for over 80 per cent of uk non oil trade in 1988 it is also widely believed to be disproportionately important for wage determina tion despite now accounting for only around one quarter of all employment and under a third of full time employment further data availability and accuracy are better than for most of the rest of the economy so this is the sector with which we begin there are three key ways of measuring the inter national competitiveness of uk manufacturing relativ output prices relative export prices and relative unit labour costs where the relativities are taken against a weighted basket of our chief com petitors figures 1 a and 1 6 plot data on the three measures as published by the cso the 1980 or 1981 high points on the graphs indicate the post ar troughs reached by competitiveness in those ea s the combination of the exchange rate appre ciation resulting from the medium term financial stra egy mtfs and the oil revenue boom the eff cts of the recent wage inflation and the cyclical d cline in labour productivity produced

on the economic interpretation and measurement of optimal capacity utilization with anticipatory expectations this study builds on recent research giving the notion of capacity utilization clearer economic foundations in this research optimal output ye is defined as the minimum point on the firm s short run average total cost curve and capacity utilization is then computed as cu y y where y is actual output here i extend these concepts to include adjustment costs due to changes in the stock of capital and nonstatic expectations of future output demand and input prices the more general notion of cu is shown to depend on the shadow values of the firm s quasi fixed inputs and is decomposed to isolate the effects of anticipatory expectations an empirical comparison is then made between traditional indices and alternative economic cu measures using annual u s manufacturing data 1954 1980 the calculated indices exhibit plausible patterns which can be interpreted as the effects of nonstatic expectations and adjustment costs

the assessment the european internal market the next steps the treaty of rome envisaged the creation of the common internal market between the member states of the european community progress to wards this goal has been slow punctuated by sudden bursts of activity after the expiry of the deadline for the 1992 programme 1993 may mark the beginning of a prolonged pause or it may provide the impetus towards full economic mon etary and political integration at the time of writing the treaty on european union the maas tricht treaty the product of the french initiative to bind a unified germany into the european economy has not yet been ratified in all ec member coun tries the second danish referendum is outstand ing as is completion of the ratification process in the ukparliament the exchange rate mechanism erm has come under severe pressure with the suspension of uk membership and a series of devaluations in short monetary integration ac cording to the delors programme seems more remote now than at any time since the uk joined the erm stage n is extremely unlikely to begin on 1 january 1994 2 the main cause of these difficulties has been german reunification high german inter est rates have not only undermined currency pari ties they have also exacerbated recession across the community this shock to the european commu nity will take several years more to work through

the regional geography of corporate patenting in information and communications technology ict domestic and foreign dimensions in the new techno socio economic conditions characterized by an increasing reduction of temporal and spatial barriers and further globalization of economic activity paradoxically geography seems to matter more than ever before this particularly applies to science based industries e g information and communications technology ict where links between corporate competitors and firm university and user producer relationships are crucial in the development and adoption of new flexible technologies using us patents granted to the largest european electronic firms this paper looks at the interplay between the patenting by domestic and european foreign electronics companies of research and development carried out in ict fields in german uk and italian regions the findings suggest that patenting is attracted to existing areas of industrial strength taking a form of cumulative causation nonetheless policy measures may be successful in reversing the trend sous de nouvelles conditions techno et soc

productivity and long term growth potential in the uk economy 1924 1968 this paper examines the long term structural determinants of labour productivity for the uk economy using a panel data set from 1924 to 1968 trade union product market competition and human capital explanations are embedded within the model and compared labour quality or human capital is found to be the most important of the explanations considered

the size distribution of innovating firms in the uk 1945 1983 a survey of 4 378 significant innovations shows that firms with fewer than 1 000 employees commercialized a much larger share than is indicated by their share of r and d expenditures innovations per employee have been consistently above average in firms with more than 10 000 employees and have become so in firms with fewer than 1 000 intersectoral variation in the size distribution of innovating firms can be explained as a function of r and d based technological opportunities and of technological ease of entry by user firms with principal activities outside the sector copyright 1987 by blackwell publishing ltd

unique equilibrium in a model of self fulfilling currency attacks even though self fulfilling currency attacks lead to multiple equilibria when fundamentals are common knowledge we demonstrate the uniqueness of equilibrium when speculators face a small amount of noise in their signals about the fundamentals this unique equilibrium depends not only on the fundamentals but also on financial variables such as the quantity of hot money in circulation and the costs of speculative trading in contrast to multiple equilibrium models our model allows analysis of policy proposals directed at curtailing currency attacks

the recent slowdown of productivity growth the slowdown of productivity growth in the developed countries during the seventies will in this paper be viewed as a combined effect of three closely interacting forces i a long term deterioration in the efficiency and flexibility of some basic mechanisms of the economic and political systems of these countries ii the fading away of a number of uniquely favourable circumstances for productivity growth during the fifties and sixties and iii the exposure of these economies to unusually severe macroeconomic disturbances in the seventies careful inspection of time series with attempted modifications for cyclical factors suggests that there was hardly any general slowdown of productivity growth among developed countries before approximately i972 4 1 as we know the situation is radically different since then labour productivity growth per year for the entire national economy gdp per man hour seems to have fallen between the periods i960 73 and i973 9 by about i 2 percentage points in the united states 45 by about 24 percentage points in western europe2 45 and by about 5 9 percentage points in japan 6o table i see also fig i the slowdown was of about the same size in the business and manufacturing sectors see table i to calculate the extent of the slowdown of total factor productivity growth is of course a much more hazardous matter to which i will return later if just the various system changes and the fading away of the uniquely favourable factors had been the dominating forces behind the productivity growth slowdown we would expect the slowdown to have been gradual rather than abrupt as it turned out to be this abruptness as well as its timing makes the dramatic macroeconomic disturbances around i972 4 a prime suspect when looking for the villain behind the productivity growth slowdown indeed it is a basic hypothesis of the paper that these macroeconomic disturbances were not only by themselves strongly unfavourable for productivity growth but that they also revealed and accentuated the gradual deterioration of the

a regional comparison of enterprise patent holdings a study of british and irish data abstract we present findings of an analysis of data on firms located in south west england wales scotland and the republic of ireland regions of varying political and economic autonomy the information relates to patent publications since 1983 obtained from searches at the uk and irish patent offices employment sector of business and headquarters location regional imputations are according to holders rather than inventors addresses and issues arising from this are discussed descriptive statistics and regressions suggest that overall levels of activity are weakest in ireland contrary to its tiger image that firms owned outside the region make little contribution to regional patent stocks and that patenting activity rises monotonically with firm size

industrial districts and regional economic development a regulation approach digiovanna s 1996 industrial districts and regional economic developoment a regulation approach reg studies 30 373 386 this paper examines the regulatory underpinnings of industrial districts as many regional governments have been forced to accept greater responsibility for their own economic futures the industrial district model has been presented as an attractive path to economic development the underlying assumption among many policy makers is that all industrial districts are based on similar models of production organization and labour relations nevertheless the comparative approach illustrates that districts which appear similar on the surface are often quite distinct particularly when the experience of workers is considered by applying the concepts of regulation theory to the experiences of emilia romagna baden wurttemberg and silicon valley this paper illustrates that flexibly specialized districts can result in a variety of social outcomes this paper concludes that the success o

energy price shocks and productivity growth in us and uk manufacturing because sustained changes in the trend of productivity growth are so very important for people s long run economic welfare the dramatic productivity growth slowdown of the 1970 s and early 1980 s has been the focus of much analysis and discussion for some observers it was much more than coincidence that the oil price shocks of 1973 74 accompanied the sharp slowdowns in traditionally measured productivity growth not only in the united states and the united kingdom but throughout the industrialised world however establishing quantifying and explaining sig nificant linkages between energy price shocks and productivity growth has proved to be most difficult traditional and time honoured relationships involving productivity growth have all seemed incapable of explaining this slowdown for example edward denison author of several widely cited productivity studies has concluded that energy had essentially no role in explaining the productivity growth slowdown and that moreover what happened is to be blunt a mystery 1979 p 4

the assessment productivity and competitiveness in british manufacturing this issue of the oxford review examines productivity and competitiveness in british manufac turing the simplest and most widely used measure of productivity is output per head from this definition sprout at once the horns of a dilemma for an economy facing unemployment on the present scale for a given rate of expansion of output the higher the rate of productivity growth the greater the decline in employment or at least the smaller its growth on the other hand in an economy open to international competition a high rate of productivity growth relative to that of other countries is the long term key to achieving the favourable international competitive po sition necessary to sustain growth and a low level of unemployment

labour and productivity it has long been commonplace to claim that trade unions and worker attitudes are important constraints upon the level and growth of productivity such problems are seen to be especially acute in britain arguments of this kind are to be found in the early stages of the industrial rev olution and have been voiced on numerous occasions ever since the debate over the relation ship between labour and productivity has been considerable over the last two decades first with moves to reform workplace industrial relations and more recently with a variety of legislative and market based initiatives drawing upon a variety of theories this paper seeks to explore a number of organisational characteristics which may help to explain the relationship between labour and productivity

do council housing policies reduce migration between regions data from the 1973 general household survey of great britain are used to examine whether the council house system which currently provides a dwelling for one british family in every three tends to discourage long distance migration controls are introduced for various socioeconomic variables and the importance of occupation sector of employment age and education in explaining migration is discussed comparisons are also made between local movements and long distance migration the findings indicate that over longer distances council tenants have much lower migration rates than owner occupiers

bubbles and capital flow volatility causes and risk management emerging market economies are fertile ground for the development of real estate and other financial bubbles despite these economies significant growth potential their corporate and government sectors do not generate the financial instruments to provide residents with adequate stores of value capital often flows out of these economies seeking these stores of value in the developed world bubbles are beneficial because they provide domestic stores of value and thereby reduce capital outflows while increasing investment but they come at a cost as they expose the country to bubble crashes and capital flow reversals we show that domestic financial underdevelopment not only facilitates the emergence of bubbles but also leads agents to undervalue the aggregate risk embodied in financial bubbles in this context even rational bubbles can be welfare reducing we study a set of aggregate risk management policies to alleviate the bubble risk we show that prudential banking regulation sterilization of capital inflows and structural policies aimed at developing public debt markets and property rights all have a high payoff in this environment

the regional dimension of taxes and public expenditure in ireland morgenroth e regional dimension of taxes and public expenditure in ireland regional studies in ireland as in many other countries there has been an ongoing debate on the nature degree and trends of regional imbalance however relatively little is known about the effects of policies at the regional level in ireland this paper considers two aspects of public policy namely the fiscal system and public expenditure in particular regional government accounts are constructed that identify the level of taxation subsidization and public expenditure at the regional level the analysis of these data confirms that the fiscal system does reduce relative income differences in ireland furthermore there are substantial resource transfers across regions morgenroth e les impots et les depenses publiques en irlande le point de vue regional regional studies en irlande comme dans la plupart des pays on discute du desequilibre regional de sa nature son importance et ses tendances cependant on sait tres

bank runs as an equilibrium phenomenon a standard demand deposit contract in which individuals are entitled to their full deposit at any time provided the bank is solvent is analyzed in a context in which there are no exogenous events on which agents condition their behavior and a unique equilibrium involving a bank run with positive probability is shown to exist

are european sovereign bonds fairly priced the role of modelling uncertainty abstract this paper examines the extent to which large swings of sovereign yields in euro area countries during the debt crisis can be attributed to fundamentals focusing on the inherent uncertainty in bond yield models we show that the outcomes are strongly affected by modelling choices with regard to i the confidence bands for the model prediction ii the assumption whether the model coefficients are similar across countries or not iii the sample selection iv the inclusion of financial variables and v the choice of time varying coefficients these choices affect the explanatory power of macro fundamentals and the extent of mispricing

do credit rating agencies provide valuable information in market evaluation of sovereign default risk abstract we assess the marginal information value of credit rating announcements on market pricing of sovereign risk as measured by cds spreads we demonstrate that accurate assessment of the effect of credit rating changes must be conditioned on relevant information known prior to the rating change to this end we include macroeconomic conditions and the watch or outlook status of the bond immediately prior to the rating change in our information set the empirical work employs a dynamic panel macroeconomic model with 56 countries using monthly data from january 2004 through august 2012 we find that watch outlook status plays a critical role in accurately determining the information value of credit rating changes with point estimates in some cases changing by a factor of eight cds spreads respond most strongly to credit rating changes when bonds are on stable status but also respond significantly when bonds are on outlook status the least response is found for bonds on watch status at the time of the downgrade the downgrades in these cases are largely anticipated and the information value incorporated at the time of the negative watch announcements

monetary economic myth and econometric reality few of the main macro economic forecasting systems can produce sensible forecasts without the tender loving care of their proprietors many econometric equations in com mon use show significant deterioration in the accuracy with which they characterise data as time passes and many economists are sceptical about empirical evidence feeling it lacks credibility monetary relationships have the dubious distinction of being among the leaders in this field as witnessed by the very large mispredictions of m1 models in the usa over what is now known as the missing money period 1973 76 as well as during the recent great velocity decline 1979 82 in the uk models of m1 and m3 demand experienced large structural breaks following the competition and credit control regu lation changes and the move to floating exchange rates perhaps it is no surprise that goodhart s law should have been formulated with respect to money demand equations

does sovereign risk in local and foreign currency differ abstract sovereign debt in local currency has been considered safer than in foreign currency the literature offers scant guidance as to why such a gap existed or why it has slowly and steadily diminished over the past two decades we suggest and empirically test five hypotheses we find fx reserves and original sin greater financing in local currency to consistently be robust determinants of the gaps in local and foreign currency ratings as for why the gap has declined we identify as important factors the surge in global reserves and to a lesser extent the decline of original sin

unemployment in britain male unemployment in britain has risen from around 2 per cent in the 1950s to around 17 per cent in 1985 see figure 1 the figures are for male unemployment because there is no consistent series for women 1 even more remarkably unemployment has fallen in only three years out of the last twenty 1973 1978 and 1979 to account for this we need a model that explains both changes in the natural or non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment nairu and deviations from it we use a three equation supply side model centred on the labour market this has two main features the first concerns the determination of employment in the short run the labour demand function that we use cuts through the fruitless debate now raging especially in europe as to whether current unemployment is classical or keynesian according to the classical view employment is too high because real wages are too high according to the keynesian view real wages are not binding and unemployment is high because the product market does not clear with prices too high relative to nominal demand the whole debate is set in the framework of perfect competition yet in perfect competition prices are set by impersonal forces and it is not clear what could possibly stop prices clearing the market it is much more reasonable to think of prices as being set by imperfectly competitive firms existing prices being the best they can think of given the demand they face in this context firms demand for labour will depend on both the real product wage and the level of real aggregate demand this is the demand function we estimate and it conforms both to common sense and to the data however this does not imply that employment can be made to grow without limit by pumping up real demand for in the medium term when price surprises are eliminated our model determines three variables employment real wages and real demand on the basis of three equations an employment equation a price equation and a wage equation thus in the medium term there is a natural level of employment and corresponding to this a natural level of real aggregate demand the second key feature of our model concerns the medium term determination of unemployment in the medium term the planned mark up of wages over prices in wage settlements must be consistent with the mark up of prices over wage costs in employers pricing behaviour for if wage setters try to set real product wages higher than is consistent with employers pricing behaviour this generates ever increasing inflation thus the key to understanding unemployment in the medium term is the behaviour of wage setters if events occur that push them towards too high real wages then unemployment has to rise to offset these influences we shall call these influences wage pressure variables or push factors and they are clearly crucial in understanding unemployment the variables here include the social security system employment protection

convergence of living standards among irish regions the roles of productivity profit outflows and demography 1960 1996 using a consistent data set this paper presents evidence for the first time on the degree of convergence of living standards among irish planning regions between 1960 and 1996 the basic decomposition of living standards into productivity and demographic factors is extended to include the income output ratio which is significant in ireland due to the presence of substantial profit outflows since the mid 1980s living standards converged strongly among regions between 1960 and 1979 but between 1979 and 1996 there was weak divergence the chief proximate cause of this reversal was the slowdown in the effect of productivity on the degree of convergence of living standards the emergence of profit outflows exerted a negative effect on living standards growth while the irish demographic dividend boosted growth but had a divergent effect on living standards growth during the 1980s and 1990s a renewed future role for regional policy focused on the major urban centres is proposed a partir d un ensemble d

global influences on uk manufacturing prices 1970 2000 abstract we introduce the first consistent series of domestic product and related import price indices at the industry level for the uk using the data to analyse both domestic and international determinants of uk manufactured product prices foreign influences on uk prices in domestic markets are always present but domestic cost movements dominate we show that the pass through of world price tariff and exchange rate changes into product prices is partial in general and varies markedly between product categories standard tariff and exchange rate theories overstate price responses to global pricing determinants and fail to allow for variation between industrial sectors such theories can mislead when used for policy analysis and prediction

testing for convergence across the greek regions siriopoulos c and asteriou d 1998 testing for convergence across the greek regions reg studies 32 537 546 during the last five years few issues have proved more controversial in empirical economics than the so called convergence hypothesis this paper examines the issue of convergence across greek regions following the theoretical basis of the neoclassical model of economic growth our empirical results support the popular view prevailing in greece about the existence of dualism across the southern and northern regions of greece a possible explanation for this may be the lack of experience that poor countries like greece have in comparison with the rich ones rich countries have the combined ability to educate themselves as they grow rich and the endogenous ability to accumulate the knowledge upon which these efforts are made the same argument can be also used as an explanation for regional differences the fact that poor regions do not have previous experience and knowledge for efficient i

spread the news the impact of news on the european sovereign bond markets during the crisis we investigate how news affected domestic interest spreads vis a vis germany and how it propagated to other countries during the recent crisis period thereby distinguishing between the so called giips countries and other european countries we make original use of the eurointelligence newsflash to construct news variables based on the amount of news that is released on a country on a given date we find that more news on average raises the domestic interest spread of giips countries since september 2009 in addition we find that it leads to an increase in the interest spreads of other giips countries the magnitude of this effect is related to cross border bank holdings a split of news into bad and good news shows that the upward pressure on domestic and foreign interest spreads is driven by bad news we also find spillovers of bad news from giips countries onto non giips countries however the magnitude of these spillovers is substantially smaller than that to other giips countries

platform selection in the lab abstract emerging literature explores experimental platform selection games these games converge rapidly on the superior platform under a wide range of conditions we replicate the remarkable results of hossain and morgan 2009 in which such a game tips almost perfectly to the superior platform next we show that platform coordination fails when seemingly innocent increases in out of equilibrium payoffs are introduced the inflated payoffs keep the best reply structure unchanged and do not influence players security levels our design allows control for the explanatory force of risk dominance we find that equilibrium selection theory is unable to account for coordination failure while observed behavior is consistent with non rational learning furthermore and contrary to the literature we find that efficiency suffers when an inferior platform is granted initial monopoly

explanations of unemployment economists commonly distinguish between two sorts of unemployment roughly speak ing the involuntarily unemployed workers are unwillingly out of work i e they feel that they would be better off with jobs on the other hand the voluntarily unemployed workers prefer to be out of work for any of a wide variety of reasons e g because they are searching or training for a job or because they choose leisure over work

payoff complementarities and financial fragility evidence from mutual fund outflows the paper provides empirical evidence that strategic complementarities among investors generate fragility in financial markets analyzing mutual fund data we find that consistent with a theoretical model funds with illiquid assets where complementarities are stronger exhibit stronger sensitivity of outflows to bad past performance than funds with liquid assets we also find that this pattern disappears in funds where the shareholder base is composed mostly of large investors we present further evidence that these results are not attributable to alternative explanations based on the informativeness of past performance or on clientele effects we analyze the implications for funds performance and policies

learning large deviations and recurrent currency crises this article studies a version of obstfeld s journal of international economics 43 1997 61 77 escape clause model the model is calibrated to produce three rational expectations equilibria two of these equilibria are e stable and one is unstable dynamics are introduced by assuming that agents must learn about the government s decision rule it is assumed they do this using a stochastic approximation algorithm it turns out that as a certain parameter describing the sensitivity of beliefs to new information gets small the algorithm converges to a small noise diffusion process the dynamics of exchange rate changes are then characterized using large deviation techniques from freidlin and wentzell random perturbations of dynamical systems second edition berlin springer verlag 1998 these methods describe the sense in which the limiting distribution of exchange rate changes is approximated by a two state markov switching process where the two states correspond to the two e stable equilibria the model is calibrated to the exchange rate histories of argentina brazil and mexico currency crises in these countries resemble the predicted escape routes of the model a key feature of these escape routes is that expectations of a devaluation erupt suddenly without large contemporaneous shocks this is consistent with evidence showing that crises are often poorly anticipated by financial markets

accounting for the economic growth of firms in uk manufacturing since 1973 the dual relationship between the growth of total factor productivity and the growth of the price differential between inputs and outputs is used to decompose productivity changes since 1973 the decline in total factor productivity 1973 79 is best explained by the dual increase in the average output price input price differential resulting from the squeeze in profit rates in 1979 86 the average increase in total factor productivity was not significantly different from zero there was no thatcher productivity miracle growth of output is determined primarily by growth of inputs and not by general increases in efficiency c 1996 academic press limited copyright 1996 by oxford university press

knowledge stocks knowledge flows and innovation evidence from matched patents and innovation panel data successful innovation depends on knowledge technological strategic and market related in this paper we explore the role and interaction of firms existing knowledge stocks and current knowledge flows in shaping innovation success the paper contributes to our understanding of the determinants of firms innovation outputs and provides new information on the relationship between knowledge stocks as measured by patents and innovation output indicators our analysis uses innovation panel data relating to plants internal knowledge creation external knowledge search and innovation outputs firm level patent data is matched with this plant level innovation panel data to provide a measure of firms knowledge stock two substantive conclusions follow first existing knowledge stocks have weak negative rather than positive impacts on firms innovation outputs reflecting potential core rigidities or negative path dependencies rather than the accumulation of competitive advantages second knowledge flows derived from internal investment and external search dominate the effect of existing knowledge stocks on innovation performance both results emphasize the importance of firms knowledge search strategies our results also re emphasize the potential issues which arise when using patents as a measure of innovation

insights into unemployment and non employment in europe using alternative measures one of the most significant set of papers to come out of the portfolio of regional studies association publications in recent years has concerned the exposure of the levels of hidden unemployment in many of the old industrial areas of britain see for instance labour market adjustment in areas of chronic industrial decline the case of the uk coalfields regional studies 30 7 1997 627 640 the authors of these papers christina beatty and stephen fothergill have generated a debate that has uncovered major implications for the way the regional problem is measured perceived and tackled although these are important in terms of regional economic development strategies and policies it remains to be seen how the failure to count the real levels of unemployment will impact on the review of regional policy assisted areas the designation of european structural fund areas and the successful introduction of such initiatives as the new deal and welfare to work underpinning and deepening the rigour of t

coordinated bubbles and crashes abstract in a market with information friction investors strategically consider the actions of others and evolutionarily switch between fundamental and technical strategies to maximize their payoffs the collective actions of all investors exert feedback on asset price which affects investors subsequent actions we find that investors have the incentive to adopt fundamental strategy to restore market efficiency only if the mispricing is sufficiently large when investors fail to coordinate on the fundamental strategy market inefficiency increases which blows the bubble as market inefficiency grows the coordination on fundamental strategy strengthens which eventually bursts the bubble

gold monetization and gold discipline gold and its price have emerged as frequent topics of both academic and government debate 2 public attention focused on the gold market since gold s price began fluctuating violently in 1980 and 1981 has turned to gold as a possible means of removing some discretion inherent in the current fiat money system since lack of adherence to monetary rules can lead to problems of dynamic policy inconsistency academic economists have begun seriously to reconsider monetary standards based either on gold or on some other commodity as politically feasible methods of establishing rules 3

dynamic government performance honeymoons and crises of confidence we use a formal theoretical framework to explore the interplay between a government s longevity and its performance ministers perform well when their careers are valuable this is so when the government s duration is expected to be long the government s survival depends on its popularity and finally that popularity depends on its ministers performance the feedback loop between performance and longevity means that multiple rational expectations equilibria can arise ministers work hard for a popular government but divert efforts elsewhere if they believe the government is doomed these alternatives are both self fulfilling prophecies however the presence of perhaps small random events that buffet the performance and popularity of a government is sufficient to pin down a unique equilibrium we explore the dynamics that arise a crisis of confidence involving the rapid collapse of a government s performance is sparked when a sequence of negative shocks push the popularity of the government below a unique critical threshold

regional income estimates for ireland 1995 o leary e 1999 regional income estimates for ireland 1995 reg studies 33 805 814 in ireland since the mid 1980s a sizeable gap has emerged between gross domestic product gdp and gross national product gnp which by 1995 stood at 15 this gap is unique among eu countries it is attributable to net factor outflows mainly due to profit outflows by foreign multinationals recently released official regional output data are being used by the irish government to decide which regions qualify for the next round of eu structural funds this paper uses two methods for adjusting regional output for net factor outflows to derive regional income or gnp estimates it suggests that in addition to the west midlands and border regions the south east and south west regions might also be considered for qualification o leary e 1999 des estimations du revenu regional pour l irlande 1995 reg studies 33 805 814 depuis le milieu des anneees 80 un ecart important s est creuse en irlande entre le pib et

inflation bankruptcy default premia and the stock market in this paper we explore some of the possibilities and argue that in the absence of index linked loans higher inflation implies higher liquidation rates and default premia this would also be one possible reason why higher inflation would depress share values our evidence also suggests that the modigliani and cohn 1979 valuation errors hypothesis is extremely important in order to see why higher inflation might lead to more bankruptcies consider the following example suppose that the real interest rate p is i and that a firm has borrowed iooo if there is no inflation the firm s interest payments are io now suppose that inflation p rises to io and that the nominal interest rate r is given by the formula i r i p i fi then r rises to i i i and total interest payments to i i i hence at a time when revenue has risen by only io interest payments rise elevenfold and this creates cashflow problems for the firm index linked debt would avoid this problem because the principal could be indexed and would rise to i ioo leaving the firm to only pay li i in interest

reforming the labour market there is nothing new about government attempts to reform the labour market the primary emphasis put upon this aspect of economic policy by the two conservative gov ernments since 1979 however is perhaps unique this emphasis is in part the conse quence of a new stress on supply side economics and of a belief that many imperfections in the labour market are in fact removable by a mixture of measures de signed to alter the attitudes of both institutions and individuals and the environment in which they operate having been shocked into heightened receptiveness by the re cession actors and institutions have been regaled by a variety of measures these in clude trade union and industrial relations legislation the abolition of the fair wages resolution a review of wages councils measures on social security benefits initiatives on training and mobility incentives for individual and community enterprise and schemes to reduce the size of the effective labour force

causes of the current stagflation since 1975 labour slack has been unusually high in the oecd countries and yet inflation has not diminished the less favourable mix of unemployment and rate of change of inflation which we call stagflation is explained by a fall in the feasible rate of growth of real wages unmatched by a reduction in the constant term in phillips curve to investigate this mechanism conventional wage and price equations are estimated for 19 countries and then used for simulation stagflation has been caused in roughly equal amounts by rising relative import prices and by the fall in the rate of productivity growth in the basic model the phillips curve is assumed not to adapt to falls in feasible real wage growth but in a final section an adaptive wage equation is estimated which confirms that the process of adaptation is slow

the electronic mail game strategic behavior under almost common knowledge the paper addresses a paradoxical game theoretic example which is closely related to the coordinated attack problem two players have to play one of two possible coordination games only one of them receives information about the coordination game to be played it is shown that the situation with almost common knowledge is very different from when the coordination game played is common knowledge

university patenting and its effects on academic research the emerging european evidence this paper surveys the existing fragmentary data on the growth of university owned patents and university invented patents in europe we find evidence that university patenting is growing but this phenomenon remains heterogeneous across countries and disciplines we found some evidence that university licensing is not profitable for most universities although some do succeed in attracting substantial additional revenues this might be due to the fact that patents and publications tend to go hand in hand in a dynamic setting however we fear that the increase in university patenting exacerbates differences across universities in terms of financial resources and research outcome

international and domestic collateral constraints in a model of emerging market crises abstract we build a model of emerging markets crises which features two types of collateral constraints firms in a domestic economy have limited borrowing capacity from international investors they also have limited borrowing capacity with respect to each other we study how the presence and changes in these collateral constraints affect financial and real variables a binding international constraint in the aggregate leads to a sharp rise in interest rates and fire sales of domestic assets while limited domestic collateral can lead to wasted international collateral these two collateral constraints can interact in important ways the first is disintermediation a fire sale of domestic assets causes banks to fail in their function of reallocating resources across the economy leading to wasted international collateral the second is a dynamic effect we show that firms in an economy with limited domestic collateral and a binding international collateral constraint will not adequately precaution against adverse shocks increasing the severity of these shocks

raw materials profits and the productivity slowdown a factor price frontier framework is used to clarify the analogy of an increase decrease in raw material prices with autonomous technological regress progress factor price profiles are estimated for the manufacturing sector of the united states the united kingdom germany and japan the production model in conjunction with estimates obtained from the factor price frontier attributes much of the slowdown in manufacturing productivity to the rise in relative raw material prices part of the apparent productivity riddle may have to do with the use of double deflated national accounting measures of value added which have an inherent measurement bias

two cases for sand in the wheels of international finance the incompatibility of pegged exchange rates international capital mobility and national monetary autonomy is a basic postulate of open economy macroeconomies in the present environment of high capital mobility and political uncertainty even the possibility that governments may utilize their policy autonomy can defeat efforts to peg the exchange rate this leaves two possibilities one is to fix the exchange rate irrevocably through monetary unification the other is to live with floating rates either way a case can be made for throwing sand in the wheels of international finance where monetary unification is not an option this is a may to make distinct national currencies tolerable and international money and capital markets compatible with modest national autonomy in monetary and macroeconomic policy for eu counties striving to create a monetary union it is the only politically and economically feasible way of completing the transition to stage iii of the maastricht process

currency crises with the threat of an interest rate defence while virtually all currency crisis models recognise that the decision to abandon a peg depends on how tenaciously policy makers defend it this is seldom modelled explicitly we add the threat of an interest rate defence to the global game model of morris and shin american economic review 88 1998 with an endogenous defence actions of speculators may become strategic substitutes instead of the usual complements nevertheless our generalised model remains tractable and has a unique threshold equilibrium it provides additional insights for instance the threat of an interest rate defence makes speculation riskier and this may be sufficient to keep speculators out when fundamentals are still relatively strong

quality of life and economic convergence across spanish regions 1980 2001 marchante a j and ortega b 2006 quality of life and economic convergence across spanish regions 1980 2001 regional studies 40 471 483 evaluations of regional welfare conventionally rely on gross value added gva per capita as an indicator of living standards this paper attempts to readdress the regional welfare issue by using alternative composite indicators in the context of the united nations development programme undp human development indices evidence is presented regarding to what extent such alternative measures of living standards are converging with this aim a database for the spanish regions nuts ii was constructed for 1980 2001 and an augmented version of the human development index ahdi was estimated incorporating sub indices of health education and the resources required for a decent standard of living including an indicator of social exclusion the regional convergence of three per capita income measures and the raw data of seven indicators of quality of life were also

oil price shocks and emu sovereign yield spreads abstract this study examines for the first time the relationship among the oil price shocks and the sovereign yield spreads in the emu which is collectively the largest oil importer of the world in a time varying environment in particular we examine the time varying correlation between oil price shocks and the 10 year sovereign yield spread of core and periphery countries in the emu by employing a scalar bekk framework the main findings reveal that the correlations between sovereign yield spreads and oil price shocks are indeed time varying and are influenced by specific economic and geopolitical events that took place during the study period furthermore even though the correlation patterns are constantly low or zero prior to the great recession a change is revealed in the post 2008 period when correlations become moderate and more volatile finally we do not observe noteworthy differences in the correlation behaviour between core and periphery countries to different oil price shocks the findings of this study are particularly useful and provide valuable information to marketplace participants

credit ratings and the pricing of sovereign debt during the euro crisis this paper identifies the impact of credit rating changes on the sovereign spreads in europe and investigates the macro and financial factors that account for the time varying effects of a given credit rating change we find that changes of ratings are informative significant economically and robust even after controlling for conventional fundamentals a one unit rise in the average credit rating in a scale index of 25 ratings decreases cds spreads by about 45 basis points on average however the association between credit rating changes and spreads follows a complicated non linear pattern dependent on the level of the credit rating applying a non linear spline regression we find high sensitivity large change in spreads for a given change in ratings at the very low end of credit ratings and then a u shape pattern ratings at the moderately low end b and very high end of credit levels above a are fairly insensitive while middle ratings are quite sensitive to credit rating changes with the highest sensitivity at the bb level we also find that european countries had quite similar cds responses to credit rating changes during the pre crisis period but that large differences emerged between the now highlysensitive giips group and other european country groupings eu and euro area excluding giips and the non eu area we also find that contagion from changing the ranking of the giips on other euro countries disappears when own country credit rating changes are taken into account in contrast a decline in the credit rating in the giips area is transmitted as a decline in the cds spread of non euro eu which may be deemed as a substitute asset that increases in demand when the perceived risk of giips sovereign debt increases

the more we know about the fundamental the less we agree on the price i allow trading horizon heterogeneity across groups in a standard differential information model of a financial market this approach can explain the well established phenomenon that after a public announcement trading volume increases more private information is incorporated into prices and volatility increases in such environments public information has the important secondary role of helping agents learn about the information of other agents therefore whenever the correlation between the private information of different groups is sufficiently low a public announcement increases disagreement among short horizon traders regarding the expected selling price even as it decreases disagreement about the fundamental value of the asset additional testable implications are also suggested

margins concentration unions and the business cycle theory and evidence for britain abstract a number of recent studies have examined the cyclical relationship between price cost margins concentration and unions u s data has concluded that unions reduce margins margins vary over the cycle and concentration unionisation and the cycle interact in their effect on margins however there is almost no theory to account for these results we propose a simple theory that assumes only that there is overhead labour present at the firm this produces theoretical predictions that can explain these results and discriminate between existing theories we present results of our own using u k panel data and show similar findings to the u s

liquidity shortages and banking crises we show in this article that bank failures can be contagious unlike earlier work where contagion stems from depositor panics or contractual links between banks we argue that bank failures can shrink the common pool of liquidity creating or exacerbating aggregate liquidity shortages this could lead to a contagion of failures and a total meltdown of the system given the costs of a meltdown there is a possible role for government intervention unfortunately liquidity and solvency problems interact and can cause each other making it hard to determine the cause of a crisis we propose a robust sequence of intervention banks are often found at the center of systemic financial crises the causes of these crises have long been debated do they stem from depositor panics or do they arise because bank balance sheets are exposed to common factors if it is the latter then is there any sense in which bank failures can be contagious can anything be done to prevent these crises or stop them from propagating once they begin our purpose in this paper is to reexamine whether bank failures can start and propagate systemic crises even if we assume that depositors do not panic that is even if depositors actions are coordinated and they do not run simply because they fear others will run our focus is not because we think that panics are empirically unimportant the jury is still out on that instead we show that contagion can stem from an underlying real general equilibrium problem rather than just from lack of coordination among depositors from a policy perspective attempts to reassure investors through confidence building measures will not work if panic and lack of coordination are not the reasons for a crisis we begin in this paper with a model of a bank that we developed in diamond and rajan 2001 assets in this model are illiquid they cannot be borrowed against or sold for the full value of resources they will generate in their best use because the human capital necessary to generate that full value cannot

productivity and income per capita convergence in a peripheral european economy the irish experience birnie j e and hitchens d m w n 1998 productivity and income per capita convergence in a peripheral european economy the irish experience reg studies 32 223 234 gdp per capita in ireland increased from 60 to 90 of the uk average during 1986 95 this extremely rapid convergence begs the question whether increases in comparative productivity were of a similar magnitude industry of origin comparisons were used to benchmark ireland uk labour productivity in 1935 1968 and 1985 dramatic improvement in manufacturing comparative productivity was the immediate explanation of much of the convergence in gdp per capital levels unadjusted manufacturing productivity in the mid 1990s was as high as that in the us this was prima facie evidence of transfer pricing the likely scale of distortion created by transfer pricing is discussed and hence the extent of exaggeration of gdp an agenda for further research was suggested birnie j e et hitchens d m w n 1998 la convergence de la productivite e

the uk economy analysis and prospects world trade and output expanded rapidly in 1984 led by a high rate of growth in the united states however the recovery which started in 1983 has not been evenly spread across countries in the us fiscal policies have been lax and domestic demand has expanded at a breakneck pace japan benefited significantly from rapid growth in the us but europe has done less well partly because fiscal policies remain very tight and domestic demand restrained high real interest rates and the strength of the dollar held down commodity prices and thus stopped the pick up in activity feeding through into inflation rates however unemployment has continued to rise in most countries and in total 30 million people are now out of work in the oecd area

disparities in employment productivity and output in the eu the roles of labour market governance and welfare regimes dunford m 1996 disparities in employment productivity and output in the eu the roles of labour market governance and welfare regimes reg studies 30 339 357 the aim of this paper is to develop a set of empirical and theoretical connections between geographies of inequality on the one hand and geographies of productivity and of the mobilization of human potential on the other to this end it presents a brief account of the current map of regional inequality in the eu disparities in gross domestic product per head are shown to depend on two elements differences in productivity and differences in the employment rate which it is argued reflects the capacity of an area to mobilize its human potential an analysis of data for nuts 1 regions in the eu and for neighbouring countries shows that the respective roles of productivity and employment rate differentials in explaining variations in output per head vary quite markedly from one region to another to interpret these empirical results it is argue

income and employment disparities across european regions the role of national and spatial factors meliciani v 2006 income and employment disparities across european regions the role of national and spatial factors regional studies 40 75 91 the paper analyses the impact of trends in employment rates on income convergence across european regions looking at the evolution of entire distributions between 1988 and 1996 european regions have been characterized by a very slow process of income convergence across countries and by a lack of income convergence within countries while trends in labour productivity have contributed to income convergence trends in employment rates have had a diverging impact polarization in employment rates also appears to be the result of national factors and of the negative performance of objective 1 regions more than the consequence of the emergence of geographical clusters that go beyond national borders regional convergence unemployment spatial correlation non parametric estimation meliciani v 2006 les ecarts de revenu et d emploi a travers les regions d euro

sovereign debt the assessment this article serves as an introduction to two issues of the oxford review of economic policy one entitled sovereign debt understanding bond markets during the eurozone crisis and the second sovereign debt lessons from the past reforms for the future we begin by documenting recent trends in advanced country sovereign indebtedness and reviewing events that preceded the sovereign debt crisis in the eurozone the mechanisms through which rising sovereign debt may impact bond yields economic growth and inflation are discussed and the evidence for such effects is reviewed our discussion highlights that there is no unique threshold beyond which sovereign debt exerts adverse macroeconomic effects and that in order to understand the consequences of a given debt load one must analyse its structure in terms of internal and external creditors currency denomination the time to maturity of the bonds and the legal code governing debt issuance as well as various economic and political constraints measuring the fiscal space of the sovereign we then turn our attention to episodes in which sovereign debt proves excessive and default occurs we review explanations for the protracted and inefficient nature of defaults and describe some lessons from historical studies examining default outcomes in the final part of the paper we discuss proposals for averting future debt crises including jointly issued bonds such as eurobonds contingent convertible bonds and elements of a sovereign debt restructuring mechanism in the course of our discussion we draw on each of the 11 articles included in the two issues of this journal devoted to sovereign debt copyright 2013 oxford university press