remittances and the informal economy abstract many developing countries are characterized by a large informal sector and are also often heavily dependent on remittance inflows from abroad we develop a general equilibrium framework to understand better the dynamic absorption of remittances in a two sector small open economy by incorporating many of the stylized features of the informal sector calibrating the model to yield a long run equilibrium consistent with sample averages for 56 developing countries for the period 1990 2014 we show that the effect of remittances depends critically on how they impinge on the recipient economy i e whether these inflows are i permanent or temporary ii associated with a collateral effect to securitize borrowing and iii exogenous or countercyclical we also identify the conditions under which remittances are associated with an expansion of the informal sector as well as the dutch disease effect

bidding behavior in descending and ascending auctions this research examines how individual differences and institutional practices influence consumer bidding in auctions bidders may be motivated by different goals e g thrill of winning the item with minimal attention to what they pay for it versus prudence winning the item at a price at or below its perceived value also innate or auctioneer induced differences may exist in the precision and salience of bidder cognitions about the item s value we report two studies on how these motivational and cognitive factors influence bids in descending and ascending auctions respectively each study also manipulated a situational variable wait time at each price step the two auctions realized different average prices for the same item set average bids were higher in the descending versus ascending auction in several study conditions in both auction formats bidders primed with thrill versus prudence bid higher but more precise and or salient values attenuated this goal effect among other results in the descending auction longer wait times elicited higher bids from bidders primed with thrill but not prudence in the ascending auction longer wait times produced lower bids for bidders primed with prudence but not thrill these findings on consumer bidding behavior have practical implications for auction design

the labor market effects of introducing unemployment benefits in an economy with high informality abstract unemployment benefit systems are nonexistent in many developing economies introducing such systems poses many challenges which are partly due to the high level of informality in the labor markets of these economies this paper studies the consequences on the labor market of implementing an unemployment benefit system in economies with large informal sectors and high flows of workers between formality and informality we build a search and matching model with endogenous destruction on the job search and intersectoral flows where agents in the economy decide optimally whether or not to formalize jobs we calibrate the model for mexico and show that the introduction of an unemployment benefit system where workers contribute when employed in the formal market and collect benefits when they lose their jobs even if they obtain informal jobs can lead to an increase in formality in the economy while also producing small increases in unemployment the exact impact of incorporating such benefits depends on the relative strength of two opposing effects the generosity of the benefits and the level of the contributions that finance those benefits we also show important policy complementarities with other interventions in the labor market in particular combining the unemployment benefit program with policies that reduce the cost of formality such as lower employment taxes and firing costs can produce greater decreases in informality and lower impacts on unemployment than when the program is applied in isolation

banking crises and short and medium term output losses in emerging and developing countries the role of structural and policy variables summary the aim of this paper is to assess the dynamic impact of banking crises on output for a panel of developing economies using an unbalanced panel of 159 countries from 1970 to 2006 the paper shows that banking crises produce significant output losses output losses are larger for relatively richer economies characterized by a higher level of financial deepening and larger current account imbalances flexible exchange rates fiscal and monetary policy and liquidity support policies have been found to attenuate the effect of the crises

nonlinear dynamics in deviations from the law of one price a broad based empirical study abstract in this paper we test empirically the validity of the law of one price using data for five major bilateral us dollar exchange rates and nine goods sectors during the recent floating exchange rate regime since the early 1970s using threshold autoregressive models we find strong evidence of nonlinear mean reversion in deviations from the law of one price with plausible convergence speeds consistent with theoretical arguments on international goods markets arbitrage under transactions costs and with an emerging strand of empirical literature these results contribute towards forming a consensus view in favor of discrete regime switching in deviations from the law of one price and the presence of differing nonzero transactions costs across a broad range of goods and countries

consumer trust social marketing and ethics of welfare exchange the global corporate scandals such as enron worldcom and global crossing have raised fundamental issues of business ethics as well as economic social and anthropological questions concerning the nature of business competition and global capitalism the purpose of this conceptual paper is to introduce the concept of welfare exchange to the existing notions of economic social and anthropological notions of business and exchange in markets and society in the 21st century global competition and business success in the 21st century continue to raise the nature of economic value and the interaction among diverse actors in international markets institutions and society we believe that the nature of such exchange between consumers and organizations which can also be termed social marketing need to increasingly take into account a welfare and ethical component in this paper we introduce our concept of welfare exchange to emphasize the importance of such welfare and ethical issues in the global business environment of the 21st century

dodging the grabbing hand the determinants of unofficial activity in 69 countries across 69 countries higher tax rates are associated with less unofficial activity as a percent of gdp but corruption is associated with more unofficial activity entrepreneurs go underground not to avoid official taxes but to reduce the burden of bureaucracy and corruption dodging the grabbing hand in this way reduces tax revenues as a percent of both official and total gdp as a result corrupt governments become small governments and only relatively uncorrupt governments can sustain high tax rates 2000 elsevier science s a all rights reserved

efficiency aspects of the financing of unemployment insurance and other government expenditure this paper argues that if the disincentive effects of unemployment insurance result from higher reservation wages they may be eliminated by financing benefits with a progressive income tax the result is obtained within an equilibrium model with stochastic job matchings an optimal tax formula is derived for a linear income tax and shown to imply that the average tax rate should increase faster with income the higher the level of ui benefits relative to other government expenditure in some cases optimal financing may require the subsidization of low wage jobs

money laundering as a crime in the financial sector a new approach to quantitative assessment with an application to italy this study provides an answer to the question of how much cash deposited via a financial institution can be traced back to criminal activities by developing a new approach to measure money laundering and proposing an application to italy we define a model of cash in flows on current accounts considering besides dirty money to be laundered also the legal motivations to deposit cash and the role of the shadow economy we find that the average amount of cash laundered in italy is around 6 of gdp these findings are coherent with estimates of the nonobserved economy obtained in previous studies

does informality facilitate inflation stability abstract informality is a structural trait in emerging economies affecting the behavior of labor markets financial access and economy wide productivity this paper develops a simple general equilibrium closed economy model with nominal rigidities labor and financial frictions to analyze the transmission of shocks and of monetary policy in the model the informal sector provides a flexible margin of adjustment to the labor market at the cost of a lower productivity in addition only formal sector firms have access to financing which is instrumental in their production process in a quantitative version of the model calibrated to mexican data we find that informality i dampens the impact of demand and financial shocks as well as of technology shocks specific to the formal sector on wages and inflation but ii heightens the inflationary impact of aggregate technology shocks the presence of an informal sector also increases the sacrifice ratio of monetary policy actions from a central bank perspective the results imply that informality mitigates inflation volatility for most type of shocks but makes monetary policy less effective

consumer research for consumers this article outlines a consumer focused approach for the study of consumer behavior i argue that much of the existing literature by developing knowledge that focuses on the determinants of consumer purchasing is implicitly biased toward a marketing perspective of consumer behavior in contrast i propose the need for a consumer focused approach that would advance knowledge aimed at helping consumers make wiser purchases this approach should address the most important and challenging consumer decisions describe consumer behavior in a manner that leads to prescriptions consider the actions of other parties in the marketplace and identify biases unique to or exacerbated by the consumer context this article then illustrates what such a consumer focused approach would imply for consumer research in three areas negotiations financial services and auctions

credit market imperfections labor markets and leverage dynamics in emerging economies abstract emerging economies emes have different credit and labor market structures relative to advanced economies we document that economies with larger self employment shares tend to exhibit less countercyclical leverage dynamics we build a model where formal credit markets input credit relationships and the structure of labor markets interact that 1 captures a comprehensive set of eme business cycle regularities and 2 rationalizes our new fact the interaction between firms net worth interfirm input credit and self employment underlying our framework is critical for explaining our fact and is supported by the data

gender entrepreneurship and the formal informal dilemma evidence from indonesia summary this study analyzes the preferences of entrepreneurs about formality and focuses on the role of gender relying on original data collected in indonesia we unpack the differences between various types of female entrepreneurs currently in the informal sector according to their preferences about formalization contrary to the existing literature we find that female entrepreneurs possess highly nuanced preferences about formalization that are conditional on many factors the preference for formalization is strongest among female entrepreneurs who are older married rural based and have recently started their firms our work contributes to research that seeks to better understand entrepreneurial preferences and the role that gender plays

the process followed by ppp data on the properties of linearity tests recent research has reported the lack of correct size in stationarity test for ppp deviations within a linear framework however theoretically well motivated nonlinear models such as the estar appear to parsimoniously fit the ppp data and provide an explanation for the ppp puzzle employing monte carlo experiments we analyze the size and power of the nonlinear tests against a variety of nonstationary hypotheses we also fit the estar model to data from high inflation economies our results provide further support for estar specification

job search and mobility in developing countries theory and policy implications abstract a labor market model is developed in which the formal sector is characterized by search frictions whereas the informal sector is competitive we show that there exists a unique steady state equilibrium in this dual economy we then consider different policies financed by a tax on firms profits we find that reducing the unemployment benefit or the firms entry cost in the formal sector induces higher job creation and formal employment reduces the size of the informal sector but has an ambiguous effect on wages we also find that an employment wage subsidy policy and a hiring subsidy policy have different implications in particular the former increases the size of the informal sector while the latter decreases it

informal self employment and macroeconomic fluctuations article i nfo article history informal self employment is a major source of employment in developing countries its cyclical behavior is important to our understanding of the functioning of ldc labor markets but turns out to be surprisingly complex we develop a flexible model with two sectors a formal salaried tradable sector that may be affected by wage rigidities and an informal non tradable self employment sector faced with liquidity constraints to entry this labor market is then embedded in a standard small economy macro model we show that different types of shocks interact with different institutional contexts to produce distinct patterns of comovement between key variables of the model relative salaried self employed incomes relative salaried self employed sector sizes and the real exchange rate model predictions are then tested empirically for argentina brazil colombia and mexico we confirm episodes where the expansion of informal self employment is consistent with the traditional segmentation views of informality however we also identify episodes where informal self employment behaves pro cyclically here informality is driven by relative demand or productivity shocks to the non tradable sector

what happens during recessions crunches and busts we provide a comprehensive empirical characterization of the linkages between key macroeconomic and financial variables around business and financial cycles for 21 oecd countries over the period 1960 2007 in particular we analyse the implications of 122 recessions 113 28 credit contraction crunch episodes 114 28 episodes of house price declines busts 245 61 episodes of equity price declines busts and their various overlaps in these countries over the sample period our results indicate that the interactions between macroeconomic and financial variables can play a major role in determining the severity and duration of a recession specifically we find evidence that recessions associated with credit crunches and house price busts tend to be deeper and longer than other recessions stijn claessens m ayhan kose and marco e terrones

predicting the next step of a random walk experimental evidence of regime shifting beliefs barberis et al j financial econ 49 1998 307 construct a model in which investors use the prevalence of past trend reversals as an indicator of the likelihood of future reversals while such regime shifting beliefs are consistent with a variety of psychological theories other contrary predictions are consistent with the same theories we report two experiments with mba student participants that strongly support the existence of regime shifting beliefs we conclude that regime shifting models can provide a useful framework for understanding market anomalies including underreactions to earnings changes and overreactions to longterm earnings trends r 2002 published by elsevier science b v

shadow economies at times of banking crises empirics and theory this paper investigates the response of the shadow economy to banking crises our empirical analysis based on a large sample of countries suggests that the informal sector is a powerful buffer which expands at times of banking crises and absorbs a large proportion of the fall in official output to rationalise our evidence we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which accounts for financial and labour market frictions and for nominal rigidities in line with the empirical literature on the shadow economy we assume that in the informal sector access to external finance is limited and the production technology is relatively more labour intensive following a banking shock in the official sector the model predicts a large negative transmission to the unofficial economy that substantially dampens the overall effect of the shock

a competitive model of the informal sector abstract in developing nations formal workers tend to be more experienced more educated and earn more than informal workers these facts are often interpreted as evidence that low skill workers face barriers to entry into the formal sector yet there is little empirical evidence that such barriers are important this paper describes a model where in equilibrium the characteristics of formal and informal workers differ systematically even though labor markets are perfectly competitive the informal sector emphasizes low skill work as in the data because informal managers have access to less outside financing and choose to substitute low skill labor for physical capital

toward an understanding of economic growth in africa a reinterpretation of the lewis model summary we develop a model economy that has many of the features of lewis 1954 but that also includes an in between sector as described by lewis 1979 our model underscores the importance of the following determinants of structural change i productivity growth in the agricultural sector ii productivity growth in the nonagricultural sector and iii the terms of trade public investment enhances productivity growth in all sectors but when it is financed by foreign inflows it also causes a real exchange rate appreciation leading to a contraction in the open modern sector these results provide a partial explanation for recent patterns of growth in rwanda and elsewhere in africa where the nontradables or what we call the in between sector has expanded more rapidly than the tradable sector our results also highlight the dilemma faced by poor countries in dire need of public investment with a very limited tax base

business ethics index measuring consumer sentiments toward business ethical practices the present study describes the development of an ongoing and systematic index to measure consumers sentiments towards business ethical practices the business ethics index bei is based on the well established measurements of consumer sentiments namely the ics index of consumer sentiment and cbcci conference board consumer confidence index the bei is comprised of 4 measurements representing the dimensions of personal vicarious and past future data from 503 telephone interviews were used to calculate a bei of 107 this indicates an overall positive consumer sentiment towards the ethical behavior of business future calculations of the bei are planned which will allow for the estimation of the latent dynamics of trends in consumer sentiments toward american business ethics

a quantitative analysis of inflation as a tax on the underground economy abstract inflation rates are more dispersed and are persistently higher in developing countries this paper quantifies the importance of the public finance motive for inflation in the presence of a tax evading sector the underground economy the approach is motivated by the observation that the underground economy is especially large in poor countries the analysis builds on a general equilibrium monetary model with two production sectors where income in one of the sectors cannot be taxed a benevolent government finances its budget using an optimal combination of the income tax rate and the inflation rate the model is first calibrated to the u s economy and is then used for a cross country simulation the resulting relationships between the size of an underground economy inflation rate income tax rate and the share of seigniorage in the government revenue rationalize the cross country data quantitatively well

real exchange rate behavior the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries using annual data spanning two centuries for dollar sterling and franc sterling real exchange rates we find strong evidence of mean reverting real exchange rate behavior using simple stationary autoregressive models estimated on prefloat data we easily outperform nonstationary real exchange rate models in dynamic forecasting exercises over the recent float such stationary univariate equations explain 60 80 percent of the in sample variation in real exchange rates although the degree of short run persistence may be high the econometric estimates imply a half life of shocks to the real exchange rate of about 6 years for dollar sterling and a little under 3 years for franc sterling

mean reversion of real exchange rates in high inflation countries we test for mean reversion in real exchange rates using data from five countries four of which have experienced episodes of high inflation using monthly data for argentina brazil chile colombia and israel we find that a stochastic unit root model is typically appropriate brazil is the exception kalman filter estimates of the stochastic unit roots show sharp deviations from unity associated with high inflation episodes this suggests that stochastic unit root models are a more appropriate way to model mean reversion in real exchange rates for high inflation countries than models with fixed rates of mean reversion

unemployment insurance with a hidden labor market abstract we consider the problem of optimal unemployment insurance ui in a repeated moral hazard framework unlike existing literature unemployed individuals can secretly participate in a hidden labor market this extension modifies the standard problem in three dimensions first it imposes an endogenous lower bound for the lifetime utility that a contract can deliver second it breaks the identity between unemployment payments and consumption and third it hardens the encouragement of search effort the optimal unemployment insurance system in an economy with a hidden labor market is simple with an initial phase in which payments are relatively flat during unemployment and with no payments for long term unemployed individuals this scheme differs substantially from the one prescribed without a hidden labor market and resembles unemployment protection programs in many countries

remittances entrepreneurship and employment dynamics over the business cycle abstract we incorporate remittances and micro entrepreneurship self employment into a small open economy business cycle model with capital and labor market frictions countercyclical remittances moderate the decline of households consumption during recessions these remittances also are used to finance the start up costs of microenterprises that bolster households income during economic downturns we show that the positive income effect from countercyclical remittances also leads to a decrease in salaried labor supply which generates offsetting upward pressure on wages during recessions and adversely affects the recovery of the economy consistent with the microeconomic evidence the behavior of remittances decisively affects labor force participation and the composition of employment between non salaried and salaried employment over the business cycle the model delivers labor market and aggregate cyclical dynamics that are consistent with the mexican data including a highly volatile and countercyclical unemployment rate

informality over the life cycle abstract in developing countries informality is mainly concentrated among younger and older workers and low skilled workers in this study we propose a dual labor market theory that highlights how frictions and taxation in the formal sector and educational choices interact to shape the informality rate over the life cycle we develop a life cycle model with search frictions skill heterogeneities and endogenous educational choices we carry out a numerical analysis and show that our model reproduces remarkably well the life cycle patterns of informality non employment and formal employment in argentina we analyze several public policies and show that an educational grant reduces both informality and non employment and may be fully financed by the extra tax revenues generated by the increase in formal employment and wages lowering taxes may achieve similar results but is detrimental to the government budget despite increasing the base on which they are levied

start up costs limited enforcement and the hidden economy abstract this paper examines how much of the difference in the size of the informal sector and in per capita income across countries can be accounted by regulation costs and enforcement of financial contracts it constructs and solves numerically a general equilibrium model with credit constrained heterogenous agents occupational choices over formal and informal businesses financial frictions and a government sector which imposes taxes and regulations on formal firms the benefit from formalization is better access to outside finance the quantitative exercises suggest that i regulation costs and not the level of enforcement account for differences in the size of the informal sector between united states and mediterranean europe ii for a developing country like peru however contract enforcement and regulation costs are equally important in accounting for the size of the informal sector and iii regulation costs and contract enforcement do not account for most of the income differences observed among countries

shadow economies size causes and consequences using various methods the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing transition and oecd countries is estimated average size varies from 12 percent of gdp for oecd countries to 23 percent for transition countries and 39 percent for developing countries increasing taxation and social security contributions combined with rising state regulations are driving forces for the increase of the shadow economy especially in oecd countries according to some findings corruption has a positive impact on the size of the shadow economy and a growing shadow economy has a negative effect on official gdp growth

wages and informality in developing countries we develop an equilibrium wage posting model with heterogeneous firms that decide to locate in the formal or the informal sector and workers who search randomly on and off the job we estimate the model on brazilian labor force survey data in equilibrium firms of equal productivity locate in different sectors a fact observed in the data wages are characterized by compensating differentials we show that tightening enforcement does not increase unemployment and increases wages total output and welfare by enabling better allocation of workers to higher productivity jobs and improving competition in the formal labor market jel e26 j24 j31 j46 o15 o17

tests for unit root versus threshold specification with an application to the purchasing power parity relationship we consider modeling the real exchange rate by a stationary three regime self exciting threshold autoregressive setar model with possibly a unit root in the middle regime this representation is consistent with purchasing power parity in the presence of trading costs our main contribution is to provide statistical tools for testing unit root versus a setar first we show that a setar with a unit root in the middle regime is stationary and mixing under reasonable assumptions second we derive analytically the asymptotic distribution of our unit root test under the null using monthly real exchange rate data our test rejects the null of unit root against a threshold process for five european series

recessions and the vulnerable abstract this study evaluates the impact of recessions on households vulnerable to poverty the results indicate that recessions impact vulnerable households asymmetrically in comparison to the impact of growth on poor households we also demonstrate that this outcome is significantly influenced by a country s extent of development we argue that a direct consequence of the foregoing is that the efficacy of growth in poverty reduction tends to be under stated by conventional measures of poor households responses to economic growth and that safety nets need to be constructed to incorporate vulnerability to recessions

the long and short of it why are stocks with shorter runs preferred this article examines how consumers process graphical financial information to estimate risk we propose that consumers sample the local maxima and minima of a graph to infer the variation around a trend line which is used to estimate risk the local maxima and minima are more extreme the higher the run length of the stocks the consecutive number of upward or downward movements of a price series with identical mean variance skewness and kurtosis three experiments show that this leads to stocks with higher run lengths being perceived as riskier the run length effect importantly the run length effect is greater for investors who are more educated are employed full time trade more frequently have had longer experience trading and trade a wider range of financial instruments implications for the communication of financial products public policy and consumer welfare are discussed as are theoretical implications for the processing of visual and financial information and behavioral finance

labor market institutions taxation and the underground economy abstract the paper aims at qualifying the links between labor market institutions taxation tax monitoring and underground economic activity the proposed model is a continuous time matching model with one commodity roduced either overground or underground underground economic activity arises because of partial compliance with regulations and tax contributions imposed by the government vacancies and workers search are directed at a specific labor market workers are heterogenous in the subjective cost they face when operating in the irregular sector analytical and numerical investigations suggest that interactions between regular and irregular activities can affect standard results of policy interventions in that respect the paper supports the view that policies aiming at increasing individuals benefits of participating in the regular sector are more desirable than a deterrence policy

modelling the informal sector formally abstract the theoretical characterization of formal informal sector dualism by labor market dualism is integrated with its empirical characterization by size dualism by supposing that the minimum formal sector wage is only enforced for firms greater than a certain size a firm s size varies directly with the talent of its enterpreneur manager and the choice between formal and informal sector entrepreneurship is determined endogenously it is then shown that the size gap between the smallest formal sector firm and largest informal sector firm varies directly with the formal informal sector wage differential which in turn is shown as expected to increase the further is the minimum wage above the market clearing wage the comparative statics of changes in the size of the firm above which the minimum wage is enforced are also examined

nonlinear mean reversion to purchasing power parity exponential smooth transition autoregressive models and stochastic unit root processes nonlinear exponential smooth transition autoregressive estar models are recently very popular in modelling the deviation from purchasing power parity this article shows that there is a close relation between the estar models estimated in taylor et al 2001 and stochastic unit root stur processes of granger and swanson 1997 and mccabe and tremayne 1995 also for a post bretton woods sample period the real exchange rates from four major countries are tested if they are better described as i 1 estar or stur processes

should unemployment benefits decrease with the unemployment spell abstract in this paper we investigate whether unemployment benefits should decrease with the unemployment spell in a model where both job search intensity and wages are endogenous wages are set by collective agreements bargained by insiders it is shown that a more declining time sequence of unemployment benefits leads to wage increases when the tax rate is given such an effect may imply an increase in unemployment and counteracts the response of job search intensity that can be found in standard job search models with a given wage distribution calibration exercises suggest that it costs twice as much in terms of welfare loss for the long term unemployed workers to reduce the unemployment rate by 1 when wages are endogenous than in the standard job search model

influences on exchange processes buyers preconceptions of a seller s trustworthiness and bargaining toughness exchange theories posit that trust has an important and favorable influence on dyadic interactions this paper examines the notion that trust plays a key role in making a seller s tough bargaining strategy successful in a bargaining experiment we manipulated subjects preconceptions about a seller s trustworthiness and bargaining toughness as hypothesized a seller s expected trustworthiness plus toughness in bargaining led to higher levels of buyer seller cooperation and agreement and a higher level of buyer concessions

informality and the labor market effects of financial crises abstract we provide evidence based on a large sample of countries on the effects of financial crises on key labor market indicators including official and unofficial employment unemployment and the participation rate crises are followed by a drop in the official market participation rate and by an increase in informal employment these responses are strongly persistent empirical results are then interpreted with a dsge model which accounts for informality and for financial and labor market frictions in this framework the informal sector acts as a buffer which absorbs workers in bad times and vice versa our simulations suggest the informal sector also is a crisis amplifier for the official economy for a given financial shock the ensuing contraction in the official economy is deeper and more persistent the larger the initial size of the unofficial sector this implies that in less developed economies financial crises cause a relatively stronger reallocation of inputs towards less efficient sectors expose a larger fraction of the population to the adverse effects of informality cause a sharper deterioration of public finances limiting governments ability to supply public goods and to engage in countercyclical fiscal policies

the international business ethics index european union the present study expands the systematic measurement of consumers sentiments towards business ethical practices to the international arena data for the business ethics index bei were gathered in three countries of the european union uk germany spain the germans were the most pessimistic while the british were the most optimistic about the future ethical behaviour of businesses

the importance of others welfare in evaluating bargaining outcomes this research proposes that negotiators consider each other s payoffs in their evaluation of potential settlements beyond the level necessary to maintain the bargaining relationship we further hypothesize that the way in which negotiators weight their opponents payoffs relative to their own is a function of characteristics of the relationship and of the bargainers personalities specifically we consider liking of the other party payoff expectations satisfaction with past settlements the likelihood of future negotiations egocentricity and power orientation we demonstrate the impact of these factors on the satisfaction negotiators derive from profiting more and less than their opponents using data from an experiment in which subjects negotiate with computer simulated opponents

can africa compete with china in manufacturing the role of relative unit labor costs in this paper examine sub saharan africa s ssa bilateral trade and cost competitiveness with china we review patterns of bilateral trade between ssa and china showing an extraordinary imbalance in the structure of trade in that china overwhelmingly exports manufactured products to ssa and almost exclusively imports primary products in return our principal means of assessing the competitiveness of ssa s manufacturing sector vis a vis china are measures of relative unit labor costs rulc we find that african rulc levels have generally been very high relative to china but declined over the 2000s as china s wages have risen faster than chinese productivity while the reverse is true for the ssa countries in our sample nevertheless rulc vis a vis china remained elevated for many ssa countries as of 2010 generally high rulc along with weaknesses in the business climate suggest that most ssa countries are unlikely to be competitive in labor intensive manufacturing any time soon

informal employment safety net or growth engine summary is informal employment a safety net or a growth engine to address this question this paper studies the trends and cycles of informal employment it first presents a theoretical model of long and short run behavior of informal labor then it analyzes these relationships empirically using the share of self employment in the labor force as the proxy for informal employment in the long run informality is larger when labor productivity is lower government services weaker and business flexibility less prevalent in the short run informal employment behaves counter cyclically indicating that it acts primarily as a safety net the degree of counter cyclicality however varies inversely with the size of informal labor itself

purchasing power parity and markov regime switching we revisit the evidence on ppp in the twentieth century allowing for markov regime switching in the adf regression using lopez et al s 2005 extension of taylor s 2002 original data set our results are 1 for most countries there are periods over which the real exchange rate is stationary and ppp holds and periods over which the real exchange rate is non stationary and ppp does not hold namely regime dependent stationarity thus real exchange rate stationarity is a stochastic event itself 2 the probability that the real exchange rate is stationary is less than 50 for most countries 3 there is evidence of non stationarity during both the bretton woods and the recent float periods for the majority countries the comparative performance of ppp is slightly better during bretton woods than the recent float

employment and firm heterogeneity capital allocation and countercyclical labor market policies abstract developing and emerging economies have large employment shares in micro and small firms which are characterized by limited access to formal financing and high reliance on input credit these economies implemented a host of countercyclical labor market policies amid the global financial crisis gfc but labor market data limitations prevent detailed empirical assessments of the effectiveness of these policies we develop a business cycle model with frictional labor markets consistent with the employment and firm structure of these economies and assess the aggregate impact of key countercyclical labor market policies implemented amid the gfc improving job intermediation for large firms is particularly effective in aiding recoveries policies targeting smaller firms yield limited aggregate benefits differences in labor productivity and sectoral contribution to employment and output across firm categories are key in explaining the response to policy

consumption habits in a new keynesian business cycle model consumption habits have become an integral component in new keynesian models however consumption habits can be modeled in a host of different ways and this diversity is reflected in the literature i examine whether different approaches to modeling consumption habits have important implications for business cycle behavior using a standard new keynesian business cycle model i show that to a first order log approximation the consumption euler equation associated with the additive functional form for habit formation encompasses the multiplicative function form empirically i show that whether consumption habits are internal or external has little effect on the model s business cycle characteristics

government effectiveness and regional variation in informal employment abstract this article analyses the role of government effectiveness in the determination of informal employment a theoretical model is developed in which local governance and worker skill level are assumed to influence the decision of the worker whether to seek employment in the formal or informal sectors the model is assessed empirically using data from brazil where almost half of the urban labour force is employed informally the empirical analysis supports the predictions of the model and suggests that the probability of a worker being employed informally is lower in regions with better governance and higher average education

taking stock of stockbrokers exploring momentum versus contrarian investor strategies and profiles two studies were conducted among professional security analysts to explore their patterns of decision making while managing investment portfolios in study 1 a computer based simulation the analysts styles differed markedly with most exhibiting either a momentum or contrarian approach as indicated by responses to portfolio stock price changes study 2 used a verbal protocol procedure and semistructured depth interviews to probe the analysts thought processes momentum and contrarian investors were found to differ on a number of dimensions including price expectations age experience raw performance risk propensity cognitive style knowledge calibration and strategy adaptivity implications and limitations are discussed

global financial risk aggregate fluctuations and unemployment dynamics abstract we use a panel structural vector autoregression methodology to study the impact of global financial risk shocks in emerging market economies emes versus small open advanced economies soaes the short term responses of gdp investment and un employment are similar in emes compared to soaes but their medium term responses differ considerably in emes the shock propagates less across gdp and investment and the response of unemployment is prominently more subdued further analysis suggests that while in emes these dynamics can be traced back to the response of country interest rates to global financial risk shocks and to the average degree of firm informality in soaes these factors are not at play instead for soaes the dynamics of bank credit can matter to some degree but more broadly a global financial risk shock passes through more directly into the economy

hot hands in mutual funds short run persistence of relative performance 1974 1988 the relative performance of no load growth oriented mutual funds persists in the near term with the strongest evidence for a one year evaluation horizon portfolios of recent poor performers do significantly worse than standard benchmarks those of recent top performers do better though not significantly so the difference in risk adjusted performance between the top and bottom octile portfolios is six to eight percent per year these results are not attributable to known anomalies or survivorship bias investigations with a different previously used data set and with some post 1988 data confirm the finding of persistence

the business ethics index as a leading economic indicator theoretical justification for the business ethics index bei from the emerging economics of trust literature is discussed the bei results for 2007 2008 and 2009 are presented while the personal past bei component shows no significant difference from the previous years the vicarious past component shows a dramatic drop to levels previously never recorded however when it came to the perception of the future business ethical behavior respondents were signifi cantly more optimistic than in previous measurements this finding was more than a little surprising given the depth of the economic crisis a possible explanation is that consumers hopefully perceived the economic crisis as already abating and or that at least the worst was over

are two better than one bargaining behavior and outcomes in an asymmetrical power relationship many consumer transactions are characterized by bargaining between parties holding unequal power positions the group polarization hypothesis suggests that the effects of group size will differ for high and low power bargainers accordingly power position and size of bargaining unit one two were manipulated in a threat vulnerable 2 2 game factor effects on economic performance communication style and post bargaining attitudes were examined at the unit and system levels supporting the group polarization hypothesis two person groups tend to magnify the power manipulation i e group size interacts with power position on post bargaining attitudes and system performance

the effects of systemic banking crises in the inter war period abstract this paper examines the time profile of the impact of systemic banking crises on gdp and industrial production using a panel of 24 countries over the inter war period and compares this to the post war experience of these countries we show that banking crises have effects that induce medium term adjustments on economies focussing on an eight year horizon it is clear that the negative effects of systemic banking crises last over the entirety of this time horizon the effect has been identified for gdp and industrial production the adverse effect on the industrial sector stands out as being substantially larger in magnitude relative to the macroeconomic effect comparing the results across long run historical periods for the same selection of countries and variables identifies some differences that stand out the short term macroeconomic impact effects are much larger in the post war period suggesting that the propagation channels of shocks operate at a faster pace in the more recent period moreover the time profile of effects differs suggesting that modern policies may be modulating the temporal shape of the response to banking crises shocks however the broad magnitude of the adverse effect of banking crises remains comparable across these time periods

the quality of employment qoe in nine latin american countries a multidimensional perspective abstract this paper proposes a methodology for measuring the quality of employment from a multidimensional and public policy perspective in latin american developing countries argentina bolivia brazil chile colombia ecuador mexico paraguay peru and uruguay using household and labour force survey data from 2015 the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the qoe can be measured using a multidimensional methodology that can inform policy makers about the state of their labour markets in a way that complements traditional variables such as participation or unemployment rates which are not always good indicators of labour market performance in developing countries with large informal sectors building on the framework of the capability approach as well as on previous work on multidimensional poverty we use the alkire foster af method to construct a synthetic indicator of the quality of employment qoe at an individual level we select three dimensions that must be considered as both instrumentally and intrinsically important to workers and the functions and capabilities generated by their employment situation income job security and employment conditions job security is then divided into two sub dimensions occupational status and job tenure as is employment conditions social security affiliation and excessive working hours a threshold is then established within each dimension and sub dimension to determine whether a person is deprived or not within each dimension before establishing an overall cut off line and calculating composite levels of deprivation the results generated by this indicator are first highly relevant to policy makers as they allow for the precise identification of groups of vulnerable workers as well as of dimensions and indicators which contribute to deprivation in the labour market second they extend the debate about employment in developing countries to variables not commonly considered by the literature as being critical to the well being of workers and their dependents such as occupational status and job tenure third this paper highlights important difference between latin american countries both in terms of the overall qoe index result as well as its component dimensions while chile presents the best results in the region paraguay presents the worst followed by mexico bolivia and peru however chile peru columbia and brazil for example have the biggest problem with job rotation finally the paper highlights that low rates of unemployment are not necessarily related to low rates of deprivation in terms of the qoe in fact in some countries analysed e g mexico the opposite is true

taxes inequality and the size of the informal sector abstract in this note we develop a simple heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets to explain the prevalence of a large low productivity informal sector in developing countries in our model taxes levied on formal sector agents are used to finance the provision of a productive public infrastructure which creates a productivity premium from formalization our model offers endogenous differentiation of rich and poor countries complete formalization is an equilibrium only in countries with the appropriate initial conditions we discuss the existence of this equilibrium and highlight the ambiguous effect of taxes

business cycles and labor market search the quantitative implications of labor market search for economic fluctuations are evaluated in the context of a real business cycle model incorporating labor market search into the model is found to improve its empirical performance along several dimensions in particular hours now fluctuate substantially more than wages and the contemporaneous correlation between hours and productivity falls in addition the model replicates the observation that output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons overall the empirical results suggest that the labor market search environment embodies a quantitatively important propagation mechanism copyright 1996 by american economic association

introducing financial frictions and unemployment into a small open economy model the current nancial crisis has made it abundantly clear that business cycle modeling no longer can abstract from nancial factors it is also becoming increasingly clear that the stylized modeling of labor markets without explicit unemployment that is the current standard approach has its limitations some questions which the dominating extant business cycle models are mute on but that we would like to answer are how important are nancial and labor market frictions for the business cycle dynamics of a

corruption extortion and evasion corruption evasion and the abuse of power and the possibility thereof are pervasive features of economic activity a prominent instance is tax collection this paper examines the implications of corruptibility and the potential abuse of authority for the effects and optimal design of potentially non linear tax collection schemes amongst the findings are that the distributional effects of evasion and corruption are unambiguously regressive under the kinds of schemes usual in practice and collecting progressive taxes without inducing evasion or corruption may require that inspectors be paid commission on high income reports but not on low with the cost of this potentially creating what seems to be a previously unnoticed trade off between equity and efficiency

informality and rent seeking bureaucracies in a model of long run growth abstract this paper explores the links among growth the informal economy and rent seeking bureaucracies the presence of congestion associated with the enforcement of property rights implies that informality can be useful whether bureaucratic rent seeking is detrimental to growth then depends on how good a substitute informality is to production in the formal sector in order to create profits which can be appropriated rent seeking bureaucrats limit entry into the formal economy as a result firms operate in the informal sector even when the cost of informality is high in which case lower growth emerges however when the cost of informality is low a large number of firms choose to operate informally irrespective of entry conditions in the latter case growth is unaffected by a rent seeking bureaucracy as entry restrictions in the formal economy do not bind

the effects of labour market policies in an economy with an informal sector in this article we build an equilibrium search and matching model of an economy with an informal sector our model extends mortensen and pissarides 1994 by allowing for ex ante worker heterogeneity with respect to formal sector productivity we use the model to analyse the effects of labour market policy on informal sector and formal sector output on the division of the workforce into unemployment informal sector employment and formal sector employment and on wages finally we examine the distributional implications of labour market policy specifically we analyse how labour market policy affects the distributions of wages and productivities across formal sector matches in this article we construct a search and matching model that we use to analyse the effects of labour market policies in an economy with a significant informal sector what we mean by an informal sector is a sector that is unregulated and hence not directly affected by labour market policies such as severance or payroll taxes we find that labour market policies that apply only to the formal sector nonetheless affect the size and the composition of employment in the informal sector this is important since there is substantial economic activity in the informal sector in many economies particularly in developing countries estimates for some latin american countries put the informal sector at more than 50 of the urban work force 1 the informal sector is also important in many transition countries as well as in some developed economies 2 although much of the literature treats the informal sector as a disadvantaged sector in a segmented labour market framework this interpretation is not consistent with recent empirical evidence from latin america under a segmented or dual labour market interpretation one would expect jobs to be rationed in the primary sector and workers to be in the secondary or informal sector involuntarily and to be queuing for formal sector jobs maloney 2004 presents evidence for several latin american countries that challenges this view and instead interprets the informal sector as an unregulated micro entrepreneurial sector similarly using data from the argentinian household survey pratap and quintin 2006 reject the notion that labour markets are segmented in the greater buenos aires area concluding that there is no evidence of a formal sector wage premium after controlling for individual and establishment we thank mauricio santamaria for stimulating conversations that inspired our interest in this topic we also thank bob hussey and fabien postel vinay as well as our editor steve pischke and two anonymous

regulation of entry labor market institutions and the informal sector abstract this paper develops a two sector matching model that incorporates the main features of latin american labor markets it has an innovation in its matching structure that makes it more consistent with some key stylized facts of the informal sector in these countries the model is numerically solved using brazilian data and several policy simulations are performed reducing formal sector s entry cost significantly reduces the size of the informal sector and improves overall labor market performance increasing enforcement significantly reduces informality but has strong adverse effects on unemployment and welfare thus the results indicate that the tradeoff between lower informal employment and higher unemployment rates is not present when one looks at policies that aim at reducing the costs of being formal as opposed to policies that simply increase the costs of being informal

the purchasing power parity debate originally propounded by the 16th century scholars of the university of salamanca the concept of purchasing power parity ppp was revived in the interwar period in the context of the debate concerning the appropriate level at which to re establish international exchange rate parities broadly accepted as a long run equilibrium condition in the post war period it first was advocated as a short run equilibrium by many international economists in the first few years following the breakdown of the bretton woods system in the early 1970s and then increasingly came under attack on both theoretical and empirical grounds from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s accordingly over the last three decades a large literature has built up that examines how much the data deviated from theory and the fruits of this research have provided a deeper understanding of how well ppp applies in both the short run and the long run since the mid 1990s larger datasets and nonlinear econometric methods in particular have improved estimation as deviations narrowed between real exchange rates and ppp so did the gap narrow between theory and data and some degree of confidence in long run ppp began to emerge again in this respect the idea of long run ppp now enjoys perhaps its strongest support in more than 30 years a distinct reversion in economic thought

transactions costs and nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates an empirical investigation eolquilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity ppp conventional cointegration tests which ignore the effect of transactions costs may be biased against the long run ppp hypothesis our results using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two centuries clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process the systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean reverting behavior for ppp deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies

optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky prices this paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky product prices the theoretical framework is a stochastic production economy without capital the government finances an exogenous stream of purchases by levying distortionary income taxes printing money and issuing one period nominally risk free bonds the main findings of the paper are first for a miniscule degree of price stickiness i e many times below available empirical estimates the optimal volatility of inflation is near zero this result stands in stark contrast with the high volatility of inflation implied by the ramsey allocation when prices are flexible the finding is in line with a recent body of work on optimal monetary policy under nominal rigidities that ignores the role of optimal fiscal policy second even small deviations from full price flexibility induce near random walk behavior in government debt and tax rates third sluggish price adjustment raises the average nominal interest rate above the one called for by the friedman rule finally an interest rate feedback rule whereby the nominal interest rate depends on inflation and output fits well the data emanating from the ramsey economy however the fitted rule is not of the taylor type for the implied inflation coefficient is less than one and close to zero and the output coefficient is negative jel classification e52 e61 e63

efficient unemployment insurance this paper constructs a tractable general equilibrium model of search with risk aversion an increase in risk aversion reduces wages unemployment and investment unemployment insurance has the opposite effect insured workers seek high wage jobs with high unemployment risk an economy with risk neutral workers achieves maximal output without any unemployment insurance but an economy with risk averse workers requires a positive level of unemployment insurance to maximize output therefore moderate unemployment insurance not only improves risk sharing but also increases output

losers winners and biased trades when faced with sequential information consumers tend to fall prey to one of two well known heuristics the hot or cold hand and the gambler s fallacy the authors relate these two traditionally separate heuristics to differences in accepting buy versus rejecting sell decisions they identify trend length as a contextual moderating variable and show an asymmetry between buying and selling frames when applied to a stock market context a consistent finding is that consumers prefer to buy past winners and sell past losers even when neither should be preferred this behavior violates the normative rule of buy low and sell high

returns to physical capital in ethiopia comparative analysis of formal and informal firms summary this paper investigates returns to capital in the formal and informal sectors in ethiopia using parametric and semi parametric regression techniques results show that there is a higher annual median return to capital in the informal sector 52 140 than the formal sector 15 21 however informal firms might benefit from working formally as their capital stock gets larger marginal returns in the informal sector increase with firm size access to reliable markets market uncertainty and owners labor supply on the other hand marginal returns to capital and overall profitability decrease with capital stock contrary to the poverty trap hypothesis

short long and spatial dynamics of informal employment di caro p and nicotra g short long and spatial dynamics of informal employment regional studies this paper analyses regional shadow labour markets cross regional migration flows are introduced in a stochastic two sector model used to study the effects of regional interactions on informality empirical results show that informal activities across italian regions are driven by the inefficient provision of public goods and high taxes regional connections are found to be significant place specific reactions of informal employment to national shocks in the official economy are investigated finding that the informal sector can act as a complement to or a substitute for formal activities the summary of the results and policy conclusions are then discussed

institutions informal labor markets and business cycle volatility i build a business cycle labor search and matching model with informal labor markets which shows that different dimensions of institutional quality have similar effects on the size of the informal sector but different effects on the relationship between informality and long run macroeconomic outcomes and between informality and labor market volatility for the same change in informal sector size changes in different proxies for institutional quality have contrasting quantitative implications for the steady state and the volatility of the labor market despite having similar consequences on other macroeconomic variables these results highlight the importance of identifying the source behind changes in the size of the informal sector to characterize the link between informality and business cycle dynamics

from the editors experimental designs in international business research the question that motivated this editorial was where are the ib experiments the short answer is that experiments are largely absent from the ib literature and we argue that they shouldn t be experimental methods offer the opportunity to significantly improve the evidence for the causal relationships in international business research in a variety of ways in this article we highlight the value and limitations of experiments in ib research and explain the basic tenets of experimental design and thinking with the goal of encouraging the submission of more papers with an experimental design to jibs

job finding and separation rates in the oecd abstract we provide a set of comparable estimates of average monthly job finding and separation rates for over 20 oecd countries that can be used for the cross country analysis of labor markets