spillovers and governance an analysis of knowledge and reputational spillovers in information technology investigating spillovers potential costs and benefits to a firm that extend beyond an individual transaction i integrate transaction cost theory and the knowledge based view of the firm in an effort to better understand the efficient governance of knowledge contracts with detailed task descriptions were associated with transactions with the potential to generate new and reusable knowledge the risk of a firm s technology spilling over to others and the risk of reputation impairing spillovers were associated with suppliers using their own employees rather than subcontractors thus results suggest that the creation and protection of knowledge are key factors in understanding governance decisions

index investment and financialization of commodities the authors found that concurrent with the rapidly growing index investment in commodity markets since the early 2000s prices of non energy commodity futures in the united states have become incr

international investment positions a cross sectional analysis abstract we explore some empirical properties of the level and composition of gross international investment positions in a cross section of countries we find that more open countries with larger domestic financial markets tend to hold greater quantities of foreign assets and liabilities there is some evidence that cross holdings are positively correlated with inflation volatility but negatively correlated with terms of trade volatility

keeping organizational secrets protective institutional mechanisms and their costs the notion that firms generate rents from proprietary knowledge is widely accepted however the mechanisms that firms as institutions can differentially deploy to protect their knowledge form appropriation by rivals are not well understood this paper examines three broad classes of protective mechanisms that firms coon deploy to keep their knowledge secret rules compensation schemes and structural isolation the paper concludes that keeping organizational secrets through the deployment of protective mechanisms is both difficult and costly economizing considerations can therefore be expected to bear strongly on this aspect of firm organization copyright 1997 by oxford university press

valuing managerial flexibility an application of real option theory to mining investments abstract the value of managerial flexibility is assessed using data on prices costs grades reserves ore extraction and metal output for a panel of canadian copper mines a real option model is estimated and solved for project and option values most empirical researchers i consider the initial investment decision but neglect flexible operation thereafter ii assume that price is stochastic but ignore cost and reserve uncertainty and iii model price as a nonstationary stochastic process the evolution of three state variables price cost and reserves is assessed here differences in assumptions compared to others are found to lead to large differences in estimated project and option values

current accounts and oil price fluctuations in oil exporting countries the role of financial development abstract oil exporting countries usually experience large current account improvements following a sharp increase in oil prices in this paper we investigate this oil price current account relationship on a sample of 27 oil exporting economies relying upon the estimation of panel smooth transition regression models over the 1980 2010 period we provide evidence that refines the traditional interpretation of oil price effects on current accounts while current accounts are positively affected by oil price variations this effect is nonlinear and depends critically on the degree of financial development of oil exporting economies more specifically oil price variations exert a stronger impact on the current account position for less financially developed countries this influence diminishing with financial deepness

metal volatility in presence of oil and interest rate shocks abstract this study uses three two factor volatility models of the garch family to examine the volatility behavior of three strategic commodities gold silver and copper in the presence of crude oil and interest rate shocks the results of the standard garch models suggest that gold and silver have almost the same volatility persistence which is greater than that of copper the cgarch estimates indicate that the short run transitory component of volatility converges to zero much faster for copper than for gold and silver in this sequence however the permanent volatility component demonstrates equally strong persistence in the long run for all three metals the egarch results suggest that the leverage effect is present and significant for copper only implying that gold and silver can be good investment in anticipation of bad times past oil shock does not impact all three metals similarly monetary policy and to leaser extent the oil shocks have calming effects on precious metals but not on copper if the t bill rate is used crises such as the 2003 iraq war heighten metal volatility these results have implications for derivatives valuations using gold as a reserve asset risk analysis and for the commodity exporting countries and commodity producing firms

the determination of spot and futures prices with storable commodities this paper analyzes the effects of futures trading in a market for a storable commodity in which producers and speculators are assumed to be risk averse and specifications of the aggregate supply and inventory demand functions are derived from explicit optimization a critical aspect is how the parameters of these functions change with the introduction of the future market as it is through these induced parameter changes that the futures market exerts its influence on the spot price the effects of the futures market on both the long run average spot price and its variance are analyzed while we are unable to draw any definitive conclusions on this issue we find that in all cases considered the futures market stabilizes the spot price as well as lowering its long run mean for many years now the question of the effects of futures trading on the stability of spot prices has been extensively debated this topic has been discussed at various levels for example farmers and agricultural interest groups have claimed that futures trading destabilizes spot prices thereby imposing welfare losses on the economy in the united states congress has decided that futures trading can cause price destabilization and has subjected futures trading to the regulation of the commodity futures trading commission at a more analytical level economists have been investigating the issue both empirically and more recently theoretically as well

common dynamics of nonenergy commodity prices and their relation to uncertainty the purpose of this article is to improve the empirical evidence on commodity prices in various dimensions first we attempt to identify the extent of comovements in 44 monthly nonenergy commodity price series in order to ascertain whether the increase in comovement is a recent term phenomenon second we attempt to determine the role of uncertainty in determining comovements among nonenergy prices in the short run we diagnose the overall comovement using a dynamic factor model estimated by principal components a factor augmented vector autoregressive approach is used to assess the relationship of fundamentals financial and uncertainty variables with the comovement in commodity prices we find a greater synchronization among raw materials since december 2003 since that date uncertainty has played an important role in determining short run fluctuations in nonenergy raw material prices

global economic activity and crude oil prices a cointegration analysis abstract this paper empirically investigates the cointegrating relationship between crude oil prices and global economic activity the kilian economic index is used as an indicator of global economic activity based on a supply demand framework and the cointegration theory we find that real futures prices of crude oil are cointegrated with the kilian economic index and a trade weighted us dollar index and crude oil prices are influenced significantly by fluctuations in the kilian economic index through both long run equilibrium conditions and short run impacts we also develop an empirically stable data coherent and single equation error correction model ecm which has sensible economic properties empirical results based on the ecm show that the adjustment implied by a permanent change in the kilian economic index is a relatively drawn out process

global growth opportunities and market integration we propose an exogenous measure of a country s growth opportunities by interacting the country s local industry mix with global price to earnings pe ratios we find that these exogenous growth opportunities predict future changes in real gdp and investment in a large panel of countries this relation is strongest in countries that have liberalized their capital accounts equity markets and banking systems we also find that financial development external finance dependence and investor protection measures are much less important in aligning growth opportunities with growth than is capital market openness finally we formulate new tests of market integration and segmentation by linking local and global pe ratios to relative economic growth in a perfectly integrated world economy capital should be invested where it

a rational expectations equilibrium model of inventories of finished goods and employment abstract a critical roadblock to modeling inventories of finished goods has been the claim that the production and inventory decisions of a perfectly competitive firm are determined independently of each other a basic goal of this study is to specify fundamental preferences of economic agents technologies constraints and market structures that are in a rough way capable of generating patterns of serial correlations and cross correlations between inventories and employment of factors of production that are consistent with those observed in the data the claim is made that the time series for inventories output and employment can in principle be interpreted as emerging from a well specified dynamic stochastic competitive equilibrium in which economic agents are assumed to form rational expectations about variables not included in their information sets inventories and employment will not be related in a direct way if and only if the price elasticity of demand for output is equal to infinity

futures markets a consequence of risk aversion or transactions costs a two period model of an industry of risk neutral processors who have nonlinear production costs and who face transact ions costs in the spot and futures markets is put forth as a countere xample to the models of commodity markets in which processors risk a version plays the major role the model s equilibrium exhibits the sa lient endogenous features of actual commodity markets namely that t he futures price is below the current spot price that processors hol d inventories despite this opportunity cost that those holding inven tories are short in futures and that processors as a group hold an u nbalanced usually net short position in the futures market copyright 1987 by university of chicago press

dynamics of oil price precious metal prices and exchange rate this study examines the co movements and information transmission among the spot prices of four precious metals gold silver platinum and palladium oil price and the us dollar euro exchange rate we find evidence of a weak long run equilibrium relationship but strong feedbacks in the short run the spot precious metal markets respond significantly but temporarily to a shock in any of the prices of the other metal prices and the exchange rate furthermore we discover some evidence of market overreactions in the palladium and platinum cases as well as in the exchange rate market in conclusion whether there are overreactions and re adjustments or not investors may diversify at least a portion of the risk away by investing in precious metals oil and the euro policy implications are provided

dependence risk analysis in energy agricultural and precious metals commodities a pair vine copula approach we apply pair vine copulas specifically the c vine and r vine copulas to examine the conditional multivariate dependence pattern structure and r vine copula based value at risk var to assess fi

net foreign asset com position does financial development matter abstract we investigate the relationship between a country s domestic financial development and the composition of its net foreign asset position using a pooled mean group estimator and data for 50 countries for the 1970 2007 period the results show that financial development reduces a country s long run net foreign asset position in addition financial development leads to higher net equity and lower net debt positions these findings confirm the theoretical predictions of mendoza et al 2009 the results are robust to using different indicators of financial development and inclusion of the level of development of a country in the cointegrating relationship

economic impacts of el nino southern oscillation evidence from the colombian coffee market el nino southern oscillation enso is a naturally occurring phenomenon that affects weather around the world past enso episodes have had severe impacts on the economy of colombia we study the influence of enso on colombian coffee production exports and price our structural econometric specification is consistent with an economic model of the market for colombian coffee which in the short run is characterized by a downward sloping demand curve and by a vertical supply curve we show that el nino i e positive shocks to enso is beneficial for colombian production and exports and decreases the real price of colombian coffee on the contrary la nina i e negative shocks to enso depresses colombian coffee production and exports and increases price however the overall impact of enso shocks is small both in the short run and in the long run shocks to international demand for colombian coffee are more relevant than supply side shocks in colombia in explaining the dynamics of the price of colombian coffee our results suggest that a given coffee price shock can have beneficial detrimental or negligible effects on the colombian economy depending on its underlying cause as a consequence policy responses to coffee price shocks should be designed by looking at the causes of the shocks

financial institutions and markets across countries and over time the updated financial development and structure database this article introduces the updated and expanded version of the financial development and structure database the database includes indicators on the size efficiency and stability of banks nonbank financial institutions and equity and bond markets over 1960 2007 it also contains indicators of financial globalization

hypotheses testing concerning relationships between spot prices of various types of coffee in this paper hypotheses are tested concerning long run relationships between the four indicator prices of coffee these relationships are assumed to exist based on a previous study of the coffee market by the same author the four coffee prices are investigated in more detail in this paper after a brief introduction to the price formation on the coffee market the univariate properties of the coffee prices are checked first then the tests for co integration as developed by johansen 1988 and johansen and juselius 1989 are performed these tests appear to be very informative with respect to the way the prices may be linked in the long run concerning the number and the form of the relationships specifications of three equilibrium relationships among the coffee prices are detected and commented

signaling through private equity placements and its impact on the valuation of biotechnology firms abstract this paper investigates how young publicly held technology firms contend with information asymmetry and the hazards it introduces to acquire the capital necessary for future growth we ascribe to the view that firms issuing private equity signal the marketplace that managers believe their growth opportunities are undervalued consistent with this view we find significant positive abnormal returns to announcements of private equity placements we develop theory suggesting that returns are determined by the timing of previous signals we also argue that the characteristics of the private placement signal specifically whether private equity is bundled with research partnerships influence the strength of the signal our results largely support our expectations

the risk concept for entrepreneurs reconsidered new challenges to the conventional wisdom abstract this paper explores the entrepreneurial risk construct focusing on how the decision to launch a new venture may entail risks different from what is found in established firms opportunities often emerge from the creation of specialized knowledge in start ups this knowledge is characterized by concerns for rent appropriation and information asymmetry we suggest that traditional measures of risk do not properly account for these concerns hence an illusion of greater risk taking attaches itself to entrepreneurs especially if the specialized knowledge is difficult to observe we suggest alternative measures that better capture these concerns including the dilution of control when issuing equity cash burn rates etc

leveraging research and development assessing the impact of the u s advanced technology program this paper examines the factors that affect a firm s chances of winning an award from the advanced technology program atp and the subsequent impact of the award on a firm s success in raising additional funds for its research and development rd the halo effect from the award increases the success of these firms in attracting additional funding from other sources our conclusion is that the atp is leveraging activities that have a strong potential for broad based economic benefit

thresholds in the process of international financial integration abstract the financial crisis has re ignited the fierce debate about the merits of financial globalization and its implications for growth especially for developing countries the empirical literature has not been able to conclusively establish the presumed growth benefits of financial integration indeed a new literature proposes that the indirect benefits of financial integration may be more important than the traditional financing channel emphasized in previous analyses a major complication however is that there seem to be certain threshold levels of financial and institutional development that an economy needs to attain before it can derive the indirect benefits and reduce the risks of financial openness in this paper we develop a unified empirical framework for characterizing such threshold conditions we find that there are clearly identifiable thresholds in variables such as financial depth and institutional quality the cost benefit trade off from financial openness improves significantly once these threshold conditions are satisfied we also find that the thresholds are lower for foreign direct investment and portfolio equity liabilities compared to those for debt liabilities

the changing structure of the world rice market 1950 2000 abstract the world rice market has been unstable for much of its post world war ii history with prices volatile and the availability of supplies uncertain these characteristics exemplified by the world food crisis of the mid 1970s influenced domestic price and production policies in a number of asian countries however the structure of the world rice market has evolved and changed during the past 50 years this paper identifies three distinct phases in the history of the market based on trends in the level and stability of production and the trade orientation of major exporters the level and stability of production increased steadily over the entire period exporters have generally been active in the world market with the period 1965 1981 being an important exception since the mid 1980s prices have been low and quite stable and the patterns identified in the paper suggest that prices will remain so in the future the policy implication is that asian rice importers can afford to rely more on the world market than was warranted in the past

co movements in commodity prices a note based on network analysis this article analyses co movements in a wide group of commodity prices during the time period 1992 2010 our methodological approach is based on the correlation matrix and the networks inside through this approach we are able to summarize global interaction and interdependence capturing the existing heterogeneity in the degrees of synchronization between commodity prices our results produce two main findings a we do not observe a persistent increase in the degree of co movement of the commodity prices in our time sample however from mid 2008 to the end of 2009 co movements almost doubled when compared with the average correlation b we observe three groups of commodities which have exhibited similar price dynamics metals oil and grains and oilseeds and which have increased their degree of co movement during the sampled period

the pecking order of cross border investment abstract is there a pecking order of cross border investment in that countries become financially integrated through some types of investment rather than others using a novel database of bilateral capital stocks for all types of investment fdi portfolio equity securities debt securities as well as loans for a broad set of 77 countries we show that such a pecking order indeed exists the paper focuses on two key determinants of this pecking order information frictions and the quality of host country institutions overall we find that in particular fdi and to some extent also loans are substantially more sensitive to information frictions than investment in portfolio equity and debt securities we also show that the share as well as the size of fdi that a country receive are largely insensitive to institutional factors in host countries while portfolio investment is by far the most sensitive to the quality of institutions this provides new evidence in favor of some hypotheses but contradicts others put forward in the literature on trade in financial assets

on the volatility and comovement of u s financial markets around macroeconomic news announcements the objective of this paper is to provide a deeper insight into the links between financial markets and the real economy to that end we study the short term anticipation and response of u s stock treasury and corporate bond markets to the first release of surprise u s macroeconomic information specifically we focus on the impact of these announcements not only on the level but also on the volatility and comovement of those assets returns we do so by estimating several extensions of the parsimonious multivariate garch dcc model of engle 2002 for the excess holding period returns on seven portfolios of these asset classes we find that both the process of price formation in each of those financial markets and their interaction appear to be driven by fundamentals yet our analysis reveals a statistically and economically significant dichotomy between the reaction of the stock and bond markets to the arrival of unexpected fundamental information we also show that the conditional mean volatility and comovement among stock treasury and corporate bond returns react asymmetrically to the information content of these surprise announcements overall the above results shed new light on the mechanismsbywhichnewinformationisincorporatedintopriceswithinandacrossu s financial markets

the effects of oil prices on the price indices in taiwan international or domestic oil prices matter abstract this study employs the multivariate threshold model developed by tsay 1998 to examine the effects of international and domestic oil prices on the price indices in taiwan using monthly data from january 1999 to december 2011 the results show that changes in domestic oil prices do not granger cause changes in the price indices when the oil price change exceeds the threshold level however international oil price shocks still affect the wholesale price index through the effects of announcement and expectation therefore controlling domestic oil prices to prevent volatility in the price indices is ineffective if we focus on the period when the left wing party is in power we also find that changes in international oil prices have more critical effects on the price indices than changes in domestic oil prices however the lead lag relationship between changes in domestic oil prices and changes in the price indices vanishes except with respect to the transportation category where the consumer price index is affected by domestic oil prices this result may be due to the government s extensive intervention in setting oil prices

unintentional unavoidable and beneficial knowledge leakage from the multinational enterprise knowledge leakage as an undesirable outcome for mnes is an accepted view in ib literature we challenge this view and argue that knowledge leakage is often unintentional unavoidable and beneficial for the mne in a highly networked and information rich society knowledge leakage from mnes 1 happens naturally due to interfirm relationships interactions and socialization 2 is unavoidable due to employee mobility and 3 facilitates knowledge inflows due to the reciprocity nature of knowledge exchange and hence is beneficial for mnes in addition the costs of protecting knowledge incurred by an mne will often outweigh the benefits

on the relationship between the prices of oil and the precious metals revisiting with a multivariate regime switching decision tree this study examines the volatility and correlation and their relationships among the euro us dollar exchange rates the s p500 equity indices and the prices of wti crude oil and the precious metals gold silver and platinum over the period 2005 to 2012 our model links the univariate volatilities with the correlations via a hidden stochastic decision tree the ensuing hidden markov decision tree hmdt model is in fact an extension of the hidden markov model hmm introduced by jordan et al 1997 the architecture of this model is the opposite that of the classical deterministic approach based on a binary decision tree and it allows a probabilistic vision of the relationship between univariate volatility and correlation our results are categorized into three groups namely 1 exchange rates and oil 2 s p500 indices and 3 precious metals a switching dynamics is seen to characterize the volatilities while in the case of the correlations the series switch from one regime to another this movement touching a peak during the period of the subprime crisis in the us and again during the days following the tohoku earthquake in japan our findings show that the relationships between volatility and correlation are dependent upon the nature of the series considered sometimes corresponding to those found in econometric studies according to which correlation increases in bear markets at other times differing from them

commodity dynamics a sparse multi class approach abstract the correct understanding of commodity price dynamics can bring relevant improvements in terms of policy formulation both for developing and developed countries agricultural metal and energy commodity prices might depend on each other although we expect few important effects among the total number of possible ones some price effects among different commodities might still be substantial moreover the increasing integration of the world economy suggests that these effects should be comparable for different markets this paper introduces a sparse estimator of the multi class vector autoregressive model to detect common price effects between a large number of commodities for different markets or investment portfolios in a first application we consider agricultural metal and energy commodities for three different markets we show a large prevalence of effects involving metal commodities in the chinese and indian markets and the existence of asymmetric price effects in a second application we analyze commodity prices for five different investment portfolios and highlight the existence of important effects from energy to agricultural commodities the relevance of biofuels is hereby confirmed overall we find stronger similarities in commodity price effects among portfolios than among markets

on the excess co movement of commodity prices a note about the role of fundamental factors in short run dynamics abstract since the influential paper by pindyck and rotemberg 1990 the excess co movement of commodity prices the economic journal 100 1173 1189 there is a common belief that prices of unrelated commodities tend to move together in excess of what can be explained by fundamentals in this paper we consider monthly data of 51 commodities from 1980 to 2008 to confirm that raw resources exhibit co movement at high frequencies nonetheless focusing on oil and six metal prices we present evidence that the high level of correlation between cycles of commodity prices can be explained to a large extent by common shocks to inventory levels once the influences of supply and demand are filtered out it appears that the links between commodity prices are rather loose

bootstrap testing for cointegration of international commodity prices this paper investigates cointegration with respect to nine commodity groups traded on international markets nonparametric bootstrapping is utilized in the testing procedure of the 21 pairs of price series investigated here for 13 the no cointegration null hypothesis is rejected in favour for the cointegration of the series in addition to five out of the remaining eight cases that were not cointegrated a plausible explanation is the prevailing trade policy thus a great majority of the institutionally nonregulated cases turn out to get empirical support for being cointegrated an important statistical finding is that the augmented dickey fuller test for cointegration cradf generally yields p values that are close to the p values obtained by the bootstrap testing but once they differ substantially it is usually an indication of irregular periods e g structural changes in the series the paper conducts also a monte carlo simulation experiment to investigate the power and size properties of the t

el nino la nina and world coffee price dynamics coffee is produced in equatorial and subequatorial regions of the world which are also most affected by el ni no southern oscillation enso enso events have a tendency to amplify weather conditions such as droughts or excess precipitation in the affected regions resulting in production shortage or excess supply subsequently impacting agricultural commodity prices in this research we assess effects of enso events on world coffee price dynamics using the monthly data between march 1989 and december 2010 we employ smooth transition autoregression framework to examine nonlinear dynamics of enso and coffee prices and illustrate the results of this research using generalized impulse response functions we find that enso events indeed have short term impacts on coffee prices the research findings are of interest to coffee producers and intermediaries in the coffee markets as well as researchers in the fields of environmental and development economics jel classifications c32 q11 q54

the shifting composition of external liabilities what determines the composition of external liabilities both across countries and over time more specifically which countries account for the massive increase in equity like liabilities foreign direct investment and portfolio equity especially since the mid 1990s the empirical analysis draws on the newly released external wealth of nations mark ii dataset in the cross section we find that larger more open economies with a better institutional quality score have a greater equity share in external liabilities which is also positively related to natural resource production along the time series dimension we find that the shift towards equity financing is stronger among those countries that have undertaken a greater degree of domestic financial reform jel f21 f34 f36

is food financialized yes but only when liquidity is abundant abstract in this paper we investigate whether commodity index trader cit positions help to explain the increase in the correlations between agricultural commodities and equities starting around 2008 some argue institutional investors who invest both in stock and commodity markets demolish the borders between these two seemingly unrelated markets and increase correlations a recent phenomenon known as financialization yet some others argue recently correlations have decreased back to historical levels and the increase between 2008 and 2012 was merely due to a business cycle effect our results do not support one side at the expense of the other but rather shows that both factors are important in explaining the correlations between agricultural commodities and stocks furthermore we find that cits prefer to go back to their circle of competence under scarce liquidity and thus correlations decrease back to levels absent institutions hence low liquidity is a significant obstacle inhibiting financialization to occur

global factors uncertainty weather conditions and energy prices on the drivers of the duration of commodity price cycle phases abstract we investigate the role of global factors in explaining the length of commodity price cycle phases using a continuous time weibull duration model and data for a panel of 33 countries over the period 1980q1 2015q4 we find evidence of increasing constant positive duration dependence for commodity price booms and busts normal time spells global macroeconomic conditions in particular inflation economic policy uncertainty and monetary policy actions significantly affect the duration of all commodity price cycle phases global environmental conditions also impact the duration of commodity price booms with a rise in average temperature rainfall increasing reducing their length a rise in the number of military conflicts around the globe is associated with shorter booms and busts finally we find that a rise in oil prices is linked with longer booms and shorter busts

does one size fit all a reexamination of the finance and growth relationship abstract recent research has found a strong positive effect of a country s financial development on economic growth we propose that this relationship may vary according to the level of financial development divided in three regions in the low region countries with very low levels of financial development additional improvements in financial markets have an uncertain effect on growth in the intermediate region financial development has a large positive effect on growth finally in the high region the effect is positive but smaller we examine a panel of 74 countries using generalized method of moments gmm dynamic panel techniques and find support for the different regions

why doesn t capital flow from rich to poor countries an empirical investigation we examine the empirical role of difierent explanations for the lack of ows of capital from rich to poor countries the lucas paradox the theoretical explanations include difierences in fundamentals across countries and capital market imperfections we show that during 1970i2000 low institutional quality is the leading explanation for example improving peru s institutional quality to australia s level implies a quadrupling of foreign investment recent studies emphasize the role of institutions for achieving higher levels of income but remain silent on the speciflc mechanisms our results indicate that foreign investment might be a channel through which institutions afiect long run development

financial openness sudden stops and current account reversals in this paper i use a panel data set to investigate the mechanics of sudden stops of capital inflows and current account reversals i am particularly interested in four questions a what is the relationship between sudden stops and current account reversals b to what extent does financial openness affect the probability of a country being subject to a current account reversal in other words do restrictions on capital mobility reduce the probability of such occurrences c does openness both trade openness and financial openness play a role in determining the effect of current account reversals on economic performance i e gdp growth and d does the exchange rate regime affect the intensity with which reversals affect real activity the empirical analysis shows that sudden stops and current account reversals have been closely related the econometric analysis suggests that restricting capital mobility does not reduce the probability of experiencing a reversal current account reversals in turn have had a negative effect on real growth that goes beyond their direct effect on investment the regression analysis indicates that the negative effects of current account reversals on growth will depend on the country s degree of trade openness more open countries will suffer less in terms of lower growth relative to trend than countries with a lower degree of trade openness on the other hand the degree of financial openness does not appear to be related to the intensity with which reversals affect real economic performance the empirical analysis also suggests that countries with more flexible exchange rate regimes are able to accommodate better shocks stemming from a reversal than countries with more rigid exchange rate regimes this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

long run waves or short run fluctuations what establishes the correlation between oil and food prices abstractthe strong correlation between food prices and energy prices has gained much attention in the public debate in this article we focus on the so called excess co movement which is the correlation between crude oil price and the prices of food commodities after controlling for economic activity we use a frequency domain granger causality test to analyse short run and long run relationships between crude oil prices and prices of food commodities for important biofuel inputs like maize soybeans rapeseed and eu sugar we find evidence for long run granger causality in particular for the period after 2007 this supports the hypothesis that the increasing biofuel production creates the link between the prices of crude oil and food commodities however we also find short run granger causality for various food commodities this result is more in line with herd behaviour or speculation in commodity markets

on the solvency of nations cross country evidence on the dynamics of external adjustment we test the hypothesis that net foreign asset positions are consistent with external solvency and examine the dynamics of external adjustment using data for 50 countries over the 1970 2006 period our analysis adapts bohn s 2007 error correction reaction function approach which tests for a negative long run relationship between net exports nx and net foreign assets nfa as a sufficiency condition for the intertemporal budget constraint to hold to a dynamic panel framework pooled mean group pmg and mean group error correction estimation yield evidence of a statistically significant negative response of nx to nfa moreover we cannot reject the hypothesis that the response is largely homogeneous across countries our sensitivity analysis shows that the countries with relatively weaker fundamentals need to respond more strongly to the changes in nfa to keep their nfas on a sustainable path

the paradox of openness appropriability external search and collaboration a b s t r a c t to innovate firms often need to draw from and collaborate with a large number of actors from outside their organization at the same time firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas this gives rise to a paradox of openness the creation of innovations often requires openness but the commercialization of innovations requires protection based on econometric analysis of data from a uk innovation survey we find a concave relationship between firms breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation and the strength of the firms appropriability strategies we show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search there is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors we explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy 2013 the authors published by elsevier b v all rights reserved

french firms strategies for protecting their intellectual property in attempting to protect their innovations firms can choose from a range of mechanisms which may be either non statutory trade secrets design complexity and lead time advantage over competitors or statutory patent design registration trademark copyright yet little is known about how firms do actually make their choices from among these different appropriability mechanisms the aim of this paper is to determine how french firms use of intellectual property protection mechanisms relates to the type of innovation the characteristics of the market sector in which they operate the firms characteristics and their human resources strategies our empirical model draws on four french databases covering the period 2001 2004 our results show that the choice of a means of protection matters and emerges out of a complex strategy our results also reveal that the different statutory and non statutory means of protection are complementary within their own categories but hardly so between categories