national animosity and cross border alliances we extend the cross border strategic alliance knowledge base by introducing dyad specific antagonism animosity between nation pairs and hold that the formation and the type of firm level cross border alliances are nontrivially impacted by conflicting relations and animosity between their home nations we examine the formation of alliances between firms among nation dyads with and without a history of conflicts the frequency and magnitude of conflicts increase the perception of likelihood of opportunism and dyad specific risks materially affect the context in which firms make alliance decisions as animosity between two nations increases the number and the probability of forming alliances within the dyad the nations form decreases conditional on the expected number of alliances increased antagonistic actions of nations outside the dyad and dissimilarity in the historical conflicts that each nation has engaged in outside the dyad i increase the number of equity alliances and ii decrease the number of nonequity alliances as a proportion of total alliances we find positive main effects of learning to contract through prior experience only for equity vs nonequity alliances the reputation effects of antagonism based on relationships with nations outside of the dyad negatively moderate the positive learning effects of prior equity alliance experience abstract from author

devaluation and the j curve some evidence from ldcs within the international trade literature it is not uncommon to find arguments about whether devaluation will improve the trade balance it is argued that the flows of goods respond only with time lags to changes in the exchange rate the j curve terrn is used to describe the movement over time of the trade balance it may deteriorate at first and improvement may come later this paper presents a method by which one could detect the existence of the j curve the method is applied to four developing countries the empirical evidence supports the pattern of movemnent described by the j curve a major policy option for a country facing a persistent balance of payments deficit is said to be devaluation of its currency within the international trade literature it is not uncommon to find arguments about whether devaluation will improve the trade balance or the balance of payments for example proponents of the elasticities approach describe the necessary and sufficient conditions for an improvement in the trade balance in terms of elasticities of demand and supply referred to as the marshall lerner condition while there is abundant empirical evidence to suggest that these conditions are indeed met at least for industrial countries there have been circumstances under which 2 devaluation has not been successful for example one might wonder why the u s trade balance deteriorated so much in 1972 despite the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 this unfavorable effect of devaluation on the trade balance is termed the j curve phenomenon received for publication august 23 1984 revision accepted for publication november 26 1984 the university of wisconsin milwaukee i would like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the initial draft of this paper 1 proponents of the absorption approach e g alexander 1952 describe how devaluation may change the terms of trade increase production and switch expenditures from foreign to domestic goods thus improving the trade balance international monetarists argue that devaluation reduces the real value of cash balances and or changes the relative price of traded and nontraded goods thus improving both the trade balance and the balance of payments 2 for an cstimate of the elasticities see houthakker and magee 1969 and warner and kreinin 1983 the former study provides the elasticities estimates under fixed exchange rates and the latter under floating rates this content downloaded from 157 55 39 17 on wed 31 aug 2016 04 39 37 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

empirical investigation of one opec country s successful non oil export performance abstract this study examines indonesian non oil export success between 1975 and 1994 with a focus on the role of exchange rate management and trade policy in export performance across sectors to examine the link between export quantity and changes in policy i estimate structural export supply functions that are derived from utility and profit maximization behavior the results indicate that non oil exporters respond positively to improved price incentives including exchange rate devaluation with the strongest impact in textiles garments and sawnwood the study offers a richer description than previous work of the relationship between price incentives and export performance

nuclear brinkmanship with two sided incomplete information a brinkmanship crisis with two sided incomplete information is modeled as a game of sequential bargaining in which each state is uncertain of its adversary s resolve the sequential crisis equilibria are characterized explicitly and used to analyze the influences of resolve misperception and the status quo on escalation and crisis stability the description of brinkmanship as a contest of resolve is found to be misleading the state with the greatest resolve may not prevail in the crisis a state may be less not more likely to prevail the greater its resolve and a states expected payoff may be less not more the greater its resolve moreover reducing misperception may destabilize a crisis surprisingly increasing the stake a potential challenger has in the status quo may not make a challenge less likely finally crises involving severe conflicts of interest are shown to be less likely than crises not entailing a severe conflict of interest

effects of exchange rate risk on exports crosscountry analysis abstract in this paper we investigate the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the aggregate exports of 19 developed and 67 developing countries using cross sectional data exchange rate uncertainty is found to be detrimental to the exports of both developing and developed countries developed countries exports however are found to be less sensitive to exchange risk than that of developing countries furthermore within the developing countries those who fixed their exchange rates to one major currency were found to be subject to less risk than the other developing countries

do demographics prevent consumption aggregates from reflecting micro level preferences abstract most simulated micro founded macro models use solely consumer demand aggregates in order to estimate preference parameters of a representative consumer for use in policy evaluation focusing on dynamic models with time separable preferences we show that aggregation holds if and only if momentary utility functions fall in the identical shape harmonic absolute risk aversion ishara utility class identifying which parameters of ishara utility functions are allowed to vary over time given this theoretical result it should be easy to empirically reject the aggregation properties that the macroeconomic representative consumer identification approach requires it suffices to show that permanent incomes guaranteeing the same living standard across households of different size violate an affine relationship in order to test the validity of this affine equation we develop a vignette survey that produces appropriate data without demand estimation restrictions imposed by models surprisingly in six countries this equation is not rejected lending support to using consumer demand aggregates

twin picks disentangling the determinants of risk taking in household portfolios this paper investigates risk taking in the liquid portfolios held by a large panel of swedish twins we document that the portfolio share invested in risky assets is an increasing and concave function of financial wealth leading to different risk sensitivities across investors human capital which we estimate directly from individual labor income also affects risk taking positively while internal habit and expenditure commitments tend to reduce it our microfindings lend strong support to decreasing relative risk aversion and habit formation preferences furthermore heterogeneous risk sensitivities across investors help reconcile individual preferences with representative agent models

determinants of international trade flows this paper models and estimates import demand and demand for export functions for 19 industrial countries although primary emphasis is placed on the period of generalized floating exchange rates 1972 through 1980 estimates are also provided for the fixed exchange rate years 1957 1970 thus making possible a comparison between the two eras aside from the conventional income and price variables the paper assesses the effect of variations in the exchange rate and in the expected exchange rate on real trade flows additionally it estimates an unrestricted lag structure of the effect of price and exchange rate variations on imports

long run price elasticities and the marshall lerner condition revisited abstract in estimating trade elasticities most previous researchers employed nonstationary data and ols or 2sls method with new developments in the literature this paper uses stationary data and johansen s cointegration analysis to provide new trade elasticities for almost 30 countries

bilateral j curve between india and her trading partners india a land of over one billion people and one of the newly emerging industrial powers in the world is going through a slow but steady metamorphism for centuries india has played a major role in the international trade it was not uncommon to see her ships carrying silk and spices across the arabian seas and bringing back machine made textile invasions of india first by mughals and latter by the british through the east india company were all trade oriented india s presence in the world trade is relatively small at this time but is gaining momentum after independence in 1947 india for a brief period experimented with socialism the five year plans were mainly focused towards building infrastructure and development of small scale agriculture based industries the industrial development even though extremely important for growth played a secondary role the foreign investment was encouraged but only in the selected sectors of the economy however threat of nationalization a large bureaucracy corruption lack of understanding of the indian business practices and the requirement that a major share holder must be an indian national discouraged foreign capital investment in india during 1991 1992 india adopted a policy of trade liberalization to attract foreign capital and to encourage non resident indians to invest in their home country government of india established a separate unit within the home ministry whose main function was to expedite processing of applications india also relaxed the requirement that a major partner be an indian national india provided export subsidies to the exporters in terms of cash as well as foreign exchange so that they could import machines and raw materials exports responded to the trade liberalization and increased from 44 041 crores of rupees in 1991 1992 to 141 603 crores in 1998 1999 where one crore is equivalent to ten million in us dollar terms at a current exchange rate of 42 48 rupees per dollar this translates to an increase from 10 37 billion to 33 34 billion over eight years india also anticipates that through a major increase in the information technology mainly software industry her exports will increase to 90 billion by 2005 the trade liberalization has been accompanied by changes in the monetary policies the inflation rate has been reduced from about 12 to 9 per year the interest rates have declined from 14 to 10 and the exchange rate has been allowed to respond to market forces as a result from 1991 1992 to 1998 1999 the rupee has declined from 19 62 rupees per dollar to 42 48 rupees per dollar by december 2000 rupee had further devalued to 46 25 per dollar with a hope that it will further boost india s exports and improve her trade balance however the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance is not instantaneous indeed there is ample evidence in the literature that after currency depreciation the trade balance worsens in the short run before improving in the long run since this pattern of movement of the trade balance over time resembles the letter j magee 1973 labelled it the j curve phenomenon magee argued that after devaluation contracts that are in transit at old exchange rates dominate the short run response of the trade balance over time new contracts at new prices begin to exert their favourable impact at this stage elasticities may increase leading to an eventual improvement in the trade balance of course the delayed response could also be due to lags in the process of increasing the production of exportables junz and rhomberg 1973 have identified five lags namely recognition lags decision lags delivery lags replacement lags and production lags only after the realization of these lags the trade balance could improve early studies that tried to investigate the impact of currency depreciation on the trade balance relied upon estimating the marshall lerner condition the condition

entrepreneurship social mobility and income redistribution in south india development economists have been preoccupied with the problem of increasing the size of the gnp pie to the relative neglect of its distribution despite the recent disenchantment with the viewpoint that all classes share in the benefits of industrial growth empirical data on the distribution of income business opportunity and economic power are in short supply many of the studies on entrepreneurship and economic development when they are not apologetics for ruthless capitalist exploitation as paul baran suggests extol the achievements of the capitalist entrepreneur without examining class origins and monopoly advantage joseph schumpeter sees entrepreneurs irrespective of class origin as heroic figures with the dream and will to found a private kingdom to conquer adversity to achieve success for its own sake and to experience the joy of creation for gustav papanek 1967 the private entrepreneur who is frugal diligent far sighted remarkably able and willing to take political risks is in large part responsible for the success of pakistan in achieving rapid industrialization

uncertainty shifting power and appeasement great britain faced an immensely complicated strategic problem in the 1930s and important aspects of it can be stylized as a situation in which a state that is declining in power is unsure of the aims of a rising state if those aims are limited then the declining state prefers to appease the rising state s demands rather than go to war to oppose them if however the rising state s demands are unlimited then the declining state prefers fighting and given that the declining state is becoming weaker over time it prefers fighting sooner rather than later if there is to be a war this situation creates a trade off the earlier a state stands firm the stronger it will be if war ensues but the higher the chance of fighting an unnecessary war in equilibrium the declining state generally tries to appease the rising state by making a series of concessions

brazil us commodity trade and the j curve currency devaluation or depreciation is said to temporarily worsen a country s trade balance and improve it later an effect that is called the j curve previous research that tested the j curve for brazil used the country s aggregate trade flows with the rest of the world and did not find support for the phenomenon in this article we consider the trade flows between brazil and a major trading partner the united states disaggregating their trade flows by commodity we then test the empirical validity of the j curve for each of the 92 industries that trade between the two countries we find support for the phenomenon in 31 industries therefore disaggregation by industry seems to yield some support for the phenomenon

determinants of international trade flows the case of developing countries abstract the question of magnitude and the time path of the trade flows to changes in the exchange rates and to changes in the price level is of emitent practical importance to assess the above proposition a distributed lag structure is imposed on the relative prices and on the effective exchange rate as the determinants of trade flows then import and export demand functions are estimated for a sample of developing countries using the almon procedure the empirical findings appeared to sustain orcutt s early conjecture that trade flows adjust differently to different price stimuli more precisely it was found that imports and exports reactions were quicker and the total response time was shorter when an exchange rate rather than relative prices caused a change in international prices

a life cycle consistent empirical model of family labour supply using cross section data this paper estimates a utility maximising model of the joint determination of male and female labour supplies using a sample of married couples from the u k family expenditure survey the emphasis is on the estimation of within period preferences that are consistent with intertemporal two stage budgeting under uncertainty however the approach we adopt provides an alternative method of estimating certain aspects of life cycle behaviour to the fixed effects constant approach of heckman and macurdy 1980 macurdy 1981 and browning deaton and irish 1985 moreover it relaxes some of the underlying restrictions that are implicit in these constant models under uncertainty

behavioral heterogeneity and the income effect inspired by the recent literature on aggregation theory this paper introduces hits a semiparametric model of consumer demand that allows for diversity in tastes the strong variation of budget shares observed across income groups has two possible origins the individual income effect and taste differences between poor and rich households consumer surveys reporting repeated cross sections do not permit the direct measurement of these two effects in hits linear heterogeneity allows the gmm estimation of structural coefficients on an aggregate series the joint density of spending and tastes is then recovered from cross sections by a nonparametric procedure involving a deconvolution we estimate the model on british data 1968 1998 and report that taste heterogeneity explains a large fraction of the variation of budget shares with income

the engel curve for alcohol and the rank of demand systems this paper shows that the quadratic shape of the engel curve for alcohol is induced by preference heterogeneity between drinkers and abstainers in a japanese data set with controlling the heterogeneity it is shown that the engel curve for alcohol slopes monotonically downwards for drinkers and that the probability of being a drinker is an increasing function of total expenditure these two relationships generate a quadratic shape for the engel curve for alcohol other goods in this data set appear to have nearly linear engel curves so if the alcohol engel curve for drinkers is also linear then after controlling for this preference heterogeneity the rank of this demand system would be two copyright 2006 john wiley sons ltd

will developing country debt forgiveness increase agricultural trade abstract latin american countries are important customers in international agricultural trade however between 1981 and 1987 u s agricultural exports to these countries declined by almost 50 one explanation for the above decrease is the change in financial conditions facing many countries in this region outstanding debt in the latin american countries continued to rise through the 1980 s reaching over 120 billion for brazil and mexico by 1987 in this paper we develop an import model which considers the effect of the debt crisis on the ability of developing countries to purchase agricultural commodities in world markets we estimate the model for four countries mexico brazil chile and venezuela the estimated results are used in a simulation model to obtain the effects of a 50 debt forgiveness scenario results indicate only a modest improvement in agricultural imports of the four latin american countries considered in this study these four countries would expand agricultural imports by 400 million per annum given the debt reduction

kalman filter approach to estimate the demand for international reserves a few studies have provided empirical support for the fact that the demand for international reserves experienced structural instability in 1973 and 1979 due to a change in exchange rate system and oil price shocks thus under the current managed float due to exchange rate and oil price fluctuations coefficient estimates could be time dependent after showing that indeed estimated coefficients are time dependent the kalman filter estimation method is employed and the reserve demand function for 19 industrial countries estimated the kalman filter approach incorporates the time varying properties of coefficients estimates

the j curve a literature review due to lag structure currency devaluation is said to worsen the trade balance first and improve it later resulting in a pattern that resemble the letter j hence the j curve phenomenon since its introduction by magee in 1973 brooking papers on economic activity 1 pp 303 25 a large number of studies have attempted to test the phenomenon using different techniques and different model specifications the results are at best ambiguous and deserve to be collected together for the future generation of researchers and graduate students this paper fills such a vacuum in the literature by reviewing the j curve related empirical papers

is there a j curve abstract if the response of the value of the trade balance to movements in the real exchange rate is described by a j curve then a real depreciation initially worsens a balance of trade deficit only improving it over time this paper investigates whether a j curve can be detected in the last twenty five years of american data no statistically reliable evidence of a stable j curve is detected the model is checked extensively to support this finding

trade liberalisation the peso and mexico s commodity trade flows with the united states abstract we assess the effects of real peso devaluations as well as the effects of gatt and nafta on mexico s in payments and out payments with the united states for 102 industries we find that relatively few trade flows are sensitive to changes in the real exchange rate probably due to production sharing and intra industry trade but devaluations affect mexican imports more than exports trade liberalisation has had a larger impact particularly on imports of intermediate goods and exports of certain manufactures many affected export industries are ones that have previously been shown to have economies of scale

asymmetric j curve evidence from industry trade between u s and u k previous research that assessed the impact of exchange rate changes on the trade balance between the u s and u k assumed the effects are symmetric in this paper we add to the literature on the

effects of exchange rate flexibility on the demand for international reserves abstract we incorporate a measure of exchange rate flexibility into the standard reserve demand equation and present empirical results for the 1976 1985 period which are consistent with the work of officer 1976 and frenkel and jovanovic 1981 indicating the existence of economies of scale and the demand for reserves

transformations of the commodity space behavioral heterogeneity and the aggregation problem aggregation in exchange markets is studied by imposing restrictions on distributions of the households characteristics approximate bounds for market demand price elasticities that depend upon specific measures of behavioral heterogeneity are provided increasing behavioral heterogeneity makes aggregate expenditures more independent of prices this has strong consequences for the prevalence in the aggregate of the weak axiom of revealed preference of gross substitutability and on uniqueness and stability of the walrasian exchange equilibrium these strong macroeconomic regularities are obtained essentially through distributional assumptions as no rationality requirements are imposed on individual demand functions other than homogeneity and walras law journal of economic literature classification numbers d11 d41 d50 el 1992 academic press lnc there are still quite a few unpleasant gaps nowadays between macroanalysis and microanalysis of socioeconomic systems a leading instance drawn from social choice theory is arrow s celebrated impossibility theorem 1 which states that any attempt to aggregate individual preferences into a consistent social ordering or a collective choice procedure satisfying a few appealing requirements is bound to fail the impossibility arises however only if one insists that the procedure should work for every possible environment or in other words for all distributions of individual preferences a possible resolution of the problem is therefore to identify broad classes of distributions of preferences for which aggrega the bulk of the research reported in this paper was essentially done at yale university during the fall semester of 1990 i thank all my colleagues for their support and comments especially martin shubik herbert scarf and truman bewley i also had very useful conversations with jorgen weibull mike jerison andreu mas colell christian gouri6roux camille bronsard guy laroque bruno jullien and bernard caillaud i am much indebted to ai klevorick for his comments on an earlier draft but my greatest debt is to werner hildenbrand whose pioneering insights and stubborn insistance have over the years kept quite a few of us struggling beyond the fads of the moment with the aggregation problem our profession is fortunate indeed to have him around

do devaluations improve the trade balance the evidence revisited do devaluations improve the trade balance the evidence revisited this paper reexamines the effectiveness of devaluation in trade balance adjustment the question is addressed in a framework which improves the previous empirical literature in several respects the evidence indicates that devaluations have been a successful tool in inducing trade balance adjustment in particular nominal devaluations are found to result in significant real devaluations that last for at least three years and the real devaluation induces significant trade flows that are distributed over a two to three year period the evidence comes from two different samples 1953 73 and 1975 84 involving twenty seven countries and sixty devaluation episodes 1 introduction do devaluations affect real magnitudes in particular the trade balance a devaluation may effect the trade balance through two channels devaluation of the real exchange rate and a direct effect on domestic absorption the traditional approach stresses the first channel a nominal devaluation is assumed to change the real exchange rate a relative price and thus improve competitiveness in turn if relative prices the terms of trade in a two country two good model affect the trade balance devaluation will be successful in the sense of improving the trade balance ceteris paribus the absorption effect becomes the sole or most important channel in the monetary approach in a world in which all goods and assets are perfect substitutes prices are exogenously given for the small country and wages and prices are flexible in both nominal and real terms a devaluation increases the price level by the same percentage the increase in the price level reduces real balances and thus domestic absorption dornbusch 1973 883 has argued that if such a real balance effect is not present then it might stand to reason that the effects of devaluation are negligible not that there must be other powerful avenues through which it exerts its effects emphasis added the controversy over the effects of devaluation on the trade balance arises because according to frenkel and johnson 1976 42 the monetary approach rejects the emphasis given to the role of relative prices in the analysis of devaluation global monetarists argue that neither of the links in the chain postulated by the traditional approach is likely to hold in practice see laffer 1977 the major disagreement centers on the question of the effectiveness of nominal devaluation to affect the real exchange rate and the importance of the latter in influencing trade flows theoretical arguments have not settled the issue the question is as strongly debated today as it was forty years ago see for example branson 1983 katseli 1983 kaldor 1983 nashashibi 1983 and mckinnon 1981 nor does it seem that the available empirical evidence leads to a consistent answer the best known studies cooper 1971 laffer 1977 salant 1977 miles 1979 gylfason and risager 1984 reach contradictory conclusions 1 cooper and gylfason and risager find that devaluations improve the trade balance or current account while laffer and miles conclude exactly the opposite salant finds that devaluations improve the trade balance but not as often as the overall balance of payments in the face of such diverse findings frenkel 1984 suggests that a reexamination of the issue would be useful indeed himarios 1985 shows that a close examination of miles s widely quoted study reveals serious deficiencies that once addressed lead to opposite results this paper provides new evidence concerning the effectiveness of devaluation in trade balance adjustment the approach differs from past studies in several respects it differs from cooper s laffer s and salant s studies in that it accounts for the effects of other variables that affect the trade balance

unobserved preference heterogeneity in demand using generalized random coefficients we model unobserved preference heterogeneity in demand systems via random barten scales in utility functions these barten scales appear as random coefficients multiplying prices in demand functions consumer demands are nonlinear in prices and may have unknown functional structure we therefore prove identification of generalized random coefficients models defined as nonparametric regressions where each regressor is multiplied by an unobserved random coefficient having an unknown distribution using canadian data we estimate energy demand functions with and without random coefficient barten scales we find that not accounting for this unobserved preference heterogeneity substantially biases estimated consumer surplus costs of an energy tax jel codes c14 d12 d13 c21 keywords unobserved heterogeneity nonseparable errors random utility parameters random coefficients equivalence scales consumer surplus welfare calculations the authors wish to thank jinyong hahn richard blundell stefan hoderlein rosa matzkin and anonymous referees for helpful discussions and suggestions earlier versions of this paper were circulated under the

impact of exchange rate uncertainty on commodity trade between us and sweden previous studies that investigated the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the trade flows of sweden employed aggregate trade data either between sweden and the rest of the world or at bilateral level between sweden and her major trading partners in this article we disaggregate the trade data and employ the import and export data from 87 industries that trade between sweden and the us we find that exchange rate volatility has significant short run effects on the trade flows between the two countries in almost two third of the industries however the short run effects are translated into the long run effects in one third of the cases furthermore the real depreciation of krona against the dollar was found to have favourable effects on the overall trade balance between the two countries

trade flows relative prices and effective exchange rates a var on ethiopian data the dynamic response of trade flows to price and effective exchange rate changes is examined via var using quarerly data from ethiopia for the period 1973 i 1985 iv the results show one way granger causality running from prices and exchange rates to imports and exports without significant feedback imports and exports exhibit similar response patterns to unexpected changes in relative prices and exchange rates the responses of imports and exports are larger and the adjustment takes longer when relative prices rather than exchange rates caused a change in international prices in the long run changes in prices account for a larger percentage of the forecast error variances in imports and exports than exchange rate changes it is shown that devaluation may have an initial adverse effect on the trade balance

simple tests of distributional effects on macroeconomic equations the presence of distributional effects in macroeconomic equations is shown to coincide with nonlinearity in micro behavioral relationships parameters estimated with aggregate data as in representative agent models contain distributional biases that are not measurable using aggregate data alone tests for distributional effects and other measures of the extent of aggregation problems are derived using distributional data observed over time significant distributional effects are noted for a model of annual aggregate u s commodity expenditure data a static model that accommodates individual heterogeneity is found to be statistically equivalent to a simply dynamic model that accommodates first order autocorrelation

demographic variables in demand analysis in this paper the authors discuss five procedures for incorporating demographic variables into theoretically plausible demand systems translating scaling and the gorman reverse gorman and implicit prais houthakker procedures these five procedures are used to incorporate a single demographic variable the number of children in a household into the generalized ces demand system using household budget data for the united kingdom for the period 1966 1972 excerpt

discrepancies in international data an application to china hong kong entrepot trade before discussing discrepancies in international data it is essential to talk about the sources of the data the principal source for global trade statistics is the united nations un that agency relies on the trade statistics reported by its member countries the obvious discrepancy in these reports is that what country a says it sends to country b is not the same as what country b says it receives from a such differences in what the exporting and importing countries report is not just a feature of developing countries these discrepancies are pervasive in industrial countries as well for example since 1989 the united states has abandoned its attempt to keep track of exports to canada and now just relies on canadian data on its imports from the united states see robert feenstra 1997 table 2 prior to this action the united states underreported its exports to canada by more than 10 percent as compared to the canadian value this illustrates the general principle that the information collected by the importer which is often collecting tariff revenues and therefore has an incentive to record imports accurately is usually viewed as more accurate than that collected by the exporter there are then two problems with the un data it contains different information from the exporting and importing countries and it is expensive at least by the standards of lowbudget academic work progress on the first of these problems has been made by statistics canada in the world trade database wtdb that agency obtains the un trade data and then attempts to resolve the differences between the exporters and importers providing a single number for the value of each disaggregate good sent from country a to b these data are distributed on cd rom but are still fairly expensive by academic standards to make progress on the second problem the statistics canada data set for an early set of years 1970 1992 is distributed by the national bureau of economic research nber for a nominal fee also in cd rom format see feenstra et al 1997 in view of the widespread use of these data distributed by the un statistics canada or the nber it is worth asking how well the statistics canada database resolves the differing reports by the exporters and importers to take a particularly important example consider u s trade with china in 1996 the united states reported a deficit with china of 39 5 billion while the chinese reported a value of the u s deficit of 10 5 billion these two figures differ by 29 billion or a factor of three times at the heart of these differing values is the treatment of goods shipped through hong kong which remains a separate entity from china for customs purposes to what extent does statistics canada resolve the differences between these reported trade values to arrive at some credible value of bilateral trade unfortunately this issue is not resolved at all the values given in the statistics canada wtdb for chinese exports to the united states are very close to those reported by china and are much less than those reported by the united states this is contrary to the general principle stated above of treating the exporter s record of trade as less accurate than the importer s record on the other hand the u s official figures for imports from china are too high because they include the feenstra department of economnics university of california davis ca 95616 haas school of business university of califomia berkeley and national bureau of economic research hai department of economics fort lewis college and china centre for economic research beijing university woo and yao department of economics university of califomia davis we thank li yan jin hongman and jiang xiaozhu from the customs general administration people s republic of china for assisting with the study from which the results reported here are drawn

nuclear deterrence counterforce strategies and the incentive to strike first i use the theory of games to investigate issues about how to understand the use of nuclear counterforce strategies by the united states and the soviet union during the cold war the function of the counterforce strategies i model is not to enable a state confidently to launch a nuclear attack but to convince its adversary that the probability that it might do so as a last resort is greater than zero the models allow one to investigate rational behavior when information is incomplete and there is an incentive to strike first and therefore provide a way to explore controversies about the effect of counterforce strategies on both the credibility of extended deterrence and the possibility of inadvertent nuclear war the models suggest contrary to the claims of a number of writers that the use of nuclear counterforce strategies is not necessarily inconsistent with rational behavior and provide some insight into the relation between counterforce strategies and brinkmanship models of deterrence

nonparametric engel curves and revealed preference this paper applies revealed preference theory to the nonparametric statistical analysis of consumer demand knowledge of expansion paths is shown to improve the power of nonparametric tests of revealed preference the tightest bounds on indifference surfaces and welfare measures are derived using an algorithm for which revealed preference conditions are shown to guarantee convergence nonparametric engel curves are used to estimate expansion paths and provide a stochastic structure within which to examine the consistency of household level data and revealed preference theory an application is made to a long time series of repeated cross sections from the family expenditure survey for britain the consistency of these data with revealed preference theory is examined for periods of consistency with revealed preference tight bounds are placed on true cost of living indices

the us china trade imbalance will revaluing the rmb help much abstract the large us china trade imbalance is regularly blamed on the undervalued rmb using an estimated model of the trade balance we find that improvements in the trade balance are likely to be modest for plausible revaluations

nuclear superiority and the balance of resolve explaining nuclear crisis outcomes scholars have long debated whether nuclear superiority or the balance of resolve shapes the probability of victory in nuclear crises but they have not clearly articulated a mechanism linking superiority to victory nor have they systematically analyzed the entire universe of empirical cases beginning from a nuclear brinkmanship theory framework i develop a new theory of nuclear crisis outcomes which links nuclear superiority to victory in nuclear crises precisely through its effect on the balance of resolve using a new data set on fifty two nuclear crisis dyads i show that states that enjoy nuclear superiority over their opponents are more likely to win nuclear crises i also find some support for the idea that political stakes shape crisis outcomes these findings hold even after controlling for conventional military capabilities and for selection into nuclear crises this article presents a new theoretical explanation and the first comprehensive empirical examination of nuclear crisis outcomes

taiwan s exports and trade imbalance against us and japan an empirical analysis the persistence of the bilateral trade surplus between taiwan and the usa and the bilateral trade deficit between taiwan and japan despite the significant appreciation or depreciation of the nt dollar during the early 1980s to the mid 1990s renewed interest to seek explanations for these phenomena to assess the above proposition a polynomial distributed lag pdl method is imposed on the impact of changes in the real exchange rate on the bilateral trade structure particularly export demand and trade imbalance between taiwan the usa and japan from 1981 to 1998 the empirical findings show that 1 the real income factors have important effects on the real exports in both cases 2 the real exchange rates and the real imports are not major determinants of the export demand from taiwan to the usa but they do play an important role on the real exports from taiwan to japan 3 the real exchange rate has significant effect on the real trade surplus with the usa and on trade deficit with japan but the real

is there a long run relation between the trade balance and the real effective exchange rate of ldcs abstract using quarterly data over 1973 1988 period the cointegration analysis is used and it is shown that the trade balance and the real effective exchange rate of some ldcs are cointegrated in the long run this approach is argued to be a close substitute for testing the marshall lerner condition

nuclear deterrence and the strategy of limited retaliation recent formal work in nuclear deterrence theory has focused on brinkmanship crises in which states exert coercive pressure by manipulating the risk of an unlimited nuclear exchange this essay extends the formal analysis of deterrence theory to the strategy of limited retaliation in which states exert coercive pressure by inflicting limited amounts of damage in order to make the threat of future punishment more credible this strategy is modeled as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information the equilibria suggest that states prefer relatively smaller less destructive limited options that counterforce options are desirable even if they cannot limit the total amount of damage an adversary can inflict that smaller less destructive limited nuclear options may make a nuclear exchange more likely and that uncertainty and incomplete information may significantly enhance deterrence

semiparametric estimation of regression models for panel data linear models with error components are widely used to analyse panel data some applications of these models require knowledge of the probability densities of the error components existing methods handle this requirement by assuming that the densities belong to known parametric families of distributions typically the normal distribution this paper shows how to carry out nonparametric estimation of the densities of the error components thereby avoiding the assumption that the densities belong to known parametric families the nonparametric estimators are applied to an earnings model using data from the current population survey the model s transitory error component is not normally distributed use of the nonparametric density estimators yields estimates of the probability that individuals with low earnings will become high earners in the future that are much lower than the estimates obtained under the assumption of normally distributed error components

additive general error models for production cost and derived demand or share systems many empirical studies of production specify a deterministic model of the firm derive the implied behavioral equations input demand or share system and then embed this system in a stochastic framework by tacking on linear error terms in contrast this paper proposes general error models gems in which the error specification is an integral part of the optimization model these models are the statistical embodiment of stigler s view that apparent observed inefficiencies reflect the investigator s ignorance of the true optimization problem additive gems are proposed and interpreted specification tests indicate that a translog additive gem is superior to the standard translog specification

exchange rate volatility and pakistan s exports to the developed world 1974 85 abstract the paper attempts to estimate the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on pakistan s exports to the developed world for 1974 85 discovering strong evidence to suggest that exports were adversely affected by the increased variability of its bilateral exchange rates unlike much of the recent evidence on developed countries however it is the variability in nominal rather than real exchange rates that is significant the computations also suggest the presence of strong third country effects

foreign exchange reserves and import demand evidence from latin america this paper investigates the impact of foreign reserves domestic real income and relative import prices on import demand for seven latin american countries we differentiate empirically between the short run and long run impact of reserves income and prices on imports the paper has three main results first we show that there exists a unique long run relationship among real imports real income relative import prices and real foreign exchange reserves for all seven countries second we find that increases in foreign exchange reserves exert a significant positive effect on import demand in both the long run and the short run in all countries however the economic impact of foreign exchange reserves is rather small finally we find that the long and short run impact of real domestic income on import demand is positive as well while the effect of relative prices is negative

crisis bargaining escalation and mad although incomplete information is recognized to be an essential feature of crises game theoretic formulations have not generally modeled this explicitly this paper models a mutually assured destruction mad crisis as a game of sequential bargaining with incomplete information sufficiently simple that its equibria may be found these provide better game theoretic foundations for the notions of resolve and critical risk and their role in crises and also make it possible to compare the bargaining dynamics of this model with those of descriptively richer but incompletely specified models revealing several inconsistencies several analyses of mad conclude that the state with the greatest resolve in this contest of resolve will prevail many models based on critical risks suggest that a state is less likely to escalate the greater its adversary s resolve in our model however the state with the weakest resolve sometimes prevails and some states prove more likely to escalate if their adversaries resolve is greater

nominal and real effective exchange rates of middle eastern countries and their trade performance indexes of real and nominal effective exchange rates that are published by the imf are mostly for industrial countries none of the middle eastern countries have received any attention on this regard this paper tries to close the gap by constructing such indexes for 11 middle eastern countries over 1971 i 1994 iv period as an application long run response of their trade balance to devaluation is also investigated

taste heterogeneity and the scale of production fragmentation unification and segmentation abstract we propose a simple framework within which taste heterogeneity is a determinant of the scale of production we show i when taste heterogeneity is small every firm chooses a mass production technology ii when taste heterogeneity is large every firm chooses a small scale production technology and iii when the degree of taste heterogeneity is intermediate these symmetric equilibria cease to exist and both technologies coexist in equilibrium we then extend the basic framework to a geographic framework and obtain a historical evolution of marketing that is characterized by three phases a geographically fragmented market with small scale production a geographically unified market with mass production and a geographically unified but characteristically segmented market

asymmetric response of the us india trade balance to exchange rate changes evidence from 68 industries the relationship between the trade balance and the exchange rate continues to attract attention by international economists and has entered into new territory mostly due to advances in econometric methods the introduction of asymmetric error correction modelling and asymmetric cointegration using the nonlinear ardl approach of shin et al festschrift in honor of peter schmidt econometric methods and applications springer 2014 281 as compared to the symmetric and linear ardl approach of pesaran et al journal of applied econometrics 2001 16 289 has led us in a new direction to discover relatively better results we apply these methods to the bilateral trade balance model of each of the 68 industries that trade between india and the usa the nonlinear approach not only provides more support to the j curve effect but also yields support in favour of short run and long run asymmetric effects of exchange rate changes in most of the industries

impulse response analysis and orcutt s hypothesis in trade evidence from developing countries orcutt s hypothesis in international economics implies that trade flows respond to exchange rate changes faster than to changes in relative prices most previous studies used import and export demand models and tested the hypothesis by imposing and comparing lag lengths on the exchange rate and relative prices one recent study however employed impulse response of trade flows to one sd shock to the nominal exchange rate and one sd shock to relative prices and tested the orcutt s hypothesis for several industrial countries in this article we follow this study and test the hypothesis for six developing countries using impulse response analysis like the other study for industrial countries we do not find much support for the hypothesis

the random utility hypothesis and inference in demand systems in this paper the authors examine the consequences of adopting the random utility hypothesis as an approach for randomizing a system of demand equations random utility models are appealing since they allow the usual assumption of deterministic utility maximizing behavior by each consumer to coexist with the apparent randomness across individuals that is exhibited by data their results show that the use of random utility models implies that the disturbances of the demand equations may not be homoskedastic but must be functions of prices and or income copyright 1989 by the econometric society

what do we learn about consumer demand patterns from micro data the aim of this paper is to assess the importance of using micro level data in the econometric analysis of consumer demand to do this we utilize a time series of repeated cross sections covering some 4 000 households in each of 15 years employing a number of different aggregation procedures we conclude that aggregate data alone are unlikely to produce reliable estimates of structural price and income coefficients however once certain aggregation factors as well as trend and seasonal components are included an aggregate model is not necessarily outperformed across all demand equations in terms of forecasting ability jel d12 c52 c31 the purpose of this paper is to develop a complete consumer demand system based on a time series of individual household data and to use it to measure the biases introduced into the study of consumer de mand behavior when aggregate data are used in place of the appropriate microeco nomic data we assess the suitability of ag gregate data through the impact on income and price elasticities and by evaluating the ability of both micro and aggregate based models to forecast aggregate consumer de mand the biases introduced by the use of aggregate data depend upon the way that household characteristics interact with in come and price effects and on departures of demand systems from linearity we explore the structure of microeconomic demand sys tems and the role of household characteris tics in the behavior of consumer demand both for the light this may shed on the pattern of future demands and for the im plications this behavior has for issues of aggregation consumer demand patterns typically found in micro data sets vary considerably across households with different household characteristics and with different levels of income we model this variability by making intercept and slope parameters in the budget share equations of our demand sys tem depend on household characteristics and by allowing for nonlinear total log expenditure terms in fact in theory consistent demand systems it is total ex penditure rather than disposable income that is allocated across goods we find that this general framework leads to a well specified data coherent demand system which is a quadratic extension of the popu lar almost ideal model of angus s deaton and john muellbauer 1980 the micro level estimates are shown to be sensitive to the treatment of endogeneity of total expen diture and to the specification of interaction terms with household characteristics in ad dition this specification is also shown to possess many attractive features for the evaluation of aggregate models

aggregate consumer behavior and household equivalence scales this article presents estimates of household equivalence scales broken down by demographic characteristics of u s households separate estimates are given by family size age of head region race and urban versus rural residence commodity specific scales are presented for five separate commodity groups energy food consumer goods capital services and other services the estimates are obtained from an econometric model of aggregate consumer behavior the parameters of this model are estimated by combining aggregate time series and individual cross section data

quadratic engel curves and consumer demand this paper presents a model of consumer demand that is consistent with the observed expenditure patterns of individual consumers in a long time series of expenditure surveys and is also able to provide a detailed welfare analysis of shifts in relative prices a nonparametric analysis of consumer expenditure patterns suggests that engel curves require quadratic terms in the logarithm of expenditure while popular models of demand such as the translog or the almost ideal demand systems do allow flexible price responses within a theoretically coherent structure they have expenditure share engel curves that are linear in the logarithm of total expenditure we derive the complete class of integrable quadratic logarithmic expenditure share systems a specification from this class is estimated on a large pooled data set of u k households models that fail to account for engel curvature are found ro generate important distortions in the patterns of welfare losses associated with a tax increase