Financial liberalization,private investment and portfolio choice: Financialization of real sectors in emerging markets

Using firm level panel data, we analyze the impacts of rates of return gap between financial and fixed investments under uncertainty on real investment performance in three emerging markets, Argentina, Mexico and Turkey. Employing a portfolio choice model to explain the low fixed investment rates in developing countries during the 1990s, we suggest that rather than investing in irreversible long-term fixed investments, firms may choose to invest in reversible short-term financial investments depending on respective rates of returns and the overall uncertainty in the economy. The empirical results show that increasing rates of return gap and uncertainty have an economically and statistically significant fixed investment reducing effect while the opposite is true with respect to financial investments.     

Why don’t you trade only four days a year? An empirical study into the abnormal returns of quarters first trading day

In this research I examined a calendar anomaly that occurs at the beginning of each quarter. Through an examination of 34 years of daily and annual returns for the S&P500 and 13 years of returns for popular ETFs, I have demonstrated the existence of the First Day of Quarter (FDQ) effect. By trading only four days a year from the beginning of 2000 until the end of 2013, an investor could have gained 113.1% of the S&P500 returns for that period, while being exposed to stock risk for only 56 days. Moreover, for 11 of those 14 years of trading, the FDQ was responsible for more than 10% of the annual returns. Only for two years since 2000 (2001, 2005) has the FDQ yielded a negative return. The biggest beneficiary of the FDQ is the financial sector, which for the last 13 years of investing has been non-fertile, showing −6.12% total return. Investing only at the beginning of each quarter for a total of 52 days would have yielded a return of 40.17%. The next beneficiary of the FDQ is the technological sector. The 82.5% of total return gained in this sector over the last 13 years could have been gained in only 52 days of trading.     

GLOBAL AND DIPLOMATIC POLITICAL RISKS AND FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT

This paper investigates whether multinational enterprises (MNEs) take into account both global and diplomatic political risks when investing abroad. Whereas global political risk is common to all foreign investors, diplomatic political risk is dyad-specific as it is related to the overall diplomatic climate between the home and host countries. The main result of this study is that both global and diplomatic political risks matter for U.S. MNEs investing in developing countries. Their required return on investment rises when the political risk faced by all foreign investors worsens or when diplomatic tensions arise between the United States and their host countries, presumably because in both cases uncertainty about future returns increases.     

TURNOVER IN POWER AS A RESTRAINT ON INVESTING IN INFLUENCE: EVIDENCE FROM THE POSTCOMMUNIST TRANSITION

We develop and implement a method for measuring the frequency of changes in power among distinct leaders and ideologically distinct parties that is comparable across political systems. We find that in the postcommunist countries, more frequent changes in power in the early years of transition are associated with better governance in the later years. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that more frequent turnover in power lowers the returns to firms seeking to buy political influence: i.e. that government turnover serves as a restraint on investing in influence regardless of the ideology of the government.     

Predicting housing prices according to expected future interest rate

In this article, I present a theoretical model for predicting future housing prices as a function of the expected future interest rate, housing depreciation and rent rate. Focusing on the notion of arbitrage, where the returns on investing in housing is equal to the return on bonds, I forecast housing prices in the US as a function of the expected future interest rate on corporate bonds graded at categories AAA or AA. I get that a change in the expected future bond yield will lead to a change in future housing prices.     

The unbalanced growth hypothesis and the role of the state: The case of China's state-owned enterprises

Albert Hirschman's unbalanced growth hypothesis suggests that a developing economy can promote economic growth by initially investing in industries with high backward and forward linkages. In the case of Chinese economic policy today, one application would be the continued presence of the state in high-linkage sectors and the strategic withdrawal of the state from low-linkage sectors. The evidence shows that while the degree of linkage plays an important role in generating economic growth in China, province-specific withdrawal strategies for the state sector have no effect on economic growth.     

Oil and political survival

Political economy theories on the “natural resource curse” predict that natural resource wealth is a determining factor for the length of time political leaderships remain in office. Whether resource wealth leads to longer or shorter durations in political office depends on the political incentives created by the natural resources, which in turn depend on the types of institutions and natural resource. Exploiting a sample of more than 600 political leadership durations in up to 152 countries, we find that both institutions and resource types matter for the effect that natural resource wealth has on political survival: (i) wealth derived from natural resources affects political survival in intermediate and autocratic, but not in democratic, polities; and (ii) while oil and non-lootable diamonds are associated with positive effects on the duration in political office, minerals are associated with negative duration effects.     

资源诅咒传导机制的研究述评

资源诅咒是开发自然资源引起的一系列经济、社会问题的统称,比如经济增长缓慢、贸易保护、教育投资不足、物质资本积累下降、创新不足、不平等、寻租、腐败、体制不健全、内战等问题。因其明显的政策含义,资源诅咒传导机制成为研究的重点。本文以经济增长源泉为线索,区分经济学和政治学,从理论和实证两方面给出资源诅咒传导机制的全面说明,以帮助找出我国资源诅咒的关键因素,制定相应政策提高资源开发绩效。     

From risks to second-order dangers in financial markets: Unintended consequences of risk management systems

This article, along with this special symposium, engages with the lasting significance of Neil Smith's Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space 25 years after its publication. Few books have made such productive contributions to expanding the horizons of political economy, particularly the spatiality of political economy, as has Uneven Development. This introductory article explores some of these aspects of the book's significance for the readership of New Political Economy; it remarks on the lasting if not growing significance of Smith's intellectual and political contributions two and a half decades after one of his, and the discipline of geography's, crowning achievements. At the same time it foreshadows ways in which the text can continue to push our understanding of the interconnections among nature, capital and the production of space.     

Spatial dynamics and convergence: The spatial AK model

We study the optimal dynamics of an AK economy where population is uniformly distributed along the unit circle. Locations only differ in initial capital endowments. Spatio-temporal capital dynamics are described by a parabolic partial differential equation. The application of the maximum principle leads to necessary but non-sufficient first-order conditions. Thanks to the linearity of the production technology and the special spatial setting considered, the value function of the problem is found explicitly, and the (unique) optimal control is identified in feedback form. Despite constant returns to capital, we prove that the spatio-temporal dynamics, induced by the willingness of the planner to give the same (detrended) consumption over space and time, lead to convergence in the level of capital across locations in the long-run.     

Investment dynamics with common and private values

We study a dynamic investment game with two-dimensional signals, where each firm observes its continuously distributed idiosyncratic cost of investment and a discrete signal correlated with common investment returns. We demonstrate that the one-step property holds and provide an equilibrium existence/characterization result. “Reversals” are possible, where a large number of firms investing in a given round becomes bad news about investment returns. Welfare is compared to static and rigid-timing benchmarks, and computed for large economies.     

Political democratization, economic liberalization, and growth volatility

This study empirically investigates the effects of political and economic liberalization on growth volatility using a difference-in-difference method for a sample of 158 countries over the 1970-2005 period. The results show that, when examined separately, economic liberalization leads to a significant reduction in volatility while democratization is not followed by a decrease in growth volatility. For countries that undertake only one liberalization, opening up the economy to international trade reduces volatility in growth; becoming a democracy, on the other hand, seems to increase macroeconomic instability. For countries that implement both political and economic liberalizations, no statistically significant effect on volatility is detected. These results serve to provide additional support for the policy recommendation that developing countries should liberalize their economy first and then consider political liberalization.     

中国女性人力资本特点及现状分析

女性人力资本投资具有较高的个人收益率和社会收益。女性人力资本具有很强的持续性,对女性人力资本投资有利于社会的可持续发展。从我国女性受教育现状来看,对女性人力资本投资相对不足。从妇女从业情况来看,女性多就业于劳动技能要求不高,技术含量低、报酬少的行业。对女性人力资本投资不足的原因主要是社会观念和经济方面的原因。增加女性人力资本投资,有利于促进社会的全面发展和国民经济持续增长。     

Total factor productivity and the measurement of technological change

Abstract.  TFP is interpreted in the literature in different, mutually contradictory ways. Changes in TFP are shown to measure not technological change, only the super‐normal returns to investing in such change – returns that exceed the full opportunity cost of the activity. Thus, in the limit, technological change can proceed with unchanged TFP. Measuring the effects of technological change instead requires counterfactual estimates. Reasons why changes in TFP are imperfect measures of super normal returns are also studied – reasons connected with the timing of output responses, the treatment of R&D in the national accounts, the omission of resource inputs, and two types of aggregation.     

The effect of political volatility on capital markets in EU accession and neighborhood countries

Political instability has the potential to disrupt financial markets. But how do political institutions affect financial movements in an environment where all institutions are in flux? This paper looks at the effects of formal and informal political volatility in the new EU countries of central and eastern Europe, in the Eastern Neighborhood, and farther afield in Central Asia to answer this question. Using asymmetric GARCH modeling on monthly data, I find that informal political volatility has a significant negative effect on stock returns, while formal political institutions generate much higher financial volatility than changes in monetary policy.     

Financial intermediation with credit constrained agents

This paper studies the effects of financial intermediation on aggregate levels and the distribution of resources in an economy with credit-constrained heterogeneous agents and occupational choice. Whether an agent becomes an entrepreneur depends on a realized entrepreneurial ability and accumulated assets needed to finance a business project with uncertain returns. I compare a steady state of an economy with financial intermediation to an economy in which entrepreneurs must finance their projects only from their savings. The simulated economy with financial intermediation matches well the US data on the distribution of occupations and resources. The steady state welfare and efficiency gains from financial intermediation are large.     

Same players,different game: how better rules make better politics

In this essay, I summarize a whole area of inquiry associated with constitutional political economy. I first try to outline the elements of political structure, the political rules that clearly influence the outcomes of the process. I look, briefly, at a range of specific structures that, taken together, will shape the constitution of any organized democratic polity. This constitution will, in its turn, influence the pattern of collective outcomes that may be observed. I argue that the disparate success of differing political communities in achieving objectives that seem to be commonly shared may be primarily due to the mix of elements in the basic structure of rules, and not to the differences as among the political players.     

THE ROLE OF PREFERENCE SHOCKS AND CAPITAL UTILIZATION IN THE GREAT DEPRESSION*

The article examines the proposition that preference shocks play a central role in our understanding of the Great Depression. I identify a series of unusually large negative shocks that destabilized the U.S. economy during the 1930s. When the artificial economy is paired with variable capital utilization and mildly increasing returns to scale in production, it is able to account for most of the decline in economic activity and it predicts a tepid recovery.     

Religion and the sociological critique of political economy: Altruism and gift

Abstract

This article shows that there is a strong connection between the religious component of French sociology and the critique of political economy. In the first section, I consider how selfish behaviour, or egoism, became treated as a major threat endangering the creation of industrial society by those concerned about the diffusion of political economy. I then summarise the methodological critique set forth in the Cours, before connecting this critique to the economic content of the Système and the concept of altruism. In the following section, Spencer's view of altruism is contrasted to that held by Comte, and then I consider the reaction of French political economists, defending the moral value bought about by their science. In the final section, I explain how the Comtean approach was re-enacted by Durkheim and then by Mauss, at the head of the “sociology of religion” section of L'Année sociologique, the Durkheimian journal, to give birth to the theory of gift-giving behaviour that Mauss used to critique political economy in the 1920s.     

Can micro-credit bring development?

We examine the long-run effects of micro-credit on development in an occupational choice model similar to Banerjee and Newman (JPE, 1993). Micro-credit is modeled as a pure improvement in the credit market that opens up self-employment options to some agents who otherwise could only work for wages or subsist. Micro-credit can either raise or lower long-run GDP, since it can lower use of both subsistence and full-scale industrial technologies. It typically lowers long-run inequality and poverty, by making subsistence payoffs less widespread. Thus, an equity-efficiency tradeoff may be involved in the promotion of micro-credit. However, in a worst case scenario, micro-credit has purely negative long-run effects. The key to micro-credit's long-run effects is found to be the “graduation rate”, defined as the rate at which the self-employed build up enough wealth to start full-scale firms. We distinguish between two avenues for graduation: “winner” graduation (of those who earn above-average returns in self-employment) and “saver” graduation (due to gradual accumulation of average returns in self-employment). Long-run development is not attainable via micro-credit if “winner” graduation is the sole avenue for graduation. In contrast, if the saving rate and self-employment returns of the average micro-borrower are jointly high enough, then micro-credit can bring an economy from stagnation to full development through “saver” graduation. Thus the lasting effects of micro-credit may partially depend on simultaneous facilitation of micro-saving. Eventual graduation of the average borrower, rather than indefinite retention, should be the goal of micro-banks if micro-credit is to be a stepping stone to broad-based development rather than at best an anti-poverty tool.