Austerity,Growth and Inflation: Remarks on the Eurozone's Unresolved Competitiveness Problem

While the financial protection measures enacted by the ECB and the community of Eurozone members have calmed financial markets, they have left the competitiveness problem of the Eurozone's southern countries and France unresolved. The paper compares price inflation before the crisis with the necessary and actual price cuts that have taken place since the outbreak of the crisis, predicting a decade of stagnation for the south and inflation for the north. Keynesian demand policy is counterproductive in the south and unnecessary in the north. The necessary realignment of relative goods prices and current account imbalances can be achieved if market forces are allowed to redirect capital flows to the north instead of being artificially steered to uses they are keen to avoid.     

Credit supply and corporate capital structure: Evidence from Japan

In this paper we examine how financial constraints, especially fluctuations in the supply of credit, affect the capital structure of 1537 publicly listed Japanese firms from 1980 to 2007, in a data set with 33,000 observations. It is one of the first studies to do so and is inspired by the recent studies of Leary (2009) and Faulkender and Petersen (2006). Japan was selected due to the extreme credit supply fluctuations observed during the last 30 years. It thus offers an ideal natural experiment to test the impact of credit supply on corporate capital structure. In particular, in our panel data study we investigated the impact of the asset bubble in the 1980s and the credit crunch of the late 1990s on corporate capital structure decisions. The results of this paper show, among other findings, that financial policy decisions are indeed influenced by monetary conditions and the supply of credit. In particular, smaller sized firms face financial constraints, especially during economic downturns.     

U.S. Equity Investment in Emerging Stock Markets

This article examines U.S. equity flows to emerging stock marketsfrom 1978 to 1991 and draws three main conclusions. First, despitethe recent increase in U.S. equity investment in emerging stockmarkets, the U.S. portfolio remains strongly biased toward domesticequities. Second, of the fraction of the U.S. portfolio thatis allocated to foreign equity investment, the share investedin emerging stock markets is roughly proportional to the shareof the emerging stock markets in the global market capitalizationvalue. Third, the volatility of U.S. transactions in emerging-marketequities is higher than in other foreign equities. The normalizedvolatility of U.S. transactions appears to be falling over time,however, and we find no relation between the volume of U.S.transactions in foreign equity and local turnover rates or volatilityof stock returns.     

Regional- und Gesammteffekte der steirischen Endverwendung

Summary This paper starts off by describing the methodology of the compilation of the 1964 IO-table for Styria, which is conceptually fully consistent with the 1964 table for Austria. Basic definitions are given and some information is provided on the more important stages of the compilation of the table, such as estimation of a table in purchaser prices, conversion to producer prices, estimation of complete import matrices for interregional and international imports. The underlying philosophy in all these stages was to work on a very low level of aggregation (products, groups of products) in order to make use of all available detailed information and to overcome the problems arising from the lack of some basic information (e.g. shipments between regions).In the second part of the paper we present some empirical results derived from an analysis of the Styrian IO-table, Version C (only regional deliveries in the first two quadrants). This analysis shows a remarkably high regional multiplier effect of Styrian exports (to other parts of Austria, and abroad) and of private consumption on the economy of the region. High multiplier effects of final demand deliveries are exhibited by such sectors as saw mills, hotels and restaurants, housing and food production (all above 1,6). Finally the bias from using a single regional table instead of a multi-regional table in estimating the regional and total effects of final demand on the economy of a region is discussed.     

Conditional utility

Summary The motivation for this paper starts out with a decision situation under risk where the decision-maker has to choose among various lottery tickets. We will ask what happens to a person's lottery choice if he is given additional information in terms of probabilities on some states of nature which might affect his choice among lottery tickets. In other words, in evaluating his decision situation, a person should not only consider the probability of a certain prospect to be realized but also the problem how and to which extent some state(s) of nature modify the utility of this prospect. This problem has not been dealt with in Bernoullian utility theory.We state several conditions which are necessary and sufficient to treat conditional utility as Bernoullian utility. Then we show as a main result that it is possible to represent expected utility of decision acts (in Savage's terminology) by conditional expected utility of prospects which preserves well-known properties of expected utility with the exception of linearity.We give a potential application of the notion of conditional utility to the estimation of the value of information as a residual value of prior and posterior utility.     

Editorial

Original Papers

Editorial