Markups,Bargaining Power and Offshoring: An Empirical Assessment1

This paper tests the pro‐competitive effect of imports on product and labour markets for Spanish manufacturing firms in the period 1990–2005. In doing so, it takes into account the type of imported products: final versus intermediate. Markups are estimated following the procedure suggested by Roeger and including an efficient bargaining model. The observed heterogeneity among firms is parametised to consider additional product standardisation and market concentration. The results support the imports as market discipline hypothesis for importers of final goods, while firms that offshore intermediate inputs show similar markups to nonimporters. Additionally, the union bargaining power is smaller for importers and the more homogeneous is the type of goods elaborated by firms.     

Banks’ Net Interest Margin in the 2000s: A Macro-Accounting international perspective

This paper re-examines the determinants of Net Interest Margin (NIM) in the banking industries of 15 developed and emerging economies. It presents three main contributions with respect to previous studies: first, we analyze the determinants of NIM in the years leading to the 2008 financial crisis; second, we account for the role of different accounting standards across countries; third, we use multi-way cluster estimation methodologies which control for cross-sectional and time-series dependence in macroeconomic and banking variables. We find that the introduction of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs) contributed to lower NIM variations unexplained by standard accounting variables. Interest rate volatility is found to be positively and strongly related to NIM dynamics, whereas inflation risk is often found to be a relevant driver of NIM cross-country differences.     

La oralidad y la escritura en el proceso de aprendizaje Aplicación del método aprende a escuchar,pensar y escribir

Research design is quasi-experimental, field, with four longitudinal assessments for two groups (one experimental and one control) of students with irregularity student. Intervention, learns listen-think-write (lltw) method. population, 488 students. With a sample conditioned (students with irregular registration) of 170 students from two university careers of accounting and administration, both manner, 24.3 years old. Material, Raven’s Progressive Matrices test and Learning strategies ACRA test. The impact obtained by the intervention (LLTW) was 23%, significant difference between follow-up evaluation 6 and 12 months. Regarding the improvement of learning skills in post-test measurement showed a general increase in average by 28%. Also it is necessary to say, the decline was failed subjects in the two groups evolving 12 months in control group was 3 to 4 and the experimental group was 1 to 2.     

Pigouvian Taxes: A Strategic Approach

This paper analyzes the problem of designing mechanisms to implement efficient solutions in economies with externalities. We provide two simple mechanisms implementing the Pigouvian Social Choice Correspondence in environments in which coalitions can or cannot be formed.     

Credit Chains and Mortgage Crises

Here I examine a production economy with a financial sector that contains multiple layers of credit. The latter constitute credit chains that include a simple mortgage market. The focus is on the nature and contagion properties of credit chains in an economy where the financial sector plays a real allocating role, and agents have a serious choice of whether to default on mortgages or not. Multiple equilibria with different rates of default are observed, due to the presence of strategic complementarities. A liquidity crunch is associated with higher rates of default that can trigger a financial crisis as well as constrain the purchase of production factors, leading to reductions in welfare, together with potentially serious effects on real economic activity with the potential of causing deep and widespread recessions.     

Path dependence view of export behaviour: A relationship between static patterns and dynamic configurations

The main objective of this work is to understand the extent to which a relationship exists between static patterns and the dynamic configurations of a firm's export behaviour. The premise of our investigation is that the set of exporting decisions adopted over a period of time can be explained, in part, by the export pattern of the firm at the start of that period. Our empirical work is based on a sample of 754 exporting firms covering a 4-year period (2002–2006). Data were obtained from the Survey of Business Strategies (SBS). Our results support the path dependent focus of internationalisation, find some interdependences among three dimensions of export behaviour (extent, entry mode and scope), in static and dynamic fields, and support the idea that export experience influences some of the changes in foreign behaviour at one point in time, but not all. Our work contributes to the literature as it is one of the first works that (1) simultaneously analyses static and dynamic variables; (2) establishing relationships between both variables; (3) different dimensions of international export behaviour are introduced jointly; and (4) these relationships are contextualised according to the firm's export experience.