A public firm in a model of spatial duopoly with price discrimination

We visit the role of privatization in the location decision of firms in an industry where no firm can produce all varieties demanded. We demonstrate that the Nash equilibrium locations are socially optimal, in the presence of a publicly owned firm, notwithstanding the degree of privatization.     

IS THERE NEWS IN THE CLUB?

In September 1994, the Wall Street Journal started the Annual Report and Earning Service. Firms participating in this service volunteer to provide on request, to any reader, their annual report and current quarterly information. The daily price quotations of such firms appear with a small symbol like the club in playing cards. We examine the utility of voluntarily disclosing this second‐hand information to the public and seek to find the motivation for this disclosure. Our results show that most of the firms that joined this service had below‐industry‐average performance, or at least were headed in that direction. Membership in the Annual Report and Earning Service brought some short‐term benefits in the form of average excess returns, but the economic fundamentals reasserted, and most firms had significant below‐average returns at the end of our sample period. JEL classification: G10, G14.     

Are Financial Markets Overly Optimistic about the Prospects of Firms That Issue Equity? Evidence from Voluntary versus Involuntary Equity Issuances by Banks

This paper examines firm performance around announcements of common stock issues. We study the banking industry in which some stock issues are made voluntarily by managers, and other issues are involuntary. We find that banks that voluntarily issue common stock experience a significant drop in the matched adjusted operating performance following the issue, a significant drop in benchmark firms' adjusted stock prices following the issue, and systematically negative market reactions to post-issue quarterly earnings announcements. Banks that issue common stock involuntarily experience values for these measures that are not significantly different from those of the benchmark firm(s).     

Tourism and the environment

This paper examines the effects of pollution taxes on welfare and environment for a small open economy. In the presence of tourism, pollution taxes provide a double dividend of less pollution and improvements in the tourism terms of trade. The optimal pollution taxes are derived under exogenous and endogenous tourism, and they can be greater or less than the marginal damage of pollution perceived by the domestic residents. Numerical simulations show that the optimal tax rate is larger under exogenous tourism.     

Technological innovations and economic prosperity: A time series analysis

Using a univariate decomposition of per capita real GDP into its permanent trend and irregular components, the objective of this paper is to measure, rank, and compare the relative importance of the major technological innovations of the past two centuries as measured by their contribution to the growth rate of real per capita GDP. The paper uses the growth model and Beveridge and Nelson’s (1981) univariate decomposition method to measure and to compare the economic impact of random technological shocks, as measured by the average increase in real per capita GDP during sub-periods of major technological advancements.     

A general equilibrium analysis of foreign investment and intersectoral linkage

In this paper, we demonstrate that a foreign capital induced growth in a protected sector, which provides an industrial input for agricultural products, may increase welfare even after the entire foreign capital income is repatriated. Such a policy may lead to an increase in the volume of trade along with an increase in the size of the protected sector, quite contrary to the usual perception. The analysed structure also incorporates migration and unemployment.     

International Capital Mobility and Free Trade Once Again*

Using a Heckscher–Ohlin model, this paper re‐examines Robert Mundell's famous thesis that free trade and unimpeded capital mobility are perfect substitutes. Under very general conditions which, according to many economists, have caused international convergence of factor rewards, we show that in a polluted environment free trade is inferior to free international investment. This happens even though commodity prices and factor rewards are the same with both policies. The practical side of our thesis is that the world will be better off by reducing the volume of trade while removing all barriers to foreign direct investment that at present hamper the service industries.     

Can Micro Health Insurance Reduce Poverty? Evidence From Bangladesh

This article examines the impact of micro health insurance on poverty reduction in rural areas of Bangladesh. The research is based on household‐level primary data collected from the operating areas of the Grameen Bank during 2006. A number of outcome measures are considered; these include household income, stability of household income via food sufficiency and ownership of nonland assets, and the probability of being above or below the poverty line. The results show that micro health insurance has a positive association with all of these indicators, and this is statistically significant and quantitatively important for food sufficiency.