International Price Linkage within a Region: The Case of East Asia

This paper investigates how “prices” in East Asian economies correlate with those in Japan and the United States. The analysis is particularly noteworthy because although the East Asian economies are geographically close to Japan, their currencies have been tied more closely to the U.S. dollar. In this paper, we analyze two different types of “prices”: overall price levels in terms of the same currency and relative prices among different commodities. We demonstrate that overall price levels in the East Asian economies are more closely related to those in the United States. However, the relative prices in East Asia, especially those in Taiwan and Korea, are more closely correlated with those in Japan. These price correlation patterns are in marked contrast with those in other regions.J. Japan. Int. Econ.December 1993,11(4), pp. 643–666. Faculty of Economics, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan; and Department of Economics, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, and Graduate School of Economics, Hitotsubashi University, Japan.     

JAPANESE STUDIES OF RICARDO'S THEORY OF FOREIGN TRADE*

The standard interpretations of Ricardo's theory of foreign trade assume that money ˙is neutral and conclude that the terms of trade cannot be determined since reciprocal demands are not taken into consideration. In Japan, however, Kojima and Morita emphasized the role of non-neutral metallic money and insisted that Ricardo can determine the terms of trade without introducing the reciprocal demands. A model is constructed to show that their arguments using numerical examples are. justified and that Ricardo's theory has conditional determinacy of the terms of trade without explicitly considering reciprocal demands.     

Local and Personal Networks in Employment and the Development of Labor Markets: Evidence from the Cut Flower Industry in Ethiopia

We examine the roles of local and personal networks in the employment process and the emergence and development of the labor market in Ethiopia’s growing cut flower industry. Using primary survey data of 320 workers randomly sampled from all 64 farms, we find that workers who were recruited informally using the social ties were paid less than the formally-recruited workers at hiring. However, these workers quickly increased their productivity, and the effect of social ties on wages disappeared over time. Further, we find that the development of labor market for this newly-emerged industry took place particularly within the industrial cluster.     

An optimal execution problem with market impact

We study an optimal execution problem in a continuous-time market model that considers market impact. We formulate the problem as a stochastic control problem and investigate properties of the corresponding value function. We find that right-continuity at the time origin is associated with the strength of market impact for large sales; otherwise the value function is continuous. Moreover, we show the semigroup property (Bellman principle) and characterise the value function as a viscosity solution of the corresponding Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation. We present some examples where the form of the optimal strategy changes completely, depending on the amount of the trader’s security holdings, and where optimal strategies in the Black–Scholes type market with nonlinear market impact are not block liquidation but gradual liquidation, even when the trader is risk-neutral.