ARE COMPUTERS AT HOME A FORM OF CONSUMPTION OR AN INVESTMENT? A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS FOR JAPAN*

This study examines the effect on labour market outcomes, of computer possession at home using longitudinal data collected in Japan. There are positive correlations between computer possession and women's full‐time employment and the salaries of both men and women. In a fixed effects analysis, however, no temporal, causal effects of computer possession on labour market outcomes were found. Overall, the results suggest that the positive correlation between computer possession and better labour market outcomes does not imply causality among workers strongly attached to the labour market.     

Economic integration and the profitability of cross-border mergers and acquisitions

The 1990s was a decade of increased economic integration. The decade also witnessed a sharp increase in cross-border mergers and acquisitions. From a theoretical perspective, the increase in international mergers in more integrated economies is rather puzzling. It is a well-established result that due to the “business stealing effect”, mergers in integrated markets are not likely to be profitable. A reasonable conjecture would therefore be that closer integration of markets would reduce the attractiveness of cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The present paper demonstrates that this is not necessarily the case: Economic integration may trigger cross-border acquisitions by reducing the business stealing effect and by reducing the reservation price of the target firm. The paper thus provides explanations to the observed increase in cross-border mergers in a world of more integrated economies.     

Evaluating investment projects in the presence of sectoral linkages1

In this paper we develop a framework to assess the economic impact of foreign investment projects. If investment projects interact with other industries in the host economy, either by buying inputs locally or by selling their own product to local downstream firms, they can create sectoral linkages. The expansion of upstream and downstream industries can feed back to the project's own industry leading to a further expansion of the local industry. We study the circumstances under which investment projects lead to the creation of sectoral linkages and characterize the factors that determine the project's welfare impact. We link analytical findings to case studies undertaken for the EBRD.     

The evolution of rationality and the Red Queen

Strategic rationality is subjected here to natural selection. In a zero-sum repeated game of incomplete information, one long-run individual is informed of the state of the world, and plays against a sequence of short-run opponents who are not. Strategies are noisy and have bounded recall. An equilibrium in these is shown to exist. Relative to any such equilibrium, sufficiently greater recall enjoys an advantage that is not decreasing in the original level of recall, thus capturing the Red Queen effect. The selection pressure to reduce a small amount of noise is less than that to increase recall.     

物流管理信息系统体系结构的分析设计

对企业内部物流管理信息系统的应用体系结构特点进行了分析和研究,剖析了J2EE标准架构的特点与优点。在此基础上,给出了基于J2EE的物流信息系统的总体设计理念。     

An instrumental variable approach for panel unit root tests under cross-sectional dependence

For dynamic panel models with cross-sectional dependence, several unit root tests are constructed using a Huber-type instrument, whose null asymptotics are standard Gaussian and do not depend on nuisance parameters. A Monte-Carlo simulation shows that the proposed tests have better sizes and comparable powers relative to other two existing tests developed for cross-sectionally dependent dynamic panel models.     

面向3PL的物流信息系统的实现

以第三方物流企业的实际需求为例,给出了适合该第三方物流企业商业运作流程的物流信息系统整体解决方案,包括基于J2EE系统技术架构、系统功能、网络体系结构、系统接口等.该解决方案适用于目前大多数的第三方物流企业.     

Moral hazard and Marshallian inefficiency: Evidence from Tunisia

We formalize the link between optimal cost-sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well-known results from duality theory. Building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature, we show that optimal contractual structure is determined by the (i) substitution possibilities that exist between different observable factor inputs, as well as (ii) between these inputs and unobservable effort. We endogenize contractual choice using landlord characteristics as instruments, exploiting the fact that, in our dataset, landlords interact with several tenants and vice versa. The approach is applied to an unbalanced plot-level panel of cost-sharing contracts in a Tunisian village, using a translog representation of the restricted profit function. Contractual terms are found to be a significant determinant of input use and therefore lead to Marshallian inefficiency, while the optimality of the underlying contractual structure is rejected.     

Stock-flow matching and the performance of the labor market

We estimate outflow equations for vacancies and unemployed workers in Britain, departing from the stock-based analysis of matching in two ways. First, we deal with the temporal aggregation problem that arises when discrete time data are used to describe continuous time processes. Second, we allow for a stock-flow matching mechanism in which the stock of traders on one side of the market matches with the flow of traders on the other side. Our estimates are in line with the predictions of stock-flow matching in terms of higher exit rates of flows and of matching combinations between labor market stocks and flows. Furthermore, employer search effectiveness did not seem to decline between the 1960s and the 1990s. Nevertheless, some deterioration in worker search effectiveness is detected, however less severe than that implied by previous, stock-based work.