Exchange Rate Exposure and its Determinants: Evidence from Indian Firms

This article examines the determinants of the exchange rate exposure by comparing both manufacturing and service sector firms in India over the period of 2000 to 2013. First, the study finds that service sector firms are more exposed to exchange rate changes than manufacturing firms in India. Second, the results indicate that the market-to-book ratio and export are significant and positively related; however, size is negatively related to the exchange rate exposure of both the manufacturing and service sector firms. These results are robust with the estimation using a trade-weighted exchange rate.     

Evidence of Wagner's law from Indian states

In this paper, we test for Wagner's law for 15 Indian states. We consider nine panels of states based on geography and level of economic development. Using panel unit-root, panel-cointegration, and panel-Granger causality analysis, we unravel strong evidence of Wagner's law. However, we find that the Wagner's law relationship is consumption rather than capital expenditure driven. This is a fresh revelation and our results are robust to different model specifications.     

Mixed Embeddedness: (In)formal Economic Activities and Immigrant Businesses in the Netherlands

Immigrants from non-industrialized countries have become part and parcel of the social fabric of many advanced urban economies, including those in the Netherlands. A significant number of these migrants opt for setting up shop themselves. Lacking access to large financial resources and mostly lacking in educational qualifications, they are funnelled towards the lower end of the opportunity structure of these urban economies. To survive in these cut-throat markets, many migrant entrepreneurs revert to informal economic activities that are strongly dependent on specific social networks – mostly consisting of co-ethnics – to sustain these activities on a more permanent basis. To understand the social position of these migrant entrepreneurs and their chances of upward social mobility, one has to look beyond these co-ethnic networks and focus on their insertion in the wider society in terms of customers, suppliers and various kinds of business organizations. To deal with this latter type of insertion, we propose the use of a more comprehensive concept of mixed embeddedness that aims at incorporating both the co-ethnic social networks as well as the linkages (or lack of linkages) between migrant entrepreneurs and the economic and institutional context of the host society. We illustrate this concept by presenting a case study of Islamic butchers in the Netherlands. — Les immigrants des pays pas industrialisés sont devenus une part intégrale du tissu social de nombreuses économies urbaines développées, y compris celles des Pays-Bas. Un nombre significatif de migrants choisissent de s’établir à leur compte. N’ayant pas accès à des ressources financières importantes et ayant peu de qualifications académiques, ils sont entraînés vers le bas des structures de débouchés de ces économies. Pour survivre dans ces économies très dures, beaucoup d’entrepreneurs immigrants retournent aux activités économiques informelles qui dépendent fortement des réseaux sociaux spécifiques – principalement co-ethniques – pour soutenir ces activités de façon plus permanente. Afin de comprendre la position sociale de ces migrants entrepreneurs et leurs possibilités de mobilité sociale vers le haut, il faut regarder plus loin que ces réseaux co-ethniques et explorer leur insertion dans la société en général par rapport aux clients, fournisseurs et divers types d’organisation commerciales. Pour traiter de ce type d’insertion, nous proposons d’utiliser un concept d’incorporation mélangée plus compréhensif qui a pour but d’intégrer à la fois les réseaux sociaux co-ethniques et les liens (ou manque de liens) entre les migrants entrepreneurs et le contexte économique et institutionnel de la société d’acceuil. Nous illustrons ce concept par un cas d’étude de bouchers islamiques aux Pays-Bas.     

On games with incomplete information and the Dvoretsky–Wald–Wolfowitz theorem with countable partitions

It has remained an open question as to whether the results of Milgrom–Weber [Milgrom, P.R., Weber, R.J., 1985. Distributional strategies for games with incomplete information. Mathematics of Operations Research 10, 619–632] are valid for action sets with a countably infinite number of elements without additional assumptions on the abstract measure space of information. In this paper, we give an affirmative answer to this question as a consequence of an extension of a theorem of Dvoretzky, Wald and Wolfowitz (henceforth DWW) due to Edwards [Edwards, D.A., 1987. On a theorem of Dvoretsky, Wald and Wolfowitz concerning Liapunov measures. Glasgow Mathematical Journal 29, 205–220]. We also present a direct elementary proof of the DWW theorem and its extension, one that may have an independent interest.     

The productivity-wage and productivity-employment nexus: a panel data analysis of Indian manufacturing

This article investigates the long-run relationship between labour productivity and employment, and between labour productivity and real wages in the case of the Indian manufacturing sector. The panel data set consists of 17 two-digit manufacturing industries for the period 1973–1974 to 1999–2001. We find that productivity-wages and productivity-employment are panel cointegrated for all industries. We find that both employment and real wages exert a positive effect on labour productivity. We argue that flexible labour market has a significant influence on manufacturing productivity, employment and real wages in the case of Indian manufacturing.     

Leverage adjustment after mergers and acquisitions

Australian firms have leverage targets. Speeds of adjustment to a target capital structure are higher than previously published estimates when there are major disruptions to firms’ leverage ratios. Firms exploit company‐specific characteristics to achieve these targets. Profitability and cash levels are important drivers of the speeds of adjustment. Firms, which have lower profitability or higher cash levels, appear to adjust faster.     

Trends in economics publications represented by JEL categories between 2007 and 2013

This article illustrates how publication trends in different subject categories in economics evolved from 2007 to 2013. Using data from RePEc we show that the largest increase in the relative share was for articles published in JEL category Q (‘Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics, Environmental and Ecological Economics’) over this period. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the number of JEL categories per article increased over the last 25 years.     

Examining Sustainability of Federal Finances in India: An Application of Non-Stationary Panel Methods

This paper examines the fiscal sustainability of Indian States during the 1990s on the basis of their budgetary data. Sustainability has been discussed using the inter-temporal budget constraint framework and has been tested by applying the panel co-integration technique. The panel analysis reveals that revenue receipts and revenue expenditures are co-integrated across the States. Further, the insensitivity of the results to the choice of the period of analysis attests robustness to the result that the State finances in India may not be unsustainable.

     

跨国并购必须透明化

目标收购公司、媒体和公众,在面对一个可能的“海外新东家”时,常会出现一种本能的抵触情绪。这种抵触心理经常会导致对买家的苛刻分析,以及对收购意图的猜忌。这给收购方带来了无形的压力,并且可能会因此而动摇投资者信心,使并购的价值基础处于不稳定状态