Post-Conflict Reconstruction and the Challenge to International Organizations: The Case of El Salvador

Countries in post-conflict transitions have to reconcile the development challenge with the additional burden of reconstruction and national reconciliation. This paper first describes the peculiarities of these countries which make them clearly different from those pursuing normal development. Second is a discussion of the challenges that these transitions pose on the countries involved and on the international organizations that support them. Third, the paper illustrates through a discussion of El Salvador—by all standards a success story—how the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations had to adapt to meet the challenges of post-conflict reconstruction. The paper concludes with some policy recommendations.     

Rational Underdevelopment*

We propose a two‐region two‐sector model of uneven development, where technological change benefits either the lagging or the leading region. In this framework interregional transfers may lead to persistent underdevelopment; by raising wages, transfers reduce the chance of the backward region adopting a new technology and taking off. Due to uncertainty about which region benefits from technological change, the backward region may rationally choose to remain underdeveloped, while the advanced region continues to pay transfers. The model provides a rationale for cases, such as Italy's Mezzogiorno, where the same rich region subsidizes the same poor region on a continuous basis.     

Knowledge acquisition and corporate entrepreneurship: Insights from Spanish SMEs in the ICT sector

The contingent perspective on the corporate entrepreneurship–performance relationship has focused mainly on the influence of factors either environmental or internal to the organization. Only recently have researchers turned their attention to the relational context and specifically to inter-organizational alliances’ potential to influence this relationship. Our paper analyzes how knowledge acquisition from alliances affects the corporate entrepreneurship–performance relationship in a sample of Spanish SMEs from the Information and Communication Technology sector (ICT). The results obtained show that both corporate entrepreneurship and knowledge acquisition have a positive influence on performance but that the moderating effect of knowledge acquisition on the relationship between corporate entrepreneurship and performance is negative and it varies depending on the level of knowledge-based resources of the firm.     

Information feedback in first price auctions

I apply the notion of a self‐confirming equilibrium (SCE) to study how feedback in first price auctions influences bidders' perceptions about their strategic environment, and consequently their bidding behavior. In a private values setting, revealing the two highest bids at the end of each auction is sufficient for bidders to have correct beliefs (justifying the assumption of Nash equilibrium). In contrast, in every symmetric SCE of a symmetric, affiliated, private values model, bidding strategies and revenue are (weakly) higher if only the highest bid is revealed. I also consider interdependent valuations and discuss implications for the empirical auction literature.     

Optimal designs for generalized linear models with biased response

This paper is concerned with the search for locally optimal designs when the observations of the response variable arise from a weighted distribution in the exponential family. Locally optimal designs are derived for regression models in which the response follows a weighted version of Normal, Gamma, Inverse Gaussian, Poisson or Binomial distributions. Some conditions are given under which the optimal designs for the weighted and original (non-weighted) distributions are the same. An efficiency study is performed to find out the behavior of the D-optimal designs for the original distribution when they are used to estimate models with weighted distributions.     

Credit spreads: An empirical analysis on the informational content of stocks,bonds, and CDS

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between stock market implied credit spreads, CDS spreads, and bond spreads. A general VECM representation is proposed for changes in the three credit spread measures which accounts for zero, one, or two independent cointegration equations, depending on the evidence provided by any particular company. Empirical analysis on price discovery, based on a proprietary sample of North American and European firms, and tailored to the specific VECM at hand, indicates that stocks lead CDS and bonds more frequently than the other way round. It likewise confirms the leading role of CDS with respect to bonds.     

Estimation of poverty measures with auxiliary information in sample surveys

The analysis of poverty measures has been receiving increased attention in recent years. This paper contributes to the literature by developing percentile ratio estimators based on the pseudo empirical likelihood method. In practice, variances of poverty measures could be not expressible by simple formulae and consequently other techniques should be used in the variance estimation stage. Assuming percentile ratios, resampling techniques are investigated in this paper. A numerical example based on data from the Spanish Household Panel Survey is taken up to illustrate how suggested procedures can perform better than existing ones. The effect of a model-misspecification on the proposed estimators is also evaluated by using simulated populations.     

Maritime connectivity and agricultural trade

Seaborne shipping is the dominant mode of transport in international trade in agricultural products, and an increasing part of seaborne agricultural trade is carried in containers. Furthermore, the majority of world containers are moved through liner shipping services, that is, regular transport services provided by global shipping companies which comprise a dense network connecting ports and countries around the world. Using a theoretically consistent gravity equation and a novel identification strategy based on the use of intra-national trade flows, this paper investigates the effect of liner shipping connectivity on international trade in agricultural products. The results show that liner shipping connectivity has a positive and statistically significative effect on agricultural trade. Moreover, this positive effect can be observed for the majority of the agricultural products analysed and is also identified for countries at different stages of development. These findings appear especially relevant in terms of the objective of increasing less developed countries' participation in global agricultural trade.     

Industry,management capabilities and firms' competitiveness: An empirical contribution

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge of strategic factors that explain the competitive position reached by firms in their activity sector. We have used a survey carried out in 1999 on 287 executives that belong to the service sector in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. We have analysed the differential factors that distinguish the strategic performance of competitive vis‐à‐vis non‐competitive firms, by jointly assessing the variables representative of the sector (five competitive forces defined by Porter) and variables of an internal feature. Finally, we have moved the level of analysis from the industry to the firm; specifically, we have focused on managerial capabilities due to the significant role played by managers in the strategic decision‐making process. The use of cluster analysis to classify firms depending on their degree of competitiveness and the application of the See5 induction algorithm of rules and decision trees to determine the differential factors that distinguish competitive from non‐competitive firms, provide a methodological framework for the most significant contributions of this work. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Minimum wages in Spain

In Spain the minimum wage appears to have no significant employment-reducing effect for workers over 18. For the under 18s, however, minimum wages and employment are negatively related. The government should consider lowering the minimum wage for younger workers.