This Little Piggy Went to Market with a Passport: The Impacts of U.S. Country of Origin Labeling on the Canadian Pork Sector

This paper examines the potential impacts of U.S. mandatory country of origin labeling. North American hog and pork markets are represented as vertically related in a partial equilibrium non-spatial model. A synthetic model is calibrated to historic data and then used to trace the program's added costs as they are passed through the market to determine who wins and who loses. The transactions costs reduce the welfare of all agents in the United States. Canadian welfare depends primarily on whether mixed supply chains continue to be accepted in the United States and trade in hogs continues. A closed border significantly reduces the welfare of Canadian hog producers and increases the welfare of Canadian pork processors.
Le présent article porte sur les répercussions éventuelles de l'étiquetage obligatoire du pays d'origine réclamée par les États‐Unis. Les marchés nord-américains du porc vivant et de la viande de porc sont représentés comme étant verticalement liés dans un modèle non spatial d'équilibre partiel. Un modèle synthétique est étalonné avec des données historiques et est ensuite utilisé pour déterminer les coûts supplémentaires qu'occasionne le programme à mesure qu'ils sont répartis sur le marché pour déterminer les gagnants et les perdants. Les coûts de transaction diminuent le bien‐être de tous les agents aux États‐Unis. Le bien-être au Canada dépend principalement de l'acceptation ou non des chaînes d'approvisionnement mixtes et de la continuité ou non du commerce du porc vivant. La fermeture des frontières diminue considérablement le bien-être des producteurs de porcs canadiens et augmente celui des transformateurs de porcs canadiens.     

Managerial actions and stock transactions during financial distress: Some empirical evidence

Should the current managers remain in control of the firm during financial distress? We address this issue by examining whether managers who take value-maximizing actions also refrain from abnormal selling of their own shares in the firm. Our empirical results show that managers in the action firms do not engage in abnormal selling even during periods of frequent earnings losses. These managers exhibit higher net purchases than the nonaction managers. Thus, trading behavior of the managers and the actions taken during poor performance both appear to be consistent with stockholder interests.     

Managerial risk-taking incentives and the systemic risk of financial institutions

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This paper examines whether the systemic risk of financial institutions is associated with the risk-taking incentives generated by executive...     

A Comparison of Consensus and BVAR Macroeconomic Forecasts

This paper provides a one-month-ahead, macroeconomic, Bayesian Vector Autoregressive (BVAR) forecasting approach that offers several advantages over conventional short-term forecasting procedures. In particular, it produces more accurate forecasts than the Bloomberg consensus forecasts, on average, for 20 major macroeconomic variables. In addition to a quantitative comparison of BVAR and Bloomberg consensus forecast, the paper focuses on five important areas of macroeconomic forecasting: the role of short-term macroeconomic forecasting, the importance of a robust forecasting approach, the importance of timing of data releases, forecast evaluation criteria, and the importance of changing model specifications as conditions warrant.     

A Ray of Hope Still Remains

Pakistan’s economy has been under considerable stresses and strains during the last year, and more especially so during its last quarter. The author, a former Economic Adviser to the Pakistan Government, reviews past economic problems and gives his personal outlook on the future development. We would like this article to serve as a basis of discussion.     

Examining rural income and employment in Bangladesh: A case of structural changes in the rural nonfarm sector in a developing country

This study uncovers some important stylised facts about the structural changes in the rural nonfarm (RNF) economy in Bangladesh for the period 2000–2016 and identifies some broad determinants. Our work uses household-level, secondary sources such as Household Income and Expenditure Survey, Labour Force Survey and Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey. We find that the positive relationship between landownership and rural income has become weaker in recent years, indicating the increasing role of nonland inputs in generating rural income. The share of RNF income in total rural income has increased substantially over the years. The increase in nonfarm income is largely driven by the nonfarm wage income of the richer households, indicating adverse distributional consequences. There are also indications for specialisation in nonfarm activities—the share of income from the ‘mixed’ sources of farm and nonfarm has decreased, and the ‘only nonfarm’ source has increased. Households tend to move away from agriculture and specialise in RNF occupations as the education level increases. Our results offer important insights into rural development strategies and contribute to the broader questions of the development discourse on the structural changes in developing countries.     

The Deeper the Recession,the Stronger the Recovery: Is It Really That Simple?

Are deep recessions typically followed by strong recoveries? This paper investigates this question. There is not a single standard definition for a deep recession or a strong recovery. Therefore, our first step is to define what constitutes a deep recession and a strong recovery. Next we examine whether there is any causal relationship between deep recessions and strong recoveries. Our analysis shows there is no relationship between the depth of a recession and the subsequent pace of economic recovery when we use Gross Domestic Product, Gross Domestic Income, and employment as measures of recession and recovery. A modestly significant relationship does exist, however, between the magnitude of increases in the unemployment rate during a recession and decreases in the unemployment rate during the ensuing recovery.     

Risks and the financing of PPP: Perspectives from the financiers

Public private partnerships (PPP) are an established model for most governments internationally to provide infrastructure-based services, using private finance. Typically the public authority will sign a contract with a special purpose vehicle (SPV), which, because of the holistic nature of PPP, in turn sub-contracts the finance, design, construction, maintenance and soft services to companies that are often related to its shareholders. Thus there is a considerable network of linked organisations that together procure and provide the PPP project.While there is an increasing body of research that examines these PPP projects, much of it is interview or case study based so that the evidence is drawn from a small number of interviews or cases in specific sectors. It also focuses on the public sector procurer and the private sector contractor in the network of organisations. Although it has been recognised that the perceptions of the financiers may vary from those of other key PPP players there is much less research that focuses on the financiers.In this paper we report the results of a postal questionnaire survey, administered to 109 providers of senior debt and equity, from which the response rate was just less than 40%. We supplement these findings with a small number of illustrative quotes from interviewees, where the cited quote represents a commonly held view. We used SPSS and Nvivo to analyse the data.The findings show that when assessing PPPs financiers perceive a very wide range of risks as important, and that it is important to them that many of these risks are either insured or allocated to sub-contractors. When considering participating in PPPs, financiers agree that working with familiar partners on familiar projects and in familiar sectors is important, which may raise barriers to entry and undermine competitive processes.