Costs of financial instability, household-sector balance sheets and consumption

Extant work on costs of financial instability focuses on fiscal costs and declines in aggregate GDP following banking crises. We estimate effects of banking and currency crises on consumption in 19 OECD countries, showing consumption plays an important role in the adjustment following a crisis, and effects are not captured solely by the impact of crises on standard consumption determinants, income and wealth. Additional effects, attributable to factors such as time-varying confidence, uncertainty and credit rationing, are aggravated by high and rising leverage, despite financial liberalisation easing liquidity constraints. High leverage implies that banking crises taking place now could have greater incidence than in the past.     

Mass-Elite Equilibrium of Federal Constitutional Legitimacy

William Riker ((1964) Federalism: Origin, Operation, Significance. Boston: Little Brown) stressed the problem of the contested nature of federal institutions and argued that federations existed amidst the ongoing challenge to their rules, that federal institutions were being continuously endogenously produced in the interaction of political parties rather than serving as self-enforceable constraints on the political process. As parties changed, so did federalism, and eventually the balance was bound to shift to either one or the other extreme as far as the degree of centralization was concerned. An alternative approach to essentially the same problem of federal instability was to conceptualize the underlying game differently, as a game of coordination, so that institutions would be accepted as constraints and would therefore be self-enforceable because they allow the players to avoid the chaos and successfully converge to an outcome with payoffs exceeding their reservation values (Hardin, 1989, Ordeshook, 1992). The third proposed solution, consociationalism, emphasizes the elite effort to overcome the conflictual nature of the institutional choice (Lijphart, 1977). Here, as in the coordination argument, the hope is that one could create incentives for politicians to view the existing rules as advantageous and to avoid redistribution by means of the institutional revision. Yet, just like the coordination argument, it is based on an implicit assumption that politicians are more easily motivated to act “cooperatively” than are their constituencies. The missing step in the literature is the mechanism by which this more or less “cooperative” behavior of elected politicians could be sustainable in the environment of popular accountability. An essential component in building the theory of institutional design is to show the possibility in a democracy of elected politicians cooperating on institutional matters even when each of their constituencies would prefer to adjust the constitutional terms to its own advantage. Elite “cooperativeness” must be sustainable even in the presence of outside challengers promising to stay closer to the constituent preferences. Here, I present a model of mass-elite equilibrium of constitutional legitimacy, which demonstrates the possibility to motivate the incumbents to sustain the institutional stability while at the same time protecting them from electoral defeat. I also discuss the difficulties and limitations that such a solution faces, in particular, in plural societies. JEL classification: H77, D02 In working on this paper, I have benefited from the discussions with Mikhail Filippov, Peter Ordeshook, Charles Kromkowski, Carol Mershon, and from the comments of the participants of the conference on ‘‘Micro-Foundations of Federal Institutional Stability’’ at the MicroIncentives Research Center at Duke University, Durham, NC, April 30–May 1, 2004, and of the Lansing Lee proseminar at the University of Virginia. The responsibility for the many remaining flaws is solely mine.     

Volatility in the knowledge economy

Summary. We seek to explain the economic volatility of the last 6 years, in particular the rapid expansion and contraction of the knowledge sectors. Our hypothesis is that these sectors amplify the business cycle due to their increasing returns to scale, growing faster than others in an upswing and contracting faster in a downswing. To test this hypothesis we postulate a general equilibrium model with two sectors: one with increasing returns that are external to the firm and endogenously determined - the knowledge sector - and the other with constant returns to scale. We introduce a new measure of volatility of output, a real beta, and derive a resolving equation, from which we prove that the increasing return sectors exhibit more volatility then other sectors. We validate the main results on US macro economic data of real GDP by industry (2-3 digits SIC codes) of the 1977-2001 period, and provide policy conclusions.Received: 18 March 2002, Revised: 16 February 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D5, D58, E10, L50, L52, O38, O51.Correspondence to: Graciela Chichilnisky     

A Time to Scatter Stones,and a Time to Gather Them: The Annual Cycle in Hedge Fund Risk Taking

Analyzing a sample of hedge fund daily returns from Bloomberg, we find a seasonal pattern in their risk taking. During earlier months of a year, poorly performing funds reduce risk. The reduction is stronger for funds with higher management fees, shorter redemption periods, and recently deteriorating performance, consistent with a managerial aversion to early fund liquidation. Toward the end of a year, poorly performing funds gamble for resurrection by increasing risk. It is largely achieved by increasing exposure to market factors, and can be linked to stronger indirect managerial incentives during the second half of a year.     

The double EMG distribution and trade elasticities

Using Brazilian export data that, unlike many trade data sets, have a full record of small export sales, this paper reconsiders trade elasticities and the welfare gains from trade. Using the Brazilian data, this paper provides novel evidence on the properties of the distributions of log‐export sales and shows that the double exponentially modified Gaussian (EMG) distribution parsimoniously captures these properties. Using the double EMG distribution in a standard monopolistic competition model of trade, this paper demonstrates that data truncation, which is prevalent in many data sets, leads to an upward bias in measuring the partial elasticity of trade with respect to variable trade costs. This bias subsequently leads to the underestimation of the gains from trade by 1% to 9% depending on the extent of data truncation, a range that is commensurate with typical economic growth and large booms.     

WHOLESALE PRICES AND COURNOT‐BERTRAND COMPETITION

This note considers the competing vertical structures framework with Cournot‐Bertrand competition downstream. It shows that the equilibrium wholesale price paid by a Cournot (Bertrand)‐type retailer is above (below) marginal costs of a corresponding manufacturer. This result contrasts with the one under pure competition downstream (i.e., Cournot or Bertrand), where the wholesale price is set below (above) marginal costs in case of a Cournot (Bertrand) game at the retail level.     

Sustainable Purchasing in Food Retailing: Interorganizational Relationship Management to Green Product Supply

Stakeholders’ demands for product sustainability redefine the focus of corporate purchasing strategies from the traditional concern with financial performance to considerations of ‘triple bottom line’ viability. This adds to the complexity of managing interorganizational relationships and poses a question regarding corporate ability to effectively leverage suppliers over environmental and social performance of supplied goods. Since it is not clear what type of purchasing relationship is more favorable for greening a product supply, the current paper aims to investigate how food retailers manage their relationships with suppliers in order to influence the environmental and social performance of procured goods and improve the availability of sustainably produced supply. The research is based on two case studies of Swedish supermarkets and supplementary semi‐structured interviews with Swedish, British and Danish supermarkets. The results of the study contribute to the existing body of academic knowledge in the field of sustainable supply chain management by developing a typology of sustainable purchasing relationships with detailed insights into the nature of collaborative practices, structure of incentives, sustainability ambition, and approaches to verification of compliance. The study has also revealed the dependence of sustainable purchasing relationships on the characteristics of the procurement context, namely the presence of well‐established sustainability certification schemes, perceived by purchaser's situation with availability of sustainability certified supply and purchaser's interpretation of the state of power dependence in relationships with suppliers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment     

Legacies,Conflict and ‘Path Dependence’ in the Former Soviet Union

This article analyses management–union–worker relations in a foreign‐owned Moldovan clothing factory. Studies of post‐socialist industrial relations have focused on explaining labour quiescence, advancing ‘path dependence’ and ‘Soviet legacy’ arguments. These draw attention to strong links between management and unions, and weak relations between the latter and workers. We show how the union has, in one case, drawn creatively on Soviet legacies to develop strong articulation between itself and women workers. This was part of a wider adaptive strategy within which the union transformed the meaning of previous functions and developed novel ones. The outcome is a well‐organized representative union capable of challenging management at the negotiating table, as well as on the shop floor. This seems unlikely to be universal but equally unlikely to be unique.     

Asset allocation in markets with contagion: The interplay between volatilities,jump intensities,and correlations

We study the impact of financial contagion on the dynamic asset allocation problem of a CRRA investor facing an incomplete market with two risky assets. We apply a Markov chain regime-switching framework with state-dependent jump intensities, diffusion volatilities and diffusion correlations. The key model feature that a switch to the bad contagion regime is triggered by a loss in one of the risky assets allows for the implementation of a hedging demand against contagion risk. Moreover, a state-dependent diffusion correlation combined with heterogeneity in jump intensities and volatilities can, e.g., generate a flight to quality effect upon a systemic jump.