Between debt and the devil: beyond the normalization delusion

Since 2008, we have found it incredibly difficult to achieve adequate nominal demand growth. I think a fundamental reason we found it so difficult focuses on debt overhangs, if we first allow private leverage to grow too high, we end up in a situation where the debt doesn’t go away, it just moves around the global economy. Total global debt to global GDP is now higher than it ever was before. When interest rates are already low, further reductions of interest rates have very little influence on investment and consumption. Ultra-loose monetary policy does produce increases in asset prices. But if that’s driving an increase in inequality on top of slow growth of real wages. There has been inadequate focus in economics on the different functions that credit creation plays within the economy. We have to think about control of the credit cycle as an end, per se. Our orthodoxy before the crisis was that private credit and money creation is just fine. We have to understand that both governments can fail and be dangerous, and that markets can fail and be dangerous.     

Applied R in the Classroom

R, with support from a number of add-on packages, is an excellent teaching tool that can greatly enhance learning of exploratory data analysis (EDA) and linear regression. This article illustrates using R along with the packages tidyverse , GGally , esquisse and lindia to walk through an example of basic EDA and linear regression that might be used in an introductory class along with code examples for every step. Teaching with R can give learners control of their analysis, lower the intimidating coding barrier, and provide a platform on which to learn modeling and analysis.     

Tracking the U.S. health sector: the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Business Economics - Health spending has grown faster than the U.S. economy for decades and currently represents approximately 18% of gross domestic product. As with other sectors of the economy,...     

Share trading activity and the rise of the rentier in the UK before 1920*

Abstract

Using a hand-collected dataset, we examine share trading activity over the period 1882–1920 for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, one of the largest UK companies of the time. Our main finding is that the steady flow of rentiers into the shareholding constituency of this company stymied share trading activity. Another important finding is that share trading still occurred during the closure of the stock exchange in 1914, but on a much-reduced scale. We also find that there was a substantial boom in share trading and in insurance stock prices after World War I.     

Capital Freedom,Financial Development and Provincial Economic Growth in China

For more than three decades, China has managed to combine rapid economic growth with a strictly regulated financial sector. The discrepancy between economic and financial development has raised the question of whether China might be an exception to the so‐called finance–growth nexus. This study examines the relationship between finance and growth at the provincial level in China using a new set of measures of capital freedom and financial development. The results indicate that capital freedom and financial development are associated with both higher income and growth rates. In particular, we find that the marketisation of financial institutions and strengthening of legal and government institutions have a particularly strong impact on income and growth in low‐income provinces.     

Creating Shopper Value: Co-Creation Roles,In-Store Self-Service Technology Use,and Value Differentiation

This study examines how retailers can use self-service technologies (SST) to increase shopper satisfaction. Using a survey of 188 consumers of a new self-service kiosk launch within a convenience-store (c-store) setting, we examine how such retailers might influence shopper's perceptions of value by better involving customers in the service delivery experience. Our proposed model links classic service operations and marketing design insights to the service-dominant logic perspective of service value co-creation. We find that shoppers perceive enhanced value creation from the new SST when they feel comfortable in their roles and the surrounding service design supports those roles.     

Regulatory Uncertainty and Financial Contagion: Evidence from the Hybrid Capital Securities Market

This paper examines the negative market impact that resulted from the insurance regulators’ potential reclassification of 140 hybrid capital securities in spring and summer 2006. It illustrates how financial contagion can spring from a regulatory policy change that lacks transparency. We investigate the impact of the uncertainty surrounding the regulators’ true classification criteria by measuring the effect of the reclassification announcements on hybrid new issue volume, cumulative average abnormal returns, bid‐ask spreads, and yield spreads. The financial contagion adversely affected the entire hybrid capital securities market for six months. The effect was most pronounced among those hybrids that were eventually reclassified as common equity equivalents. It was greater for Yankee Tier 1 hybrids, which had been more popular with insurance firm investors prior to the reclassifications, than among non‐Tier 1 hybrids.     

The Relationship Between Project Success and Project Efficiency

Many researchers have suggested that meeting time, scope, and budget goals, sometimes called ‘project efficiency,’ is not the comprehensive measure of project success. Broader measures of success have been recommended; however, to date, nobody has determined empirically the relationship between efficiency and overall success or indeed shown whether efficiency is important at all to overall project success. Our aim in this article is to correct that omission. Through a survey of 1,386 projects we have shown that project efficiency correlates moderately strongly to overall project success (correlation of 0.6 and R² of 0.36). Efficiency is shown through analysis to be neither the only aspect of project success nor an aspect of project success that can be ignored.