Firm Microstructure and Aggregate Productivity

Models of firm microstructure are becoming now a standard building block in macroeconomics, trade, and development. This literature builds on the recognition that firm heterogeneity and the allocation of resources across firms plays a key role in determining aggregate productivity and the gains from trade. Barriers to the efficient allocation of resources across firms have been recently recognized to play a key role in economic development. This paper focuses on this methodological contribution, the link between firm microstructure and economic aggregates.     

CAPITAL CONTROLS AND THE LENDING BEHAVIOUR OF SOUTH AFRICAN BANKS: PRELIMINARY FINDINGS ON THE EXPECTED IMPACT OF BASEL II

Banking regulation has developed rapidly over the past few years. There is a growing realization that the regulatory environment must keep pace with globalization and with advances in the financial sector. The 1988 Basel Capital Accord was an attempt to align regulatory capital with the actual underlying risks that banks face, thereby improving the soundness of the banking sector. The New Basel Capital Accord, due for implementation in South Africa in 2007, refines this principle and remedies some of the flaws of the 1988 Accord. This paper considers whether such implementation would have an effect on lending patterns and credit expansion in South Africa. It falls into five parts. Section 1 examines the rationale for the 1988 Basel Accord and outlines the relevant features of the New Accord. Section 2 reviews some of the criticisms directed towards the New Accord, concentrating on the speculation that its implementation will adversely affect bank credit expansion. Section 3 proposes a method of research for assessing the effect of the New Accord in South Africa. Section 4 analyses the trends in South African banking and considers how the New Accord may affect bank behaviour. Section 5 concludes.     

USING PSEUDO‐PANELS TO MEASURE INCOME MOBILITY IN LATIN AMERICA

This paper presents a comparative overview of mobility patterns in 14 Latin American countries between 1992 and 2003. Using three alternative econometric techniques on constructed pseudo‐panels, the paper provides a set of estimators for the traditional notion of income mobility as well as for mobility around extreme and moderate poverty lines. The estimates suggest very high levels of time‐dependent unconditional immobility for the Region. However, the introduction of socioeconomic and personal factors reduces the estimate of income immobility by around 30 percent. There are also large variations in country‐specific income mobility (estimated to explain some additional 10 percent of inter‐temporal income variation). Analyzing the determinants of changes in poverty incidence within cohorts revealed statistically significant roles for age, gender, and education of the household head, the latter subject to distinctive effects across levels of attainment and transition in and out of poverty.     

DO LABOUR SOCIETIES PERFORM DIFFERENTLY TO COOPERATIVES? EVIDENCE FROM THE SPANISH BUILDING INDUSTRY

ABSTRACT: Labour Societies and Cooperatives are both Social Economy enterprises, but with noticeable differences, some of which are imposed by legislation in Spain. The aim of this paper is to study whether such differences affect their management capacity and, in particular, efficiency. In doing so, Data Envelopment Analysis techniques and the metafrontier approach proposed by O’Donnell et al. (2008) are used on a sample of Spanish Labour Societies and Cooperatives belonging to the building industry. Scores of technical efficiency and metafrontier ratios are computed at firm level and, as a novel contribution to existing literature in this field of research, at input‐specific level. The main finding shows that Cooperatives enjoy some technological advantages over Labour Societies, particularly in regard to the management of labour, fixed assets and current assets.     

Assessing the Impact of Fair‐Value Accounting on Financial Statement Analysis: A Data Envelopment Analysis Approach

The historical‐cost and prudence principles have guided accounting for financial investments and tangible fixed assets in many jurisdictions around the globe. This situation might change as a consequence of the increasing number of countries adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), which, to some extent, permit accounting on a fair‐value basis. It is unclear how such a change would affect the analysis of financial statements and to what extent it could modify analysts' perceptions of companies' condition and performance. This paper attempts to shed some light on this issue by restating the financial investments and tangible fixed assets of a sample of 85 Spanish insurance companies, applying fair value instead of historical‐cost‐based valuations and by simulating analyst perception of these companies' efficiency and profitability for both sets of data using data envelopment analysis (DEA). We find that the numbers on the face of the financial statements change considerably and observe that the magnitude of these changes varies between companies and classes of assets. However, only in a few cases does a change in the valuation basis lead to a relevant change in DEA scores; within our sample, the overall assessment of companies with regard to efficiency and profitability remains largely the same under both valuation bases. These findings seem to indicate that a change from historical‐cost to fair‐value accounting could alter analyst perceptions of a limited number of companies but likely will not have a major impact on the appraisal of the majority of them.     

Optimal Unemployment Insurance and Employment History

In existing unemployment insurance programmes, it is standard to condition eligibility on the previous employment record of unemployed workers. The purpose of this article is to study conditions under which the efficient contract exhibits these properties. In order to do so, we characterize the optimal unemployment insurance contract in asymmetric information environments in which workers experience multiple unemployment spells. We show that if quits cannot be distinguished from layoffs, it is optimal to condition the benefits paid to unemployed workers on their employment history, in particular, the coverage should increase with the length of previous employment spells.     

Fiscal Data Revisions in Europe

Revisions of budget balances in Europe could be particularly worrisome as adherence to multilateral surveillance rules is judged upon initial data releases. We use a pool of real‐time vintages of data for 15 EU countries over the period 1995–2008. Our main findings are: (i) preliminary releases are biased and nonefficient predictors of subsequent releases, (ii) such systematic bias in revisions is a general feature of the sample, (iii) Eurostat's decisions explain a significant share of the bias and provide some evidence of window dressing practices, and (iv) expected real gross domestic product growth, political cycles, and the strength of fiscal rules also contribute to explain revision patterns.