Interenterprise Credit and Adjustment during Financial Crises: The Role of Firm Size

Small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) suffered a sharp contraction in their borrowing from banks during the Great Recession. Analyzing a large firm‐level database for European countries, the paper shows that trade credit amplified the liquidity squeeze on SMEs, with adverse effects on their real activity. SMEs sharply increased their net trade credit and thus transferred financial resources to larger firms. Given the large weight of SMEs in the economy of European countries, the liquidity squeeze of SMEs likely contributed to the depth of the output fall and the slow recovery in Europe during the Great Recession.     

Local Crowding-Out in China

In China, between 2006 and 2013, local public debt crowded out the investment of private firms by tightening their funding constraints while leaving state-owned firms' investment unaffected. We establish this result using a purpose-built data set for Chinese local public debt. Private firms invest less in cities with more public debt, with the reduction in investment larger for firms located farther from banks in other cities or more dependent on external funding. Moreover, in cities where public debt is high, private firms' investment is more sensitive to internal cash flow.     

Brokers and Order Flow Leakage: Evidence from Fire Sales

Using trade‐level data, we study whether brokers play a role in spreading order flow information in the stock market. We focus on large portfolio liquidations that result in temporary price drops, and identify the brokers who intermediate these trades. These brokers’ clients are more likely to predate on the liquidating funds than to provide liquidity. Predation leads to profits of about 25 basis points over 10 days and increases the liquidation costs of the distressed fund by 40%. This evidence suggests a role of information leakage in exacerbating fire sales.     

Exports,Supply Constraints and Growth: An Investigation using Regional Data

In this work we first model the role of demand‐ and supply‐side factors (labour market adjustment, productive efficiency) in explaining economic growth. Empirically testing the model, we evaluate why different growth regimes may appear in the 20 Italian administrative regions. This exercise uses a two‐stage econometric approach. Estimates for the elasticity of manufacturing output to exports are obtained from regional time series: a significant long‐run relationship indicates the existence of a demand‐constrained growth regime. We then ascertain whether the regional dispersion of supply‐side factors has an impact on the regional dispersion of growth regimes. The empirical evidence supports our expectations of strong regional differences. Southern regions are less likely to display demand‐constrained regimes. In explanation of these differences, second‐stage analysis reveals that a strong role is played by such efficiency‐enhancing factors as technological innovation, bank diffusion and ‘social capital’. No role is found for labour market rigidities.     

Centralized Wage Bargaining and the “Celtic Tiger” Phenomenon

Drawing on a variety of sources and research methods, this article argues that centralized wage bargaining contributed to the “Celtic Tiger” phenomenon by linking wage increases in the dynamic multinational companies sector to wage and productivity increases in the much more sluggish domestic sector of the economy and, in so doing, considerably increased the competitiveness of foreign multinational companies—a key driver of Irish growth. The article also argues that much‐received wisdom about the institutional and organizational preconditions for centralized wage regulation needs to be reconsidered in light of the Irish case. Public sector unions played a pivotal role in initiating and sustaining wage centralization, yet their leadership role did not undermine its effectiveness. Likewise, internal democratic procedures and the absence of wage compression policies, rather than centralized organizational structures, facilitated compliance with centralized wage policies.     

Stock Market Returns and Consumption

This paper employs Swedish data on households' stock holdings to investigate how consumption responds to changes in stock market returns. We instrument the actual capital gains and dividend payments with past portfolio weights. Unrealized capital gains lead to a marginal propensity to consume of 23% for the bottom 50% of the wealth distribution and about 3% for the top 30% of the wealth distribution. Household consumption is significantly more responsive to dividend payouts across all parts of the wealth distribution. Our findings are consistent with households treating capital gains and dividends as separate sources of income.     

The Riskiness of Corporate Bonds

We use an index of riskiness recently proposed by Aumann and Serrano ( 2008 ) to analyze how the riskiness of diversified portfolios of corporate bonds changes across rating classes and through time and how it compares to the riskiness of other financial instruments. We find that differences in riskiness among portfolios of bonds belonging to different rating classes are seldom statistically significant. We instead find significant time variation in riskiness, driven mainly by return volatility, inflation, and average bond yields. In particular, we find that increases in average bond yields have historically tended to reduce the riskiness of portfolios of corporate bonds by increasing their expected return and by lowering the probability of portfolio losses.     

EXTRAORDINARY WEALTH,GLOBALIZATION, AND CORRUPTION

The billionaires of the world attract significant attention from the media and the public. Surprisingly, only a limited number of studies have explored empirically the determinants of extraordinary wealth. Using a large dataset we investigate whether globalization and corruption affect extreme wealth accumulation. We find evidence that an increase in globalization increases super‐affluence. In addition, we also find that an increase in corruption leads to an increase in the creation of super fortune. This supports the argument that in kleptocracies large sums are transferred into the hands of a small group of individuals.     

WHY DO UNDERGROUND REDUCING POLICIES OFTEN FAIL THEIR SCOPE? SOME ANSWERS FROM THE ITALIAN EXPERIENCE

Several European countries, facing a sizeable underground economy, often adopt underground reducing policies mainly based on incentives in the tax-benefit system. Since empirical evidence manifests a substantial failure of such policies, we construct a simple model to indicate the crucial aspects of this failure. To this end we consider a tax-evading firm, allocating work in the official and underground sector, where it is not taxed. With a view to reducing underground employment, the government may decide to launch an amnesty for past social security non-compliance, while providing fiscal incentives for new hiring in order to encourage a process of worker regularization. Allowing for endogenous enforcement, we find that the reputation of policy-makers in combating tax evasion proves crucial in determining the success of such a policy.     

On the Existence of Minimax Martingale Measures

Embedding asset pricing in a utility maximization framework leads naturally to the concept of minimax martingale measures. We consider a market model where the price process is assumed to be an ^d‐semimartingale X and the set of trading strategies consists of all predictable, X‐integrable, ^d‐valued processes H for which the stochastic integral (H.X) is uniformly bounded from below. When the market is free of arbitrage, we show that a sufficient condition for the existence of the minimax measure is that the utility function u : → is concave and nondecreasing. We also show the equivalence between the no free lunch with vanishing risk condition, the existence of a separating measure, and a properly defined notion of viability.