The New Game in Town: Competitive Effects of IPOs

We analyze the effect of initial public offerings (IPOs) on industry competitors and provide evidence that companies experience negative stock price reactions to completed IPOs in their industry and positive stock price reactions to their withdrawal. Following a successful IPO in their industry, they show significant deterioration in their operating performance. These results are consistent with the existence of IPO‐related competitive advantages through the loosening of financial constraints, financial intermediary certification, and the presence of knowledge capital. These aspects of competitiveness are significant in explaining the cross‐section of underperformance as well as survival probabilities for competing firms.     

Foreign direct investment and wages in domestic firms in Ireland: Productivity spillovers versus labour‐market crowding out

There is a large literature on the positive spillovers frequently thought to be associated with inward foreign direct investment. Aitken et al. (1996 Aitken, BJ, Harrison, AE and Lipsey, RE. (1996). Wages and foreign ownership: a comparative study of Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States. Journal of International Economics, 40: pp. 345–71 [Google Scholar]) identify several cases, however, where inward FDI appears to have reduced wages in domestic firms. They suggest that this might arise either because foreign firms increase the degree of product‐market competition that domestic firms face, or because they poach the best workers from domestic firms. We concentrate on the second effect, arguing that the first is unlikely to arise in the Irish case to which our data pertain. In a theoretical section we show that the labour‐market poaching effect cannot generate the results postulated if labour markets are competitive and production functions are of the Cobb–Douglas variety, but that it can arise if production functions display higher elasticities of substitution. In an empirical section based on a sample of larger Irish firms we show that, consistent with our theoretical model, foreign presence has different effects on wages and productivity in domestic exporting and non‐exporting establishments.     

International evidence on the tax- and revenue-smoothing hypotheses

This paper tests Barro's tax-smoothing hypothesis and Mankiw'srevenue-smoothing hypothesis, using quarterly data for fourcountries - Canada, France, the UK, and the US. The tests areconducted using recent advances in the theory of integratedregressors, the single-equation approach (with the time seriesproperties of the data imposed in estimation and hypothesistesting) as well as the multi-equation VAR approach, which treatsall variables as part of a joint process. There is considerableevidence for tax-smoothing (and inflation-smoothing) but nonefor revenue-smoothing.     

Sticky Information Phillips Curves: European Evidence

We estimate the Sticky Information Phillips Curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, while in Italy, about once each 6 months.     

Performance Measure Congruity and the Balanced Scorecard

This paper studies the incentive effects of a balanced scorecard within a multitask agency framework under both formal and relational contracts. First, the main characteristics of the balanced scorecard are analyzed with respect to performance measure congruity. It is shown that under complete verifiability, a properly designed balanced scorecard is capable of perfectly aligning the interests of owners and employees by means of an explicit contract. I then investigate whether subjective performance evaluation is beneficial when not all the scorecard measures are contractible. It emerges that congruity of the contractible scorecard measures constrains a purely implicit incentive contract, but the first‐best solution may still be obtained through a combination of formal and relational contracts. Furthermore, a purely explicit contract in most cases can be improved by incorporating subjective rewards.     

Multivariate Prediction with Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis: Theory

We propose the notion of multivariate predictability as a measure of goodness-of-fit in data reduction techniques which are useful for visualizing and screening data. For quantitative variables this leads to the usual sums-of-squares and variance accounted for criteria. For categorical variables we show how to predict the category-levels of all variables associated with every point (case). The proportion of predictions which agree with the true categories gives the measure of fit. The ideas are very general; as an illustration we use nonlinear principal components analysis (NLPCA) in association with ordered categorical variables. A detailed example using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) will be given in Blasius and Gower (quality and quantity, 39, to appear). It will be shown that the predictability criterion suggests that the fits are rather better than is indicated by “percentage of variance accounted for”.This article was written while John Gower was a visiting professor at the ZA-Eurolab, at the Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung, University of Cologne, Germany. The ZA is a Large Scale Facility funded by the Training and Mobility of Researchers program of the European Union.     

Projecting scenarios for South-east Asia and the South-west Pacific

The article describes further work to validate and assess a method of futures projection. The full methodology is shown in the context of a projection of plausible future trends for South-east Asia and the South-west Pacific. A number of scenarios are developed and it is shown that the future for that region may be fraught with considerable problems. Finally, the methodology is assessed and suggestions for future work are made.     

Multivariate Prediction with Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis: Application

Gower and Blasius (Quality and Quantity, 39, 2005) proposed the notion of multivariate predictability as a measure of goodness-of-fit in data reduction techniques which is useful for visualizing and screening data. For quantitative variables this leads to the usual sums-of-squares and variance accounted for criteria. For categorical variables, and in particular for ordered categorical variables, they showed how to predict the levels of all variables associated with every point (case). The proportion of predictions which agree with the true category-levels gives the measure of fit. The ideas are very general; as an illustration they used nonlinear principal components analysis. An example of the method is described in this paper using data drawn from 23 countries participating in the International Social Survey Program (1995), paying special attention to two sets of variables concerned with Regional and National Identity. It turns out that the predictability criterion suggests that the fits are rather better than is indicated by “percentage of variance accounted for”.     

Trade credit: theories and evidence

Firms may be financed by their suppliers rather than by financialinstitutions. There are many theories of trade credit, but fewcomprehensive empirical tests. This article attempts to fillthe gap. We focus on small firms whose access to capital marketsmay be limited and find evidence suggesting that firms use moretrade credit when credit from financial institutions is unavailable.Suppliers lend to constrained firms because they have a comparativeadvantage in getting information about buyers, they can liquidateassets more efficiently, and they have an implicit equity stakein the firms. Finally, firms with better access to credit offermore trade credit.