A MACROECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE OF AFTA'S PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the impressive economic performance of most of its members have increased the weight of the region's views in world fora. However, ASEAN has been unsuccessful in fostering a regional integration arrangement (RIA) leading to an increase in intraregional trade and foreign direct investment. In January 1992, ASEAN launched the Asean Free Trade Area (AFTA) seeking to establish a free trade area (FTA) by 2008.
Market integration increases economic interdependence and thereby raises the need for policy integration and discipline. This paper argues that a number of difficulties that ASEAN faced in promoting intraregional trade are likely to continue to affect AFTA (e.g., low economic complementarity and macroeconomic imbalances requiring large changes in equilibrium real exchange rates). The experience of other RIAs suggests other potential problems.
AFTA's prospects of evolving into deeper forms of sustainable integration are remote. Some cooperation in areas of common interest seems likely.     

Effectiveness of Mediation Strategies in Collective Bargaining

Effectiveness of mediation strategies is analyzed in two different types of collective labor conflicts: rights conflicts and conflicts of interests. The sample consists of 106 professional labor mediators who completed a questionnaire about the strategies they used and the outcomes they achieved in their most recent mediation intervention. Results from regression analysis indicate that while the use of substantive and contextual strategies is positively related to effectiveness in both types of conflict, the use of reflexive strategies is negatively related to effectiveness, particularly in rights conflicts.     

Risk Management and Firm Value: Evidence from Weather Derivatives

This paper shows that active risk management policies lead to an increase in firm value. To identify the effect of hedging and to overcome endogeneity concerns, we exploit the introduction of weather derivatives as an exogenous shock to firms’ ability to hedge weather risks. This innovation disproportionately benefits weather‐sensitive firms, irrespective of their future investment opportunities. Using this natural experiment and data from energy firms, we find that derivatives lead to higher valuations, investments, and leverage. Overall, our results demonstrate that risk management has real consequences on firm outcomes.     

Do CEOs Matter? Evidence from Hospitalization Events

Using variation in firms’ exposure to their CEOs resulting from hospitalization, we estimate the effect of chief executive officers (CEOs) on firm policies, holding firm-CEO matches constant. We document three main findings. First, CEOs have a significant effect on profitability and investment. Second, CEO effects are larger for younger CEOs, in growing and family-controlled firms, and in human-capital-intensive industries. Third, CEOs are unique: the hospitalization of other senior executives does not have similar effects on the performance. Overall, our findings demonstrate that CEOs are a key driver of firm performance, which suggests that CEO contingency plans are valuable.     

The Impact of the 2007 Liquidity Shock on Bank Jumbo Mortgage Lending

This paper explores the consequences of the collapse of the private‐label residential mortgage‐backed securities market in 2007 on banks’ originations of jumbo mortgages. We show that jumbo lending declined by more at banks that were more dependent on this market and were less well capitalized. In contrast, banks that had little dependence on this market and were well capitalized increased jumbo originations. These findings highlight how dependence on the secondary market may cause amplification of financial shocks, and the potential value of capital requirements that are higher during periods of economic growth in mitigating the amplification effects.     

Para/Site艺术空间与香港马会策展培训计划:未来策展人的教育

2007年,在香港马会的支持下,Para/Site艺术空间开始了一项独一无二的亚洲教育历险:一个效仿阿姆斯特丹De Appel基金会的"非镜面区"和法国格勒诺布尔Le Magasin艺术中心的策展人教育计划。这个课程的目的是要为未来的策展人提供专业的培训,课程将教授策展实践以及批评,对当代视觉艺术的理解是课程的核心。通过一系列的训练,这些未来的策展人们将在8个月中成长起来,他们将有机会进行一次实地考察旅行,以及一次在香港策划展览的机会。接下来的时间里还会有一系列的工作坊,以及提供展实践机会的讲座。     

Regulatory Arbitrage in Cross‐Border Banking Mergers within the EU

Expanding the cross‐country footprint of an organization's profit‐making activities changes the geographic pattern of its exposure to loss in ways that are hard for regulators and supervisors to observe. This paper tests and confirms the hypothesis that differences in the size and character of safety‐net benefits available to banks in individual EU countries help to account for cross‐border merger activity. Our results suggest that central bankers need to develop statistical procedures for assessing the consequences of differences in supervisory strength and weakness in partner countries. We believe that the methods used here can help in this task.     

HAS EUROPEAN ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AFFECTED THE FUNCTIONAL COMPOSITION OF GOVERNMENT EXPENDITURES?

Globalization and growth-maximizing governments may cause countries to converge toward a similar composition of government expenditures. These convergent forces may be even more intensive in the case of EU member states engaged in the European integration process. The results obtained, through calculation of a constructed dissimilarity index and by adapting the usual indicators of convergence (β, σ, and γ), reveal that there has been a harmonization process. In addition, this approximation of the structures of government expenditures has been greater in the EU than in the non-EU countries of the OECD. Nevertheless, EU member states are converging toward a different steady-state composition of government expenditures. (JEL H11, H50, H60 )