The American Inventors Protection Act: A Natural Experiment on Innovation Disclosure and the Cost of Debt

We examine the impact of innovation disclosure through patenting on firms' cost of debt, focusing on the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) as an exogenous shock in innovation disclosure regulation. Post‐AIPA, firms have an incentive to apply for patents only if commercial success is likely. Accordingly, we expect post‐AIPA patents to be a better proxy for successful innovation activity, and thus to have a stronger effect on reducing the cost of debt than pre‐AIPA patents. Indeed, we find that pre‐AIPA patents reduce the cost of debt only for the most innovative firms, while post‐AIPA, this effect holds for all firms.     

Tourism and community resilience in the Anthropocene: accentuating temporal overtourism

Abstract

Global tourism growth is unprecedented. Consequently, this has elevated the sector as a key plank for economic development, and its utility is deeply embedded in political, economic and social-ecological discourse. Where the expansion of the sector leverages natural and cultural landscapes, this applies pressure to social and ecological underpinnings that if not reconciled, can become problematic. The way this plays out in Australia’s Shipwreck Coast and the wider Great Ocean Road region, especially the implications for community resilience, is the focus. Emphasis is placed on the vulnerability of peripheral coastal areas to development that withdraws from destination endowments, yet fails to provide commensurate economic yield as a suitable trade-off. This is obvious where tourism intensification has led to concerns about the breach of normative carrying capacities. Temporal overtourism driven by seasonal overcrowding is countenanced as emblematic of tourism in the Anthropocene where focus tends to be largely growth-oriented, with much less attention given to bolstering social-ecological resilience, especially community resilience. At stake is the resilience of regional areas and their communities, who in the absence of garnering commensurate economic returns from tourism expansion find themselves in social and ecological deficit.     

Beware of Financial Repression: Lessons from History

Intereconomics - As austerity policies are unpopular with voters and high debt levels are a drag on growth, several economists, most famously Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, have suggested that...     

Migration,Ethnicity and Solidarity: ‘Multinational Workers’ in the Former Soviet Union

We investigate migrant construction workers’ experiences in the Former Soviet Union, examining their attitudes to other ethno-national groups, unions and collective action. Industrial relations and migration studies view migrant workers’ hypermobility and diversity, under conditions of low union coverage and rising nationalism, as potentially obstructing consciousness-raising and mobilizing. Workers in our study faced union indifference, ethno-national segregation and discrimination. However, managerial abuses, informality and contestation from below led to spontaneous mobilization. Lack of institutional channels to solve these disputes drove workers’ further mobility. Complex mobility trajectories and collective action translated into increased awareness of collective interests and rejection of nationalist ideologies. The outcome is ‘multinational workers’ potentially resistant to nation-state politics and capital's logics but also aware of the value and usefulness of collective solidarities. Thus, previous arguments solely associating exit with individualistic attitudes, and post-socialist legacies with workers’ quiescence present only partial pictures.     

Mechanics of good trade execution in the framework of linear temporary market impact

We define the concept of good trade execution and we construct explicit adapted good trade execution strategies in the framework of linear temporary market impact. Good trade execution strategies are dynamic, in the sense that they react to the actual realisation of the traded asset price path over the trading period; this is paramount in volatile regimes, where price trajectories can considerably deviate from their expected value. Remarkably, however, the implementation of our strategies does not require the full specification of an SDE evolution for the traded asset price, making them robust across different models. Moreover, rather than minimising the expected trading cost, good trade execution strategies minimise trading costs in a pathwise sense, a point of view not yet considered in the literature. The mathematical apparatus for such a pathwise minimisation hinges on certain random Young differential equations that correspond to the Euler–Lagrange equations of the classical Calculus of Variations. These Young differential equations characterise our good trade execution strategies in terms of an initial value problem that allows for easy implementations.     

Behaviour‐Based and Outcome‐Based Control Systems: A Meta‐Analytic Study

Sales control systems are instruments used by firms to improve performance and other organizational outcomes. To understand their antecedents and consequences, this paper conducts a meta‐analysis based on 104 studies. The results showed significant relationships between behaviour‐ and outcome‐based control systems and the complexity of the products, bonuses, financial performance, sales innovation, organizational support and satisfaction with supervisors. The outcomes revealed that behaviour‐based control systems were the most effective mechanism in turbulent markets and for determining financial performance. However, outcome‐based control systems were the most efficient instrument for complex products.     

Stock Market Reaction to Monetary Policy: An Event Study Analysis of the Brazilian Case

This article examines the relationship between the monetary policy implemented by the Central Bank of Brazil and the stock market. We implement event study analysis and analyze the effect of the anticipated and unanticipated components of monetary policy decisions on the returns of the IBOVESPA index and 53 stocks. We find that monetary policy has a significant effect on the stock market, but is only responsible for a small proportion of market variation. The analysis at the sector level with expected returns identifies that the financial sector is the most affected by this policy, whereas with excess returns only industrial goods are significantly affected. Moreover, individual assets respond in a rather heterogeneous fashion to monetary policy; however, when we look at excess returns, we identify a reduction in the intensity and in the number of companies impacted by monetary policy. Finally, the monetary shock is explained by unanticipated variations in the unemployment rate, in the Industrial Production Index, in the General Market Price Index, and in the Broad Consumer Price Index.     

Bank intermediation activity in a low-interest-rate environment

This paper investigates how a prolonged period of low-interest rates affects bank intermediation activity. We use data for 113 large international banks headquartered in 14 major advanced economies during the period 1994–2015. We find that low-interest rates induce banks to shift their activities from interest-generating to fee-related and trading activities. This rebalancing is stronger for low capitalised banks. Banks also moderately adjust their funding structure, away from short-term market funding towards deposits. We observe a concomitant decline in the risk-weighted asset ratio and a reduction in loan-loss provisions, which is consistent with signs of evergreening.     

Index der wahrgenommenen Inflation oder EU-Verbraucherumfragen?

Nach der Euro-Umstellung Anfang 2002 entwickelte sich das Preisempfinden deutlich anders als der gemessene Verbraucherpreisindex. Inwieweit wird auch heute noch die Preisentwicklung von den Konsumenten übersch?tzt? Wie zuverl?ssig misst der von Hans Wolfgang Brachinger entwickelte „Index der wahrgenommenen Inflation“ dieses Ph?nomen? Zu welchen Ergebnissen kommen die von der EU-Kommission beauftragten Verbraucherumfragen? Die Verfasser geben ihre pers?nliche Auffassung wieder, die nicht unbedingt mit derjenigen der Deutschen Bundesbank übereinstimmen muss.     

Formalising Workflow: A CCS-inspired Characterisation of the YAWL Workflow Patterns

We present work concerning the formal specification of business processes. It is of substantial benefit to be able to pin down the meaning of business processes precisely. This is an end in itself, but we are also concerned to do so in order that we might prove properties about the business processes that are being specified. It is a notable characteristic of most languages for representing business processes that they lack a robust semantics, and a notable characteristic of most commercial Business Process Management products that they have no support for verification of business process models. We define a high-level meta-model, called Liesbet , for representing business processes. The ontological commitments for Liesbet are sourced from the YAWL workflow patterns, which have been defined from studies into the behavioural nature of business processes. A formal characterisation of Liesbet is provided using Milner’s Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS). In this article, we omit some of the technical details of this characterisation and instead present the essential features by means of an abstract machine language, called LCCS. We also explain how we have facilitated the verification of certain properties of business processes specified in Liesbet , and discuss how Liesbet supports the YAWL workflow patterns. We include a simple three-part example of using Liesbet .