Real exchange rate volatility,financial crises and exchange rate regimes

This article examines real exchange rate (RER) volatility in 80 countries around the world, during the period 1970 to 2011. Two main questions are raised: are structural breaks in RER volatility related to changes in exchange rate regimes or financial crises? And do these two events affect the permanent and transitory components of RER volatility? To answer these, we employ two complementary procedures that consist in detecting structural breaks in the RER series and decomposing volatility into its permanent and transitory components. Our results suggest that structural breaks in RER volatility coincidence with financial crises and certain changes in nominal exchange rate regimes. Moreover, our findings confirm that RER volatility does increase with the global financial crises and detect that the more flexible the exchange rate regime, the higher the volatility of the RER using a de facto exchange rate classification.     

Sudden stops, banking crises and investment collapses in emerging markets

We evaluate whether financial openness leaves emerging market economies vulnerable to the adverse effects of capital reversals (“sudden stops”) on domestic investment. We investigate this claim in a broad sample of emerging markets during the period 1976–2002. If the banking sector does not experience a systemic crisis, sudden stop events fail to have a significant impact on investment. Bank crises, on the other hand, have a significant negative effect on investment even in the absence of a contemporaneous sudden stop crisis. We also find that openness to capital flows worsens the adverse impact of banking crises on investment. Our results provide statistical support for the policy view that a strong banking sector which can withstand the negative fallout of capital flight is essential for countries that open their economies to international financial flows.     

Why Are There so Many Banking Crises?

The last 25 years have seen an impressive number of bankingcrises all over the world. These crises have renewed interestof economic research on the causes of fragility of banks andthe possible remedies to it. The justifications and organisationof public intervention in the banking sector have also beenput into question. This article builds on this recent researchin order to understand better the causes of banking crises andoffer policy guidelines for reform of regulatory and supervisorysystems. The main conclusions are: •Although many banking crises have been initiated by financialderegulation and globalization, these crises were largely amplifiedby political interference. •Supervision systems face a fundamental commitment problem,analogous to the time consistency problem confronted by monetarypolicy. •The key to successful reform is independence and accountabilityof banking supervisors. (JEL E58,G21)     

危机时刻的社会保障支出

文章研究了社会保障支出与金融危机之间的关系,回答了两个问题:第一个问题是:在金融危机发生后,社会保障支出的发展趋势如何?第二个问题是:哪些原因可以解释这些变化?文章认为,社会保障制度往往诞生于危机之际。此外,一般地讲,社会保障支出在危机期间会增加;但是各国情况不同,发达国家显示出反周期支出的特点。文章支持这样一个观点,即危机可以被当作改善和加强社会保障的机会,而在这样的过程中,各国不仅可以缓解危机最不利的影响,而且能制定比较好的社会政策,改进长期危机的防范应对。     

Political booms and currency crises

This paper shows evidence that political booms, defined as the rise in governments’ popularity, are associated with a higher likelihood of currency crises. The reasoning behind this finding is that prudent economic policies to address underlying weaknesses in the economy may be political costly for incumbent governments in the short-term. Hence, popularity-concerned governments may not have enough incentives to take such corrective actions in a timely manner. This approach, in turn, can deteriorate economic fundamentals and increase related risks in the economy which can eventually lead to crises. This paper sheds light on this phenomenon in the case of currency crises, suggesting that currency crises can be viewed as “political booms gone bust” events. Moreover, it finds that higher international reserves, higher exports, and a higher degree of financial openness alleviate the effect of political booms on currency crises.     

Technology strategy in uk firms

This paper is a conceptual and empirical study of the problems that companies and managers face in formulating a 'technology strategy'. The main issues in technology strategy decisions can be charactented as having acquisation management and exploitation elements and an internal-external dimension. The research on which the paper is based aims to link and develop these elements within a wider conceptual context. It reports that, empirical results of one questionnaire and two interview surveys on technology strategy, as practised by UK companies and managers. The findings from the studies and their implications are discussed for the technology strategy itself for the significance of the company industry and technology setting; and-fir the underlying problem of how managers think about the firms technologies. The conclusion is that the problems of formulating a technology strategy are more deeply rooted than has previously been suggested.     

Narrating Crises and Uncertainty,or, Placing Germany: Reflections on Theoretical Implications of the Standort DeutschlandDebate

This article deals with the mid-1990s Standort Deutschland debate, which is considered to be a distinct semantic means for the reproduction of the nation-state. This debate serves as a starting point for further theorising what we will call spatial semantics. In addition, but also in difference to research focusing too narrowly on (re)organisational aspects of economic state crises, we propose a view that addresses the role and function of space-related terms within mass-media communication. Against the fundamental background of Luhmann's version of systems theory, certain elements from banal nationalism, critical geopolitics and the place-concept in humanistic geography are revised to grasp the capability of spatial semantics to transform uncertainty of ‘the world we live in’ into seemingly ‘natural’ certainties. This elaboration is underpinned by a short empirical illustration that catches the main contents of the above mentioned debate by scrutinising the articles on the Standort Deutschland in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit between 1995 and 1999.     

A Tribute to Hyman P. Minsky

In this article, we examine financial crises after the Bretton Woods period using a new virulence index. After summarizing financial crises after Bretton Woods, we analyze aspects of four separate crises in a virulence index. The index includes measures of contagion, as well as impacts on economic, financial and social indicators. We find that financial crises have increased in virulence over time.     

Gini’s transvariation analysis: an application on financial crises in developing countries

The damage and the recurrence of financial crises have increased the concern of investors and policymakers on one hand and the interest of macroeconomists on the other. This paper presents an original non parametric methodology, whose aim is to give a very intuitive and rigorous method for variable selection in order to analyse financial crises. Transvariation analysis compares the distributions of two different groups of countries (sound and distressed) with respect to a single macroeconomic variable and selects the indicators on the basis of a low transvariation probability index. The current account deficit to GDP ratio, differently from other studies on financial crises, seems to be a suitable variable in discriminating distressed countries from sound ones, and the case of Argentina and Turkey confirms this finding.     

The role of legal status in influencing bank financing and new firm growth

We provide an empirical assessment of the suggestion, based on Severo (2012), to use a systemic liquidity risk index (SLRI) for estimating liquidity premia that could be charged on large banks as a compensation for the implicit liquidity support obtained from public authorities (Blancher et al., 2013). To this end we compute, over the period January 2004–December 2012, a parsimonious and fully documented SLRI. We also investigate its statistical significance in explaining the level and variability of stock returns for a group of large international banks across the subprime and the Eurozone sovereign debt crises. Main findings are two: our more parsimonious SLRI is close to Severo’s but provides a stronger signal of liquidity stress and recovery episodes; we consistently fail to detect, within and across the two crises, a stable group of banks among the global systemically important ones listed by the Financial Stability Board.     

The structure of man-made organizational crises: Conceptual and empirical issues in the development of a general theory of crisis management

Analyses of a nationwide questionnaire sent to the public affairs officers of the Fortune 1,000 corporations reveals that the crises their organizations experienced in the last three years and the preventative actions they are undertaking to blunt potential crises cluster together in a relatively small number of distinct factors or families. The differences in the factor scores between those organizations with a crisis management unit (CMU) and those without one are statistically significant. The paper suggests that organizations would do well to consider forming dual crisis portfolios: one made up of a set of preventative actions drawn from the action clusters and another composed of a set of crises drawn from the crisis clusters. In this way, organizations could not only begin to insure themselves with minimal coverage across a broad family of crises, but they could also add a significant component of needed rationalization to their CM programs. The paper discusses the broad implications of the results for an emerging general theory of CM.     

Banks and financial crises: contributions of Ben Bernanke,Douglas Diamond,and Philip Dybvig*

The 2022 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was awarded to Ben S. Bernanke, Douglas W. Diamond, and Philip H. Dybvig “for research on banks and financial crises”. This article surveys the contributions of the three laureates and discusses how their insights have changed the way that academics and policymakers understand banks and their roles in financial crises.     

Defining and exploring the terrorism field: Toward an intertheoretic, agent-based approach

Drawing upon organizational design, contingency, and field theory, we outline a conceptual model for studying terrorism at the field level and argue that existing computational organizational theory could be extended to enable such inquiry. We introduce the terrorism field as the system of dynamic interaction between the terrorism, counterterrorism and political governance industries, defining the overarching functions of each. We then argue that intertheoretic, field-level inquiry could lead to explicit conceptual and computational models with significant benefits for researchers and policy makers, to include enhancing understanding of the proximate environmental conditions that are deleterious to the use of terrorism by political challengers. Using POW-ER, an illustrative field-level case of a basic terrorist attack is then modeled based on two archetypes of terrorist organizational forms emerging from the new terrorism debate: 1) hierarchy and 2) network, and two treatments: 1) applying counterterrorism techniques and 2) reducing knowledge within the terrorist organization. Preliminary findings compared to the baseline case are discussed, as well as implications for future research.     

Does Medicare benefit the poor?

Measuring the progressivity of age-targeted government programs is difficult because no single data set measures income and benefit use throughout life. Previous research, using zip code as a proxy for lifetime income, has found that Medicare benefits flow primarily to the most economically advantaged groups, and that the financial returns to Medicare are often higher for the rich than the poor. However, our analysis produces the starkly opposed result that Medicare is an extraordinarily progressive public program, in dollar terms or welfare terms. These new results owe themselves to our measurement of socioeconomic status as an individual's education, rather than the geographically aggregated measures of income used by previous research. We argue that individual education has important practical and conceptual advantages over geographically aggregated measures of income. Our results suggest the crucial importance of accurate poverty measurement in evaluating the progressivity of complex government programs like Medicare or Social Security.     

放弃成本、政府偏好与资本控制:一个审慎的机会主义汇率制度选择模型

本文在Obstfeld(1 996)第二代货币危机模型的基础上 ,建立了一个考虑经济结构、供给冲击以及金融风险的多因素汇率制度选择模型 ,以成本分析为工具解释了资本控制、各类成本和政府偏好对均衡的影响以及对汇率制度选择的影响。研究表明 :(1 )资本控制可以通过多种途径对均衡产生影响 ,在一定条件下可以利用资本控制措施使经济避免多重均衡 ;(2 )放弃成本对汇率制度选择发挥关键作用 ;(3 )较大的政府偏好促使政府选择固定汇率制度 ,在放弃成本不足够大的条件下 ,决策者也可以通过提高政府偏好或者实施资本控制措施来保护本国固定汇率制度 ;(4)对人民币现行汇率制度的放弃成本的估计表明 ,当前人民币汇率制度放弃成本正处于中间水平 ,因此有必要增大政府对固定汇率制度的偏好并且对资本帐户实施适度管理以保持人民币汇率的稳定 ,防范金融风险。至于未来人民币汇率波动幅度的扩大、资本项目自由化的进程以及人民币汇率制度何时回归真正的“管理浮动” ,应主要取决于人民币汇率制度放弃成本的有效降低     

James Anthony Lawson on commercial panics and their recurrence

In a paper read in 1848 before the Dublin Statistical Society, James Anthony Lawson propounded a theory of commercial crises based on a credit–overtrading–speculation mechanism. This view was quite widespread at the time, but it was couched in an original reinterpretation of the causal relationships. Lawson’s epistemic premise that laws must be universal and that similar causes must entail similar effects implied that crises were no longer seen as disconnected events but as instances of the same class of events. This was one of the most important ingredients in the transition from the theories of crises towards theories of the business cycle.     

SEN ON FREEDOM AND GENDER JUSTICE

Abstract

This comment on the special double issue of Feminist Economics on Amartya Sen's work discusses a number of themes and evaluates certain criticisms and claims in the volume. Sen's work involves a complex differentiation of distinct aspects of freedom. This differentiation is relevant to a number of criticisms. It is particularly helpful in evaluating various claims about Sen's focus on and the adequacy of his account of freedom. The article also considers claims about Sen's neglect of issues relating to interdependence and agency. To the degree that it is argued that some of these claims and criticisms can be addressed within Sen's conceptual framework, this article constitutes a qualified defense of his work. However, it does not claim that Sen's framework addresses all the criticisms that are leveled at it in the volume. Possible themes for future research are also briefly discussed.     

Clarence E. Ayres and the Socialist Planning Debate

This article argues that two different manifestations of rational behavior can coexist and collide in a relatively homogeneous society. In the Ticuna community of Arara in the Colombian Amazon; on the one hand, the majority of villagers tend to reach relatively lower levels of material wealth, following Polanyi’s idea of the pre-modern man (1968a; 1968b; 1968c), and also Sahlins’ (1972) idea of the original affluent man. On the other hand, community leaders and schoolteachers tend to accumulate material wealth, following Polanyi’s idea of modern-man (1968a; 1968b). These behavioral frameworks help explain the limited success of certain types of development programs in the Ticuna community.     

Diffusion research in the industrial setting: Some conceptual clarifications

This paper deals with some conceptual and methodological issues concerning research into the diffusion of innovations. In particular, it examines differences in the research traditions of anthropological and sociological work on the one hand, and economic research on the other, and evaluates the usefulness of each field's paradigms in the study of industrial technological change. Such differences are found to exist with respect to the appropriate measure of diffusion, the role of information flows in the spread process, and the meaning of resistance to change. It concludes that explanations of diffusion processes in industry couched in terms of economic variables form a more solid basis for purposes of technological forecasting and planning.     

A Comparative Study of Two Global Crises

This article identifies the differences and common features of two global crises: the Great Depression of 1929 and the international financial crisis of 2008. The circumstances of the two crises differ in terms of the demographic structure, the technological conditions, the economic and social systems in developed countries, the extent of globalization and other global economic situations. Among the common features, both crises were preceded by unprecedented economic booms, laisse-faire regulatory policies, easy monetary and credit policies, asset bubbles and yawning income gaps. Moreover, the crises had a strong redistribution effect, which would cause shifts of power among large countries and major changes in international economic order.