Economic reforms and human development: evidence from transition economies

Do market-oriented economic reforms result in higher levels of human well-being? This article studies the impact of macro-level institutional and infrastructure reforms on the economic, educational and health dimensions of human well-being among 25 transition economies. We use panel data econometrics based on the LSDVC technique to analyse the effects of market-oriented reforms on the human development index (HDI), as a measure of human well-being, from 1992 to 2007. The results show the complexity of reform impacts in transition countries. They show that institutional and economic reforms led to positive economic effect and significant impacts on other dimensions of human development. We find some positive economic impacts from infrastructure sectors reforms. However, not every reform measure appears to generate positive impacts. Large-scale privatizations show negative effects in health and economic outcomes. The overall results show the importance of the interaction among different reform measures and the combined effect of these on human development.     

The composition of capital inflows when emerging market firms face financing constraints

The composition of capital inflows to emerging market economies tends to follow a predictable dynamic pattern across the business cycle. In most emerging market economies, total inflows are pro-cyclical, with debt and portfolio equity flowing in first, followed later in the expansion by foreign direct investment (FDI). To understand the dynamic composition of these flows, we use a small open economy (SOE) framework to model the composition of capital inflows as the equilibrium outcome of emerging market firms' financing decisions. We show how costly external financing and FDI search costs generate a state contingent cost of financing such that the cheapest source of financing depends on the phase of the business cycle. In this manner, the financial frictions are able to explain the interaction between the types of flows and deliver a time-varying composition of flows, as well as other standard features of emerging market business cycles. If, as this work suggests, flows are an equilibrium outcome of firms' financing decisions, then volatility of capital inflows is not necessarily bad for an economy. Furthermore, using capital controls to shut down one type of flow and encourage another is certain to have both short- and long-run welfare implications.     

A Minskyan account of emerging currencies dynamics

Abstract

The currencies of a few emerging market economies (EMEs) have been following a specific dynamic since the early 2000s: They are strongly subordinated to international financial conditions, appreciating in moments of tranquility and presenting sharp depreciations in peaks of uncertainty. What is the mechanism behind it? To answer this question, this article applies the Minskyan framework to the context of money managers and their portfolio allocation decisions. The approach provides a detailed account of the mechanisms of the appreciation phase, thus complementing the emerging currencies’ literature that is focused on crisis episodes. The result is a dynamic characterized by deviation-amplifying systems—the opposite of the mainstream view where fundamentals lead to an equilibrium-seeking mechanism. Apart from these contributions to the exchange rate literature, it enriches the Minskyan literature for providing a broader reading of the original framework that allows it to be transposed to a larger set of contexts and for identifying the main elements to be translated in an analysis of a different context.     

The instantaneous capital market line

Summary. We show that if the intercept and slope of the instantaneous capital market line are deterministic, then investors will not hold any hedge portfolios in the sense of Merton [9, 11]. They will choose portfolios that plot on the capital market line, and they will slide up and down the capital market line over time as their wealth and risk tolerance change. This result allows us to aggregate over investors and derive a single factor CAPM where the first and second moments of security returns may change stochastically over time and markets are potentially incomplete.Received: 21 June 2004, Revised: 10 December 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: G11, G12.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Econometric Society Meeting in Pasadena (1997) under the title “Portfolio selection and asset pricing with dynamically incomplete markets and time-varying first and second moments”.     

Endogenous capital market imperfections, human capital, and intergenerational mobility

In this paper, capital market imperfections are endogenized considering an adverse selection problem between banks and borrowers. We develop a growth model with linear OLG wealth dynamics, where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observable wealth and ability, which is private information. We show that banks react to this informational asymmetry by granting higher loans to talented borrowers. This, in turn, helps poor and talented agents to become educated and catch up with the rich agents. Furthermore, the credit market friction leads to greater human capital accumulation.     

Domestic financial market frictions,unrestricted international capital flows,and crises in small open economies

Summary. We present an example of a small open economy where small increases in the world interest rate may induce a sharp decline in output and a precipitous depreciation of the exchange rate. Due to a costly state verification problem in domestic credit markets, combined with unrestricted international capital flows, our economy generates two long-run equilibria, one with low GDP and a relatively depreciated real exchange rate (RER), and one with high GDP and a relatively appreciated RER. The first is always a saddle, while the second may be a sink or a source, depending on the level of the world interest rate. A crisis is identified with the economy switching from an equilibrium path approaching the high-output steady state to the saddlepath approaching the low-output steady state. In Mexicos recent history, periods of growth associated with appreciation of the RER have alternated with periods of sharp contraction and depreciation of the RER. Our economy displays such behavior in response to changes in the world interest rate.Received: 9 April 2002, Revised: 20 March 2003JEL Classification Numbers: E5, F4.G. Antinolfi, E. Huybens: We thank Steve Fazzari, Tim Kehoe, Todd Keister, Manuel Santos, Karl Shell and especially Bruce Smith for very helpful discussions. Jaime Calleja Alderete, Eduardo Camero Godínez, and Juan Vargas Hernández provided excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are ours. Huybens was an assistant professor in the Centro de Investigación Económica, ITAM, at the time this article was written, and part of this work was completed while Antinolfi was a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The views expressed herein are those of the authors, and do not reflect those of the World Bank or the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Correspondence to: G. Antinolfi     

人民币汇改后中国资本市场改革的成就与问题

解决资本市场与货币市场的不平衡发展是中国实行金融改革的主要动因之一，随着大力发展资本市场的中央文件陆续提出，中国资本市场改革进展顺利，2005年7月人民币汇改后，资本市场也随之进入发展新阶段。过了2006年中国加入WTO承诺——对外开放金融业即将兑现，此前出现的新机遇和新问题亟待我们去分析解决，以积极应对对外开放对我国金融业带来的冲击并把握金融业开放给我们带来的契机。     

An evolutionary approach to the examination of capital market efficiency

The paper investigates capital market efficiency on basis of an evolutionary model of asset pricing. Participants of capital markets are considered as organizations in the sense of Nelson and Winter (1982). Behavior of these organizations is described by routines. Routines are regular and predictable behavioral patterns, which determine how individuals gather information, form expectations, and order assets. The participants change their behavior by innovating new routines or by imitating routines of other participants.     

Capital Flows to Asia: The Role of Monetary Policy

Monetary policy played an important role in the Asian experience with capital inflows. Central banks used monetary policy to contain the threat of overheating, but the resulting increases in interest rates attracted additional inflows. Empirical measurement of these links shows that tight monetary policy was an important source of inflows to Indonesia and Thailand in recent years, and that the independence of monetary policy decreased during the inflow period.     

Catching up of emerging economies: the role of capital goods imports,FDI inflows,domestic investment and absorptive capacity

We show that the impact of capital goods imports and FDI inflows on economic convergence depends on the local capacity of emerging economies to absorb superior technologies.     

Herding behaviour and the declining value relevance of accounting information: evidence from an emerging stock market

This article sheds light on the underlying mechanisms behind the changes in the value relevance of accounting information in the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) during the 1999–2010 period. We find that neither changes in earnings quality nor the earnings lack of timeliness hypothesis can explain the decline in the value relevance of accounting information in the KSE. Based on the stylized facts associated with the growth of the KSE and the broader economics literature, we argue that the reduction in the explanatory power of accounting information vis-à-vis stock returns was caused by herding behaviour. Empirical estimates from state-space model of herding behaviour confirm the existence of herding, and we find that the value relevance of accounting information is significantly lower in periods characterized by herding behaviour. This article is also amongst the first attempts to empirically demonstrate that an expansionary monetary policy and increases in foreign portfolio investment lead to increased levels of herding.     

The effects of agglomeration economies on technical efficiency of manufacturing firms: evidence from Indonesia

This article examines the effects of agglomeration economies and industrial structure upon firm-level technical efficiency in the Indonesian manufacturing industry over the period 2004–2009. A stochastic production frontier and three channels of agglomeration economies consisting of specialization, diversity and competition are used. The empirical results show that the effects of specialization and diversity upon firm-level technical efficiency are positive and negative, respectively, indicating that specialization is more favourable than diversity for stimulating firms’ technical efficiency. Competition has a positive sign, showing that region with high levels of competition tend to be more conducive in accelerating firm-level technical efficiency. In terms of firm location, both dummy for urban region and industrial complex turn out to be positive, indicating that firms located in both areas are experienced higher technical efficiency. Both firm size and age also have positive effect upon technical efficiency.     

Debt markets and corporate debt structure in an emerging market: The South African example

This is a first attempt at gauging the effects of corporate public debt issuance on the debt structure, risk profile and valuation of firms in an emerging market. We find that financial services firms, along with government institutions, are important early supporters of an organized public debt market. Firms in this market use equity, public debt and private debt funds simultaneously as need be. Consistent with predictions of the corporate debt structure literature, public debt-issuing firms are larger, older, more profitable, and less informational opaque than non-public debt-issuing firms. Moreover, public debt-issuing firms experience significant reductions in both overall and systematic risks, and incur lower cost of capital following issuance than non-public debt issuers. These and other findings of the study suggest deepening national debt markets can be a fruitful financial market development exercise for emerging markets.     

Corporate governance and efficiency in banking: evidence from emerging economies

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the impact of corporate governance on bank efficiency across a sample of 139 commercial banks from 17 countries of Central and Eastern Europe during the period 2005–2012. Data on governance characteristics are hand-collected from banks’ reports. The empirical findings indicate that implementing rigorous corporate governance structures is associated with higher costs for banks and a lower level of efficiency. However, during the crisis, a tight governance mechanism significantly increases banks’ cost and technical efficiencies. We also show that prudent risk management is associated with both higher cost and technical efficiency for more capitalized banks, while rigid supervisory boards are linked with greater technical efficiency for more capitalized banks.     

Inflation targeting in emerging economies: Panel evidence

This paper shows there is no evidence that the inflation targeting regime (IT) improves economic performance as measured by the behavior of inflation and output growth in developing countries. The control of common time effects results in less negative and less significant IT impacts on inflation, inflation volatility and output growth volatility than previously found in the literature. Additionally, our analysis shows robust evidence of lower output growth during IT adoption. On balance, although lower long-run mean inflation signals that the central banks of emerging economies with inflation targeting are more inflation-averse, the costs of disinflation have not been lower than under other monetary regimes.     

Non-linearity in the determinants of capital structure: evidence from UK firms

We demonstrate that, by exploiting more fully the distribution of leverage, conditional quantile regression methods yield new insights into the choice of leverage ratio. For UK listed companies we find that not only is the estimated effect of the explanatory variables different at different quantiles of the distribution, but also that the effect of a variable changes sign between low leveraged and high leveraged firms.      

Dynamic correlation and equicorrelation analysis of global financial turmoil: evidence from emerging East Asian stock markets

This study investigates the dynamic conditional correlations (DCCs) between eight emerging East Asian stock markets and the US stock market and analyses the dynamic equicorrelation among these nine stock markets. We find a significant increase in the conditional correlations and equicorrelation in the first phase of the global financial crisis. We refer to this finding as contagion from the US stock market to the emerging East Asian markets. We also find an additional significant process of increasing correlations and equicorrelation (herding) in the second phase of the global financial crisis. Further, we employ two new models, namely DCCX-MGARCH (a DCC Multivariate GARCH model with exogenous variables) and DECOX-MGARCH (a dynamic equicorrelation multivariate GARCH model with exogenous variables), to identify the channels of contagion. We find that an increase in the VIX Index increases the conditional correlations and equicorrelation, while increases in TED spreads decrease the conditional correlations of six emerging East Asian countries with the USA. We compare the accuracy of the conditional correlation estimates of the DCC and DCCX models (or DECO and DECOX models) by constructing a loss function. We find that the DCCX (DECOX) model provides more accurate conditional correlation estimates than the DCC (DECO) model by extracting additional information from exogenous variables.     

The puzzling dual of the uncovered interest parity puzzle evidence from Pacific Rim capital flows

International financial arbitrage should prevent the existence of non-zero expected returns when borrowing in one currency and lending in another implying that interest differentials should predict exchange rate movements. The failure of interest differentials to act as an unbiased predictor of future exchange rate movements is referred to as the uncovered interest parity puzzle. This paper explores whether capital flows respond to these interest differentials in the context of a model in which dynamic adjustment costs keep capital from flowing immediately across borders. The paper finds little or even a negative relationship between expected excess returns on exchange rate adjusted U.S. money market rates (relative to domestic interest rates) and capital flows to the U.S. from Australia, Canada, Japan or Korea.     

Takeover bids: evidence from the Portuguese market

Throughout the nineties, a number of tender offers occurred in the Portuguese market. This article employs event study methodology to investigate their effects on the involved firms shareholders. On average, these operations increased the market value of the involved firms by 2% to 3%. However, target shareholders appropriated most of this gain, earning 18% over their firms previous value, whereas bidder shareholders seem to have gained nothing. These averages bent in bidders shareholders favour, however, when bidders held significant positions in the targets capital before the bid.Received: December 2002, Accepted: September 2003, JEL Classification: G14, G34This paper corresponds to a revised version of chapter 6 of my PhD dissertation. I have greatly benefited from comments by my supervisors José Manuel Amado da Silva and Victor Mendes dos Santos, Pedro Pita Barros, participants in the 9^o Encontro Nacional de Economia Industrial and in an internal seminar at the Faculdade de Economia e Gestão, and two anonymous referees. The responsibility for any remaining errors is, of course, exclusively mine. CMVM and BDP have kindly provided the data used. Grant PRAXIS/PCSH/C/CEG/30/96 partially supported this research.