Tolerance for uncertainty and the growth of informationally opaque industries

Hofstede's [Hofstede, Geert H. 1980. Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.] cross-country psychological survey of IBM employees finds that some countries (societies) are systematically less tolerant of uncertainty, while uncertainty-tolerance is shown by some theoretic models to be essential to the growth of emerging sectors about which less is known. This paper first uses Durnev, Morck, and Yeung's [Durnev, Art, Morck, Randall, and Yeung, Bernard. 2004. Value-enhancing capital budgeting and firm-specific stock return variation. The Journal of Finance. 59(1): 65–105.] methodology to identify these informationally opaque industries. The hypothesis is then made that countries characterized by high uncertainty aversion (measured by Hofstede's indicator, and two other alternative indicators) will grow disproportionately slower in industrial sectors where information is less available. Using the Rajan and Zingales [Rajan, Raghuram G. and Zingales, Luigi. 1998. Financial Dependence and Growth. American Economic Review. Vol. 88(3): 559–586.] “difference-in-differences” methodology, which is relatively free from the endogeneity problem, the study provides robust evidence of such an industrial growth pattern in 34 countries and 36 manufacturing industries. It also shows that national uncertainty aversion is not driven by underdevelopment of financial sector, inadaptability of civil law systems, lower level of economic or human capital development, labor market inflexibility, or any of many other institutional factors. The results remain robust when religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) composition is used as an instrumental variable for national uncertainty aversion. The international evidence presented helps explain why some countries are slower in embracing “new” (vs. traditional) industries.     

Government industrial policy for a healthy world economy

The Japanese concept of “industrial policy” is the subject of this presentation. The central role of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry in the formulation of industrial policy for Japan over the past 35 years is reviewed. Several strategic phases are identified: 1945–1952, reconstruction of the economy; 1952–1960, comparative advantage strategy in capital-intensive industries; 1960–1973, transition to an open economy; 1973 to present, positive support policy for promising industries, e.g., subsidies for high-tech sectors and adjustive policy for declining industries (e.g., disposing of excess capacity in the textile sector). The advantages of National industrial policies for the world economy are indicated.     

Exchange rate pass-through in New Member States and candidate countries of the EU

This paper studies the degree of exchange rate pass-through to the prices of imports of some New Member States (NMSs) of the European Union plus Turkey, coming from the euro area. I estimate industry-specific rates of pass-through across and within countries using the methodology proposed by Campa and González-Mínguez [Campa, J.M. and González-Mínguez, J.M. (2006). Differences in Exchange Rate Pass-Through in the Euro Area. European Economic Review, 50, 121–145.] which estimates the short- and long-run pass-through elasticities. I did not find evidence either in favour of the hypothesis of Local Currency Pricing (zero pass-through) or the hypothesis of Producer Currency Pricing (complete pass-through) for all the countries except for Slovenia and Cyprus. With reference to the results by industry, the lowest values for exchange rate pass-through are in Manufacturing sectors. However, I did observe a exchange rate pass-through decline through the pricing chain.     

Sequentially complete markets remain incomplete

We show by means of an example that the result of Arrow [Arrow, K.J. (1953), Le rôle des valeurs boursières pour la répartition la meilleure des risques, Econométrie, 41–47, CNRS, Paris; translated as The role of securities in the optimal allocation of risk bearing, Review of Economic Studies, 31, 91–96] is problematic when there exist multiple equilibrium continuations to the initial-period component of an intertemporal equilibrium.     

Catching-up and Regulation in a Two-Sector Small Open Economy

Deregulation is often aimed at reducing mark-up pricing in technologically stagnant sheltered sectors. The paper shows that this may decrease the process of catching-up and welfare since it shifts resources away from R&D-intensive tradables sectors. Catching-up and deregulation are analyzed in an R&D-based growth model that allows for international capital mobility, trade, and spillovers. Knowledge spillovers raise the productivity of R&D in the exposed sector which results in catching-up. In the long run, the economy grows at the exogenous world growth rate. Capital mobility speeds up convergence. Temporary shocks have long-lasting effects as the economy exhibits hysteresis.     

Understanding International Price and Consumption Disparities

This study proposes a new measure of the tradability of 120+ commodities based on price dispersion. This approach is used to construct price indices of tradables and non-tradables for 150+ countries. The expenditure share of tradables is lower for richer countries, while the relative price of non-tradables, which plays an important role in the determination of real exchange rates, is higher. Secondly, a common-factor approach (based on principal components) is introduced to compress the large volume of information on prices and quantities consumed globally. We find that cross-commodity correlations are higher for prices than for consumption. In addition, income is responsible for most of the variation in the first principal component of consumption but explains less of the first price component. This suggests consumption are driven primarily by domestic factors, while prices are determined by factors outside the country, along the lines of the Purchasing Power Parity theory.     

理解中国的实际汇率:一价定律偏离还是相对价格变动?

本文利用1997年1月至2010年9月的数据对人民币实际汇率进行分解,发现可贸易品偏离一价定律因素可以解释实际汇率波动的60%—80%,而可贸易品与不可贸易品之间的相对价格波动只能解释实际汇率波动的20%—40%。这意味着研究人民币实际汇率需要更多地从可贸易产品出发,不应仅仅强调国内不可贸易品与可贸易品的相对价格变化。进一步的研究发现,可贸易品因素对于解释人民币实际汇率占主导的结论,与中国相对于其他国家的经济体发展阶段有关。但是,上述结论并不意味着传统的"巴拉萨-萨缪尔森"效应失灵。事实上,当在计量回归中控制可贸易品偏离一价定律因素以后,巴萨效应在中国显著成立。只不过,相对于可贸易品偏离一价定律因素,巴萨效应对实际汇率波动的影响是次要的。     

Too much of a good thing: Endogenous business cycles generated by bounded technological progress

Following Jones and Williams [Jones, C.I., Williams, J., 2000. Too much of a good thing? The economics of investment in R&D. Journal of Economic Growth vol. 5 (no. 1), 65–85], we assume that R&D is simultaneously subject to positive and to negative external effects (e.g., the non-rival nature of technology conflicts with congestion externalities). This observation allows to conceive an economy where two R&D sectors evolve without departing significantly from each other in terms of their productive results (society tends to penalize imbalances in technical progress, making negative external effects to appear associated to a sector when this outstands relatively to the other sector; the second sector, in turn, will be subject to positive externalities that reflect a catching up effect). The proposed framework, when associated to a growth setup, is able to replicate the existence of endogenous fluctuations and, therefore, it intends to be a contribution to the literature on endogenous business cycles.     

Central bank instruments, fiscal policy regimes, and the requirements for equilibrium determinacy

This paper examines the role of the monetary instrument choice for local equilibrium determinacy under sticky prices and different fiscal policy regimes. Corresponding to Benhabib et al.'s results for interest rate feedback rules [Benhabib, J., Schmitt-Grohé, S., Uribe, M., 2001. Monetary policy and multiple equilibria. American Economic Review 91, 167–185], the money growth rate should not rise by more than one for one with inflation when the primary surplus is raised with public debt. Under an exogenous primary surplus, money supply should be accommodating—such that real balances grow with inflation—to ensure local equilibrium determinacy. When the central bank links the supply of money to government bonds by controlling the bond-to-money ratio, an inflation stabilizing policy can be implemented for both fiscal policy regimes. Local determinacy is then ensured when the bond-to-money ratio is not extremely sensitive to inflation, or when interest payments on public debt are entirely tax financed, i.e., the budget is balanced.     

Growth effects of government expenditure and taxation in rich countries: A comment

Fölster and Henrekson (European Economic Review 45 (2001), 1501-1520) argue that “...the more the econometric problems that are addressed, the more robust the relationship between government size and economic growth appears”. But in failing to control for simultaneity and in ignoring issues of sample-selection bias, the regressions reported by Fölster/Henrekson are flawed. Using theoretically valid instruments, we find that the estimated partial correlation between size of the public sector and economic growth is statistically insignificant and highly unstable across specifications. Moreover, since instruments are weak, all hypothesis tests are unreliable. We conclude that cross-country growth regressions are unlikely to come up with a reliable answer to the question of the growth effects of government spending and taxation.     

Will low technology products disappear?: The hidden innovation processes in low technology industries

Political discussions and analyses have usually been devoted to an understanding of the development of high technology products, although low technology products have dominated the industrial structure of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries. The important role of low technology products in these countries raises the question of whether we can observe a technological paradox in the industrial structure of the more advanced nations, the dominant role of this sector in spite of its competitive disadvantages because of high wages. Using the Danish packaging industry as an example, a central thesis in the article is that innovation processes are important in low technology industries. They are also often an integrated part of the marketing and production functions of the firm. The innovation processes in the low technology industries are therefore too complex for traditional R&D analyses to handle. The article points out that—especially in small firms—the “practical man” and his “tacit knowledge” play a very central role in both product and process development, and that low technology, even in the future, will play a central role in the industrial structure of the OECD countries.     

The election cycle in the inflation bias: evidence from the G-7 countries

This paper derives and evaluates empirical implications which separate the naive voters view [Nordhaus, W.D., 1975. The political business cycle. Review of Economic Studies 42, 169–190.] from the rational-voters view [Barro R., Gordon, D., 1983. Rules, discretion, and reputation in a model of monetary policy. Journal of Monetary Economics 12, 101–121.] under rational expectations. The observational equivalence of the two approaches obtained under a natural rate vanishes as output persistence is introduced. An analysis of inflation in the G-7 countries reveals election patterns supporting the joint hypothesis that demand shocks persist and that monetary policy courts retrospective voters. Patterns turn weaker as central banks become more independent, but do not disappear. Reducing inflationary bias not only requires more central bank independence, but as well less persistence.     

Purification in the infinitely-repeated prisoners' dilemma

This paper investigates the Harsanyi [Harsanyi, J.C., 1973. Games with randomly disturbed payoffs: A new rationale for mixed-strategy equilibrium points. International Journal of Game Theory 2 (1), 1–23]-purifiability of mixed strategies in the repeated prisoners' dilemma with perfect monitoring. We perturb the game so that in each period, a player receives a private payoff shock which is independently and identically distributed across players and periods. We focus on the purifiability of one-period memory mixed strategy equilibria used by Ely and Välimäki [Ely, J.C., Välimäki, J., 2002. A robust folk theorem for the prisoner's dilemma. Journal of Economic Theory 102 (1), 84–105] in their study of the repeated prisoners' dilemma with private monitoring. We find that any such strategy profile is not the limit of one-period memory equilibrium strategy profiles of the perturbed game, for almost all noise distributions. However, if we allow infinite memory strategies in the perturbed game, then any completely-mixed equilibrium is purifiable.     

Tolerance for uncertainty and the growth of informationally opaque industries

Hofstede's [Hofstede, Geert H. 1980. Culture's consequences: international differences in work-related values. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.] cross-country psychological survey of IBM employees finds that some countries (societies) are systematically less tolerant of uncertainty, while uncertainty-tolerance is shown by some theoretic models to be essential to the growth of emerging sectors about which less is known. This paper first uses Durnev, Morck, and Yeung's [Durnev, Art, Morck, Randall, and Yeung, Bernard. 2004. Value-enhancing capital budgeting and firm-specific stock return variation. The Journal of Finance. 59(1): 65–105.] methodology to identify these informationally opaque industries. The hypothesis is then made that countries characterized by high uncertainty aversion (measured by Hofstede's indicator, and two other alternative indicators) will grow disproportionately slower in industrial sectors where information is less available. Using the Rajan and Zingales [Rajan, Raghuram G. and Zingales, Luigi. 1998. Financial Dependence and Growth. American Economic Review. Vol. 88(3): 559–586.] “difference-in-differences” methodology, which is relatively free from the endogeneity problem, the study provides robust evidence of such an industrial growth pattern in 34 countries and 36 manufacturing industries. It also shows that national uncertainty aversion is not driven by underdevelopment of financial sector, inadaptability of civil law systems, lower level of economic or human capital development, labor market inflexibility, or any of many other institutional factors. The results remain robust when religious (Catholic vs. Protestant) composition is used as an instrumental variable for national uncertainty aversion. The international evidence presented helps explain why some countries are slower in embracing “new” (vs. traditional) industries.     

Altruism,Warm Glow and the Willingness-to-Donate for Green Electricity: An Artefactual Field Experiment

The ongoing liberalization of electricity markets in most western countries forms the background of our artefactual field experiment. Using a Cheap talk design [R.G. Cummings and L.O. Taylor. American Economic Review 89 (1999) 649–665] with supplementary monetary incentives, we test for presence of “warm glow” motivations [J. Andreoni. Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989) 1447–1458; Economic Journal 100 (1990) 464–477] in the willingness-to-donate for electricity generated from renewables. Our data from 200 participants supports impure altruism, that is, individuals benefit from both contributing to environmental quality and its current level when opting in favor of green electricity. Furthermore, we find evidence of crowding-out as well as crowding-in effects. Depending on the knowledge of people about electricity markets and the types of electricity contracts offered, “all-or-none” contracts are most likely to bring about crowding-out effects.     

Government spending, capital accumulation and the optimal policy rule: The role of public service capital

In this paper, we modify the Djajić [Djajić, S., 1987. “Government Spending and the Optimal Rates of Consumption and Capital Accumulation,” Canadian Journal of Economics 20, 544–554.] model in such a way that government consumption expenditure provides utility to households via the total stock of government services rather than the government consumption flow alone. By using such a framework, we show that the optimality condition for the public service capital stock is the marginal rate of substitution between public service capital and consumption that equals the intertemporal marginal rate of transformation between the two goods. In addition, we show that the relationship between private consumption and public service capital in a household's utility plays an important role in determining the transitional behavior of relevant variables. We also examine the second-best government consumption expenditure policy. By contrast, in the standard flow specification, e.g., Turnovsky and Brock [Turnovsky, S.J. and Brock, W.A., 1980. “Time Consistency and Optimal Government Policies in Perfect Foresight Equilibrium,” Journal of Public Economics 13, 183–212.], Ihori [Ihori, T., 1990. “Government Spending and Private Consumption,” Canadian Journal of Economics 23, 60–69.], and Turnovsky and Fisher [Turnovsky, S.J. and Fisher, W.H., 1995. “The Composition of Government Expenditure and its Consequences for Macroeconomic Performance,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 19, 747–786.], the second-best government consumption expenditure is decided on the basis that the marginal utility of consumption is equal to the discounted sum of the marginal utility of the government's flow spending.     

Stock prices, inflation and output: Evidence from wavelet analysis

The negative relationship between real stock return and inflation puzzled many as it contradicts conventional Fisherian wisdom. Fama [Fama, E.F. (1981), “Stock returns, real activity, inflation and money”, American Economic Review, 71(September), 545–564.] gave an explanation for this negative relationship with two propositions that links real stock return and inflation through real output. This study revisits Fama's hypothesis for India in the post-liberalized period from a developing country perspective. Examining this relationship on the time-scale decomposition from a wavelet multi-resolution analysis suggests that Fama's hypothesis holds only for the long time scale and remains as a puzzle for the other time scales.     

Ordinal vs cardinal status: Two examples

We demonstrate that in models where agents have concerns for status the model predictions can drastically change depending on whether status is modelled as an ordinal or cardinal magnitude. As a proof, we show that two well known theoretical findings are not robust to the substitution of ordinal status with cardinal status [Frank, R.H., The Demand for Unobservable and Other Positional Goods. American Economic Review, (75):101–116, 1985.] and viceversa [Clark, A. and Oswald, R.J., Comparison-Concave Utility and Following Behavior in Social and Economic Settings. Journal of Public Economics, (70):133–155, 1998.].     

Eliciting Preferences to Assign Positions and Compensation

We describe strategy-proof rules for economies where an agent is assigned a position (e.g., a job) plus some of a divisible good. For the 2-agent–2-position case we derive a robust characterization. For the multi-agent–position case, many “arbitrary” such rules exist, so we consider additional requirements. By also requiring coalitional strategy-proofness or nonbossiness, the range of a solution is restricted to the point that such rules are not more complex than those for the Shapley–Scarf housing model (no divisible good). Third, we show that essentially only constant solutions are immune to manipulations involving “bribes.” Finally, we demonstrate a conflict between efficiency and strategy-proofness. The results extend to models (without externalities) in which agents share positions. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D70.     

Stochastic convergence of per capita carbon dioxide emissions and multiple structural breaks in OECD countries

This research applies an innovative panel data stationarity testing procedure developed by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. [Carrion-i-Silvestre, J.L., Barrio-Castro, T.D. and Lopez-Bazo, E., 2005. Breaking the panels: An application to the GDP per capita, Econometrics Journal 8, 159–175.], which has the advantage of recognizing multiple structural breaks and the presence of cross-section dependence in order to re-investigate the hypothesis that per capita carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions stochastically converge for 21 OECD countries from 1950 to 2002. Remarkably, the evidence clearly indicates that the panel dataset of relative per capita CO₂ emissions is stationary after the structural breaks and cross-sectional dependence are introduced into the model. These findings offer strong policy implications for governments, regardless of whether they are in “convergent group” or “divergent group” countries. We also find that the structural breaks in the 1960s and over the 1970–1982 period are associated with time periods of fossil fuel becoming the main source of productivity, higher oil prices, and the development of nuclear power.