Participation in WTO Dispute Settlement: Complainants, Interested Parties, and Free Riders

What affects a country’s decision of whether to formallyengage in a trade dispute directly related to its exportinginterests? This article empirically examines determinants ofaffected country participation decisions in formal trade litigationarising under the World Trade Organization (wto) between 1995and 2000. It investigates determinants of nonparticipation andexamines whether the incentives generated by the system’srules and procedures discourage active engagement in disputesettlement by developing country members in particular. Thoughthe size of exports at stake is found to be an important economicdeterminant affecting the decision to participate in challengesto a wto-inconsistent policy, the evidence also shows that measuresof a country’s retaliatory and legal capacity as wellas its international political economy relationships matter.These results are consistent with the hypothesis of an implicit"institutional bias" generated by the system’s rules andincentives that particularly affects developing economy participationin dispute settlement.     

Foreign Direct Investment in Mexico since the Approval of NAFTA

Cross-country panel data are used to assess the effect of free-tradeagreements on flows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Free-tradeagreements are found to have a significant positive effect onFDI flows, and free-trade agreements are found to matter morefor the smaller members of the agreement. For example, the NorthAmerican Free-Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) effect on FDIflows into Mexico is much larger than its effect on flows intothe United States. These cross-country results are used to assessNAFTA’s effect on FDI flows into Mexico. After controllingfor a set of other factors—such as an increase in worldwideFDI flows—the trade agreement is found to generate FDIflows nearly 60 percent higher than they would have been withoutthe agreement.     

Market pricing of executive stock options and implied risk preferences

When managers get to trade in options received as compensation, their trading prices reveal several aspects of subjective option pricing and risk preferences. Two subjective pricing models are fitted to show that executive stock option prices incorporate a subjective discount. It depends positively on implied volatility and negatively on option moneyness. Further, risk preferences are estimated using the semiparametric model of Aït-Sahalia and Lo (2000). The results suggest that relative risk aversion is just above 1 for a certain stock price range. This level of risk aversion is low but reasonable, and it may be explained by the typical manager being wealthy and having low marginal utility. Related to risk aversion, it is found that marginal rate of substitution increases considerably in states with low stock prices.     

Market Access and Welfare under Free Trade Agreements: Textiles under NAFTA

The effective market access granted to textiles and apparelunder the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is estimated,taking into account the presence of rules of origin. First,estimates are provided of the effect of tariff preferences combinedwith rules of origin on the border prices of Mexican final goodsexported to the United States and of U.S. intermediate goodsexported to Mexico, based on eight-digit Harmonized System tariff-linedata. A third of the estimated rise in the border price of Mexicanapparel products is found to compensate for the cost of complyingwith NAFTA’s rules of origin, and NAFTA is found to haveraised the price of U.S. intermediate goods exported to Mexicoby around 12 percent, with downstream rules of origin accountingfor a third of that increase. Second, simulations are used toestimate welfare gains for Mexican exporters from preferentialmarket access under NAFTA. The presence of rules of origin isfound to approximately halve these gains.     

Dynamic pricing: when to entice brand switching and when to reward consumer loyalty

This article develops a theory of dynamic pricing in which firms may offer separate prices to different consumers based on their past purchases. Brand preferences over two periods are described by a copula admitting various degrees of positive dependence. When commitment to future prices is infeasible, each firm offers lower prices to its rival's customers. When firms can commit to future prices, consumer loyalty is rewarded if preference dependence is low, but enticing brand switching occurs if preference dependence is high. Our theory provides a unified treatment of the two pricing policies and sheds light on observed practices across industries.     

Trades and Quotes: A Bivariate Point Process

This article formulates a bivariate point process to jointlyanalyze trade and quote arrivals. In microstructure models,trades may reveal private information that is then incorporatedinto new price quotes. This article examines the speed of thisinformation flow and the circumstances that govern it. A jointlikelihood function for trade and quote arrivals is specifiedin a way that recognizes that an intervening trade sometimescensors the time between a trade and the subsequent quote. Modelsof trades and quotes are estimated for eight stocks using Tradeand Quote database (TAQ) data. The essential finding for thearrival of price quotes is that information flow variables,such as high trade arrival rates, large volume per trade, andwide bid–ask spreads, all predict more rapid price revisions.This means prices respond more quickly to trades when informationis flowing so that the price impacts of trades and ultimatelythe volatility of prices are high in such circumstances.     

Tracking NAFTA's Shadow 10 Years on: Introduction to the Symposium

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is arguablythe first "case study" of what might be expected from the increasingnumber of preferential trade agreements involving both developedand developing economies. Ten years after the treaty’sinception, it is time to assess how its outcomes compare withinitial expectations. The articles in this symposium issue provideinsights into the effects of NAFTA on economic geography, trade,wages and migration, and foreign investment from Mexico’sperspective. The contributions paint a complex post-NAFTA realitycharacterized by persistent intrabloc trade barriers, interregionalinequality within Mexico, labor market outcomes that seem closelytied to migration patterns and international trade and investment,and foreign investment flows that appear weakly related to tradeagreements. NAFTA seems to be the first trade agreement in historyfor which the traditional static trade creation or diversioneffects are likely negligible—and hard to identify inany case.     

Doha Merchandise Trade Reform: What Is at Stake for Developing Countries?

The LINKAGE model of the global economy and the latest GlobalTrade Analysis Project (GTAP) database (version 6.05) are usedto examine the impact of current merchandise trade barriersand agricultural subsidies and possible reform outcomes of theWorld Trade Organization’s (WTO’s) Doha DevelopmentAgenda. The results suggest that moving to free global merchandisetrade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa proportionatelymore than in other developing countries or in high-income countries,despite the terms of trade loss in parts of that region. Particularattention is given to agriculture, as farmers constitute thepoorest households in developing countries but the most assistedin rich countries. Net farm incomes would rise substantiallyin Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing country regions,alleviating rural poverty. Partial liberalization could movethe world some way toward those desirable outcomes, the moreso the more developing countries themselves cut applied tariffs,particularly on agricultural imports.     

Beauty Contests and Iterated Expectations in Asset Markets

In a financial market where traders are risk averse and shortlived and prices are noisy, asset prices today depend on theaverage expectation today of tomorrow’s price. Thus (iteratingthis relationship) the date 1 price equals the date 1 averageexpectation of the date 2 average expectation of the date 3price. This will not, in general, equal the date 1 average expectationof the date 3 price. We show how this failure of the law ofiterated expectations for average belief can help understandthe role of higher-order beliefs in a fully rational asset pricingmodel.     

Housing market dynamics in a small open economy: Do external and news shocks matter?

We study the sources of fluctuations in the housing market of a small open economy. We use an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model and data from seven small open economies to assess the quantitative effects of both contemporaneous and news shocks to domestic and external fundamentals on housing market dynamics. External shocks and news shocks have significant effects. Cyclical fluctuations in housing prices and housing investment are mainly driven by contemporaneous shocks related to foreign housing preferences and terms of trade, and by news shocks related to domestic consumption-goods technology, housing preferences and terms of trade. The spillover effects of external shocks on housing prices are notably larger than those of domestic shocks.     

The Model-Free Implied Volatility and Its Information Content

Britten-Jones and Neuberger (2000) derived a model-free impliedvolatility under the diffusion assumption. In this article,we extend their model-free implied volatility to asset priceprocesses with jumps and develop a simple method for implementingit using observed option prices. In addition, we perform a directtest of the informational efficiency of the option market usingthe model-free implied volatility. Our results from the Standard& Poor’s 500 index (SPX) options suggest that themodel-free implied volatility subsumes all information containedin the Black–Scholes (B–S) implied volatility andpast realized volatility and is a more efficient forecast forfuture realized volatility.     

Dealer behavior and trading systems in foreign exchange markets

We study dealer behavior in the foreign exchange spot market using detailed observations on all the transactions of four interbank dealers. There is strong support for an information effect in incoming trades. The direction of trade is most important, but we also find that the information effect increases with trade size in direct bilateral trades. All four dealers control their inventory intensively. Inventory control is not, however, manifested through a dealer's own prices in contrast to findings by Lyons (J. Financial Econ. 39(1995) 321). Furthermore, we document differences in trading styles, especially how they actually control their inventories.     

Fractals in trade duration: capturing long-range dependence and heavy tailedness in modeling trade duration

Several studies that have investigated a few stocks have found that the spacing between consecutive financial transactions (referred to as trade duration) tend to exhibit long-range dependence, heavy tailedness, and clustering. In this study, we empirically investigate whether a larger sample of stocks exhibit those characteristics. We do so by comparing goodness of fit in modeling trade duration data for stable distribution and fractional stable noise based on a procedure applying bootstrap methods developed by the authors with several alternative distributional assumptions in modeling trade duration data. The empirical results suggest that the autoregressive conditional duration model with stable distribution fits better than other combinations, while fractional stable noise itself fits better for the time series of trade duration. Our result is consistent with the general findings in the literature that trade duration is informative and that short trade durations move prices more than long trade duration. In addition, our result confirms the advantage of fractal models in the study of roughness in trade duration and provides some evidence for duration dependence. S. Rachev’s research was supported by grants from the Division of Mathematical, Life and Physical Science, College of Letters and Science, University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. W. Sun’s research was supported by grants from the Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. P.S. Kalev’s research was supported with a NCG grant from the Faculty of Business and Economics, Monash University. Data are supplied by Securities Industry Research Center of Asia-Pacific (SIRCA) on behalf of Reuters. The first draft of this paper was presented at the International Conference on High Frequency Finance 2006; the authors would like to thank the conference participants for their valuable comments.     

Raising rival's costs in the securities settlement industry

The competition between a central securities depository (CSD) and a custodian bank is analyzed in a Stackelberg model. Investor banks decide whether to use the services of the CSD or of the custodian bank, depending on the prices and their preferences for their inhomogeneous services. Since the custodian bank uses services provided by the CSD as input, the CSD can raise its rival's costs. The CSD's equilibrium market share is higher than socially optimal, unless the CSD is not allowed to charge negative prices. This result has important policy implications that are related to a discussion currently taking place in the securities settlement industry.     

Risk-adjusted option-implied moments

This paper provides a new way of converting risk-neutral moments into the corresponding physical moments, which are required for many applications. The main theoretical result is a new analytical representation of the expected payoffs of put and call options under the physical measure in terms of current option prices and a representative investor’s preferences. This representation is then used to derive analytical expressions for a variety of ex-ante physical return moments, showing explicitly how moment premiums depend on current option prices and preferences. As an empirical application of our theoretical results, we provide option-implied estimates of the representative stock market investor’s disappointment aversion using S&P 500 index option prices. We find that disappointment aversion has a procyclical pattern. It is high in times of high index levels and declines when the index falls. We confirm the view that investors with high risk aversion and disappointment aversion leave the stock market during times of turbulence and reenter it after a period of high returns.     

The effect of earnings quality and country-level institutions on the value relevance of earnings

This study investigates the relationship between the value relevance of earnings and earnings quality across countries. We find that there is a stronger relationship between earnings quality and the value relevance of earnings in countries with high investor protection than in countries with weak investor protection. We also find that the association between the value relevance of earnings and earnings quality is higher when a country’s information environment is less opaque. Overall, our study documents evidence on international differences in the ability of stock prices to capture useful accounting information, consistent with the notion that the returns-earnings association reflects not only the quality of accounting earnings but also the informativeness of stock prices.     

Consumer search with observational learning

This article studies observational learning in a consumer search environment. Consumers observe the purchasing decision of a predecessor with similar preferences. Consumers rationally emulate by initiating their search at the firm from which their predecessor purchased, free‐riding on search effort, and reacting less to price changes. Prices are nonmonotone in search costs and may be as low as marginal costs. We discuss several extensions and show that the effect of emulation on prices is stronger when (i) the number of firms increases, (ii) consumers' first visits are more elastic with respect to market shares, and (iii) prices are adjusted more frequently.     

Financial Intermediation and the Costs of Trading in an Opaque Market

Municipal bonds trade in opaque, decentralized broker-dealermarkets in which price information is costly to gather. We analyzea database of trades between broker-dealers and customers inmunicipal bonds. These data were only released to the publicwith a lag; the market was opaque. Dealers earn lower averagemarkups on larger trades, even though dealers bear a higherrisk of losses with larger trades. We estimate a bargainingmodel and compute measures of dealer’s bargaining power.Dealers exercise substantial market power. Our measures of marketpower decrease in trade size and increase in the complexityof the trade for the dealer. (JEL G0, G24)     

Option Coskewness and Capital Asset Pricing

This article shows how the market coskewness model of Rubinstein(1973) and Kraus and Litzenberger (1976) is altered when a nonredundantcall option is optimally traded. Owing to the option’snonredundancy, the economy’s stochastic discount factor(SDF) depends not only on the market return and the square ofthe market return but also on the option return, the squareof the option return, and the product of the market and optionreturns. This leads to an asset pricing model in which the expectedreturn on any risky asset depends explicitly on the asset’scoskewness with option returns. The empirical results show thatthe option coskewness model outperforms several competing benchmarkmodels. Furthermore, option coskewness captures some of thesame risks as the Fama–French factors small minus big(SMB) and high minus low (HML). These results suggest that thefactors that drive the pricing of nonredundant options are alsoimportant for pricing risky equities.(JEL G11, G12, D61)