Credit towards graduation: The impact of US bank deregulation on human capital accumulation

Credit markets affect the real economy. It is important to identify unintended consequences of financial policies. This paper studies the impact of bank branching deregulation on high school graduation. The use of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 geocoded data focuses the results on three deregulations: Ohio in 1979, Connecticut in 1980, and Alabama in 1981. Discontinuities in treatment assignment at borders between deregulated states and regulated states identify the effect of banking deregulation on high school graduation. Using a regression discontinuity type set up called differences-in-discontinuities, results indicate significant increases in the likelihood of high school graduation for treated individuals. Analysis provides evidence of heterogeneous effects of bank branching deregulation based on skill level and income level.     

Patent activity and technical change

As creations of the mind, intellectual property includes industrial property and copyrights. This paper presents an aggregate production function of the generalized Fechner–Thurstone (GFT) form to analyze the impact of an important component of intellectual industrial property, namely patent activity, on technical change in the USA for the period 1947–1981. Patents should alter isoquant maps, and measuring their elasticities is both intuitively and empirically appealing. We define a technology-changer as a variable that has an impact on the elasticity of the marginal rate of technical substitution (MRTS) between inputs of the GFT production function over time. Various types of US patent grant activity, specifically total, domestic, foreign, successful and unsuccessful patent applications, are used as instruments for the technology-changer. Using the GFT specification, the impacts of various technology-changers on the elasticity of the MRTS between inputs are estimated directly. It is found that granted (or successful) patents, patents granted to foreign companies and individuals, total patent applications, and even unsuccessful patent applications, have significant impacts on the rates at which inputs are substituted for each other over time in production.     

Skill supply and biased technical change

This article contributes to the debate on skill-biased technical change by studying the dynamics of skill supply and wage inequality in an endogenous growth model with ability-biased technical progress. Due to a discouragement effect, rising within groups inequality reduces incentives to become educated for ordinary-ability workers. This mechanism generates a non-monotonic relationship between the growth rate and skill supply driving wage inequality upward during periods of accelerating technical change. This theoretical explanation is consistent with the apparent ambiguous relationship between the relative skill supply and inequality in the last decades in several OECD countries.     

Transaction costs and market efficiency: Evidence from commission deregulation

This study analyzes the impacts of explicit transaction costs on weak-form market efficiency within the context of the brokerage commission deregulation in Japan in October 1999, which led to lower commission rates across the market. Applying two alternative statistical tests to both daily and weekly data, we find that return randomness (unpredictability) increases significantly for stocks listed in Japan, but not for the Japanese stocks dually listed in the United States, which are immune to the deregulation. These results suggest an inefficiency loss or an efficiency gain in the Japanese equity market following the deregulation, insofar as randomness proxies for efficiency.     

Econometric modeling of technical change

The purpose of this paper is to present a new approach to econometric modeling of substitution and technical change. Substitution is determined by observable variables, such as prices of output and inputs and shares of inputs in the value of output. Our principal innovation is to represent the rate and biases of technical change by unobservable or latent variables. This representation is considerably more flexible than the constant time trends employed in the previous literature. An added advantage of the new representation is that the latent variables can be projected into the future, so that the rate and bias of technical change can be incorporated into econometric projections.     

Dating structural changes: An illustration from financial deregulation

Recent developments in econometrics emphasize the importance of testing for structural breaks in time series analysis. The typical event study of financial economics examines abnormal stock market returns around arbitrarily established dates. The paper has two objectives. The first aim is to present an application of the switching regression methodology to date structural changes in the return-generating function of financial firms. The second objective is to assess the effectiveness of the conventional event methodology in dating regime shifts associated with regulatory changes in the financial services industry. (JEL C52, G21)     

Cost effects of mergers and deregulation in the U.S. Rail industry

We attempt to disentangle the effects of deregulation on rail costs from those directly attributable to mergers and acquisitions, employing a translog variable cost function, based on an unbalanced panel data set of annual observations for major U.S. Class I railroads from 1974 to 1986. We find that both deregulation and mergers contributed significantly to cost savings. However, of the accumulated cost savings achieved by the six major firms involved in mergers postderegulation, we estimate that by 1986 about 91% of the reduction in accumulated costs is due to deregulation, and about 9% is directly due to mergers and acquisitions (which in turn were facilitated by regulatory reforms).     

Functional forms for technical change functions

In this paper we examine the four properties of technical change functions introduced by Sato [1980, 1981], paying particular attention to the composition property. We show by way of examples that two of the properties are independent, but that a third is a necessary consequence of two others. A theorem providing a necessary condition for the composition property is stated and proved. Finally, we identify the general continuous functional form of technical change functions for which the efficiency of factor i is independent of the quantities of all factors j i. Noting an unappealing characteristic of a member of this class of transformations, we propose an additional property for technical change functions and note that it is independent of the others.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through S.T. Hackman.     

The impact of technological change on bank performance

Quarterly call report data for 225 banks over twenty-six quarters are used to estimate a quadratic cost function to provide a measure of technological change within the banking industry. The nature of the relationship between technological change and bank performance is then examined. A logit model is formulated to estimate the likelihood that banks will display a positive level of technological development. Return on assets and return on equity are selected as measures of banking performance. The results suggest that technological change is significantly related to over-all banking performance. Finally, a significant relationship is indicated between bank size and profitability and the rate at which banks implement technological change.     

Productivity indexes under Hicks neutral technical change

The Malmquist and Hicks–Moorsteen productivity indexes are the two most widely used theoretical indexes for measuring productivity growth of firms, industries and countries. We indicate that these two indexes coincide under constant returns to scale technology and Hicks neutral technical change. While the conditions on production technology under which two indexes coincide have been examined before, this is the first study on the types of technical change under which they coincide. We shed new insight on the relationship between these popular indexes.     

Technology and technical change in a dynamic production model

The basic features of input-output production models are briefly reviewed. It is argued that some of the assumptions and the consequent mathematical setting underlying input-output models should be revised when (a) substitution effects prevail over growth-decline effects, (b) technological innovation is taken into account. In this light, the standard dynamic version of a Leontief model is criticized in order to arrive at a more general formulation of a production-innovation model. Some properties of this model are then illustrated and the economic meaning of the results is discussed. The main conclusion is that it is possible to establish a certain long-term invariance of the production vector in presence of uncertainties affecting technology, investment and consumption patterns.     

Skill-biased technical change in US manufacturing: a general index approach

This article applies recent advances in productivity and efficiency measurement to the evaluation of skill-biased technical change. Using the general index approach we are able to establish an explicit and unconstrained time path for nonneutral technical change between production and nonproduction labor in US manufacturing industries over the 1959–1996 period. Our findings confirm the prevailing interpretation in the labor economics literature that substantial reductions in the relative share of production labor are attributable to a sustained period of nonneutral technical change. However, we find that skill-biased technical change effects are most evident prior to 1983. This predates the diffusion of personal computer technologies in the workplace and the dramatic wage structure changes associated with the 1980s. In contrast to prevailing alternatives, the general index approach also permits us to explain observed shifts in relative labor demand as a combination of price-induced substitution, nonhomothetic output effects and skill-biased technical change responses to a range of proposed elements.     

New competition and technical change in the computer industry

This paper briefly describes and analyses the competitive strength of the Japanese electronics industry, based on the author's studies of the leading firms in the television and semiconductor industries world wide [1] and notes some of the implications for the computer industry.There are some important similarities among these industries: in particular the crucial role which technology and innovation have played through their implications both for international competitiveness and for the users and consumers of the products of these industries.Although it is not suggested that the computer industry will evolve along exactly the same lines as these other two electronics industries, there are some very useful lessons that may be drawn for the computer industry from the experience of competition in these other sectors.The paper begins by giving some indicators or “measures” of the competitive performance and strength of the Japanese firms. It also explains some of the reasons why they have achieved this performance. Finally, it describes and analyses the pattern of expansion of these industries from domestic market to exports and finally to direct investment in the U.S. and Western Europe, to indicate likely patterns for competition in the computer industry.     

Managing change strategically: the technical, political, and cultural keys.

Managing strategic change is increasingly a way of life for organizations faced with the turbulent economic, political, and cultural forces of the 1980s. To manage such change, organizations and their managers will have to confront basic questions regarding the organization's technical, political, and cultural foundations. The technical questions include: What business(es) should we be in? How should we be organized to accomplish our strategy? What kinds of people do we need, and how will they be acquired, developed, and rewarded? The political questions include: Who gets to influence the mission and strategy of the organization? How is power allocated both vertically and horizontally across the organization? Who gets promoted to what key positions? The cultural questions include: What values and beliefs are necessary to support the organization's strategy? What subcultures are desirable, and should there be an overarching corporate culture? How should the human resources system shape and mold the culture?     

Environmental performance and bank lending: Evidence from unlisted firms

Growing public concerns about sustainability and adopting environmentally responsible practices increase risks as well as opportunities for firms and banks. It is unclear whether being environmentally responsible matters for unlisted firms, which are significant contributors to the degradation of the environment but which are not under strict scrutiny like public listed firms. Using a sample of 3915 firms from developing economies, we investigate whether the superior environmental performance of unlisted firms leads them to better loan conditions. After controlling for endogeneity and sample selection bias, we find that firms with better environmental performance received approximately 6.4% higher loans (as a ratio of total sales) and that this effect is more prominent in small and medium firms. This finding supports an information asymmetry view of agency costs. Our results, however, show that environmental performance does not affect loan duration and collateral requirement, indicating no spillover economic effect of corporate environmental performance on loan conditions. This partially supports a new perspective of legitimacy theory in relation to the ‘greenwash strategy’. Overall, our study shows that strategically engaged environmental activities that are integrated with core business objectives represent an important business strategy for firms to enhance credit access.     

Financial innovation and bank behavior: Evidence from credit markets

This paper investigates whether, and through which channel, the active use of credit derivatives changes bank behavior in the credit market, and how this channel was affected by the crisis of 2007–2009. Our principal finding is that banks with larger gross positions in credit derivatives charge significantly lower corporate loan spreads, while banks׳ net positions are not consistently related to loan pricing. We argue that this is consistent with banks passing on risk management benefits to corporate borrowers but not with alternative channels through which credit derivative use may affect loan pricing. We also find that the magnitude of the risk management effect remained unchanged during the crisis period of 2007–2009. In addition, banks with larger gross positions in credit derivatives cut their lending by less than other banks during the crisis and have consistently lower loan charge-offs. In sum, our study is suggestive of significant risk management benefits from financial innovations that persist under adverse conditions – that is, when they matter most.     

The impact of bank competition and concentration on bank risk-taking behavior and stability: Evidence from GCC countries

This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of the impact of competition on bank fragility pre and post financial crisis period in the GCC banking market as measured by bank risk-taking behavior and bank stability during the period 1998–2016. Our results indicate that a higher level of bank competition and the greater degree of concentration adds to financial fragility. The findings further shows that during the 2008 crisis, lower bank competition maintain the stability of GCC banks. We also find that lower level of competition and lower concentration in the banking market increases the risk-taking behavior of the low capitalized, low liquid and small banks which add to fragility in the banking system. Our findings suggest that countries with greater capital stringency, greater supervisory power, greater market discipline, and private monitoring, with explicit deposit insurance schemes, higher shareholder protection, and higher legal efficiency decrease banks’ risk-taking and increase their stability. We also find that greater regulatory restrictions and higher creditor protection decrease banks’ stability and increase risk in concerned countries. We find support for both competition-fragility and competition-stability hypotheses in the GCC banking market. The results also confirm that the use of a single measure of competition is insufficient to assess the role of competition in banking stability.     

叉车电控:从直流技术向交流技术转换——访北京萨牌电器设备有限公司总经理周雪梅

北京萨牌电器设备有限公司成立于1998年．公司代理的意大利ZAPI控制器在叉车市场有很高的市场占有率。毕业于同济大学起重运输与工程机械专业和科技德语研究生的总经理周雪梅，当时在组建北京萨牌电器设备公司的时候．就没想仅仅做一个销售代表，困而地把公司定位威一个技术型的公司，业务其一是为电动叉主提供电机和电控的匹配设计。提供车辆动力系统解决方案，包括行走系统、提升系统、转向系统、电磁阀控制系统和车辆控制附件。     

Valuation uncertainty and IPOs: Investment bank versus commercial bank underwriters

This paper tests commercial bank underwriting for the existence of a conflict of interest versus a certification role. Our tests compare samples of equity IPOs underwritten by both commercial and investment banks. We examine the degree of asymmetric information present in the market for these issues by examining their microstructure trading characteristics. Our results show that greater information asymmetry is present in the after-market when a commercial bank acts as underwriter. The asymmetry resolves itself as the market learns more about each issue, deciding which ones may have involved a conflict. This is consistent with greater uncertainty about the value of commercial-bank-underwritten IPOs, and is also consistent with the market perceiving a possible conflict of interest on the part of commercial banks.