News-driven international credit cycles

How does news about future economic fundamentals affect within-country and cross-country credit allocation? How effective is unconventional policy when financial crises are driven by unfulfilled favorable news? I study these questions by employing a two-sector, two-country macroeconomic model with a banking sector in which financial crises are associated with occasionally binding leverage constraints. In response to positive news on the valuation of non-traded sector capital which turns out to be incorrect at a later date, the model captures the patterns of financial flows and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000–2010, including the changes in the sectoral allocation of bank credit and movements in cross-country borrowing during the boom and the bust. When there are unconventional policies by a common authority in response to unfulfilled favorable news, liquidity injections perform better in ameliorating the downturn than direct assets purchases from the non-traded sector.     

Identifying peers in international tax competition

Multinational companies (MNCs) have historically used corporate subsidiaries to isolate income earned in lower-taxed jurisdictions from tax in a higher-rate home country. This planning technique has been long accepted as a strategy to lower the MNC’s effective tax rate and maintain shareholder value. A recently study, however, demonstrates that this is an inefficient, and possibly inappropriate, strategy. This article conducts a comprehensive empirical benchmarking analysis by applying cluster analysis to empirically identify peer groups of MNCs operating in the pharmaceutical industry. We find that most firms consistently fall into the same cluster, providing evidence that income shifting can be benchmarked by industry sector. We also find special cases where firms should be excluded from the benchmark.     

Decentralization and international tax competition

This paper models tax competition between two countries that are divided into regions. In the first stage of the game, the strategy variable for each country is the division of a continuum of public goods between central and regional government provision. In the second stage, the central and regional governments choose their tax rates on capital. A country's decentralization level serves as a strategic tool through its influence on the mix of horizontal and vertical externalities that exists under tax competition. In contrast to standard tax competition models, decentralizing the provision of public goods may improve welfare.     

Industrial heterogeneity and international product cycles

We analyze the superiority of the specific, demand and cost ad valorem subsidies in industrial and export policies. The criterion employed to measure the ranking of the superiority of the subsidy policies in this paper is that, given an identical total output, the smaller the amount of the subsidy, the superior the subsidy policy. We show that the demand ad valorem subsidy is the least efficient policy, regardless of whether it is measured in regard to the industrial or export subsidy policies. The superiority related to the specific and cost ad valorem subsidies hinges upon the production technology. We can thus provide a theoretical explanation to the real world phenomenon as to why governments usually offer a specific or cost ad valorem subsidy policy to agricultural products and exports.     

Global banking and international business cycles

This paper incorporates a global bank into a two-country business cycle model. The bank collects deposits from households and makes loans to entrepreneurs, in both countries. It has to finance a fraction of loans using equity. We investigate how such a bank capital requirement affects the international transmission of productivity and loan default shocks. Three findings emerge. First, the bank's capital requirement has little effect on the international transmission of productivity shocks. Second, the contribution of loan default shocks to business cycle fluctuations is negligible under normal economic conditions. Third, an exceptionally large loan loss originating in one country induces a sizeable and simultaneous decline in economic activity in both countries. This is particularly noteworthy, as the 2007–09 global financial crisis was characterized by large credit losses in the US and a simultaneous sharp output reduction in the US and the Euro Area. Our results thus suggest that global banks may have played an important role in the international transmission of the crisis.     

Leapfrogging in switching systems

The rapid emergence of new technologies has increased the rate of obsolescene. This creates the possibility that developing countries and, in particular, newly industrializing countries may leapfrog older generations of technologies. We lay out the issues and variables to the considered for an understanding of leapfrogging in telephone switching systems. In particular, we distinguish between demand-driven and infrastructure-driven leapfrogging. Data for the early 1980s offer some evidence that demand-driven leapfrogging was most prevalent in countries with intermediate network maturity. Infrastructure-driven leapfrogging has taken place mainly in France, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.     

Environmental innovation policy and international competition

We consider one polluting industry in an open economy. The national government implements a policy of industrial pollution control, by inducing appropriate technological innovation to reduce toxic emissions. The emission-reducing innovations are developed through firm-specific costly investments. Under different hypotheses on market structure (perfect competition, Bertrand and Cournot oligopoly), international competition forces the national government to subsidize innovation. The appropriate subsidy scheme varies according to the information available to the government and according to market structure. If information is asymmetric, the subsidy must include the information premium necessary to separate different types of firms.     

Perpetual Leapfrogging in Bertrand Duopoly

We consider different patterns of infinite technological adoption choices by firms in a Bertrand duopoly. Every period technological progress provides a sequence of cost reducing innovations. The equilibrium concept is Markov perfect equilibrium. We analyze conditions for which equilibrium adoption leads to persistent leadership and those where firms alternate in adoption inducing leapfrogging. Only leapfrogging leads to technological improvement in the long run. Demand conditions play a crucial role in determining whether leapfrogging can be perpetual in Bertrand duopoly.     

Real business cycles with Cournot competition and endogenous entry

We introduce strategic interactions with quantity competition a` la Cournot and endogenous entry in an RBC model with homogenous goods. In the long run, the steady state mark up is decreasing in the capital share, in the discount factor and in the level of technology, while it is increasing in the rate of bankruptcy and in the entry cost. In the short run, a competition effect amplifies the propagation of the shocks and generates procyclical profits and countercyclical mark ups. We extend the model to different forms of competition (as imperfect collusion and Stackelberg competition). The analysis of technology and preference shocks and of the second moments suggests that the model outperforms the RBC in terms of variability of output, labor and, of course, profits and mark ups.     

Interlinkage in the endogenous real business cycles of international economies

Summary This study investigates interlinkage among the business cycles of countries from the viewpoint of endogenous real business cycles. For this purpose, we build a simple perfect foresight equilibrium model with two countries and characterize the global dynamics of a free-trade equilibrium as well as that of each country's autarky equilibrium by means of the fundamental structure of an economy.We are greatful to Murray Kemp, Mukul Majumdar, Takashi Negishi, Marcus Noland, Ian Novos, Jose Scheinkman and an anonymous referee for useful conversations and suggestions.     

Product differentiation, competition, and international trade

In this paper the two workhorse theories of international trade under imperfect competition – Krugman's taste for variety model and Brander's strategic intra-industry trade model – are integrated into a single analytical framework. A quadratic utility function allows for a nesting of these two theories by postulating a consumer taste for variety over differentiated products, where the extent of product differentiation is linked to the intensity of strategic interaction among firms. The model yields intuitive predictions on the effects of the degree of product differentiation on the volume of trade and on the composition of the gains from trade under imperfect competition. JEL classification: F12
Différenciation de produits, concurrence et commerce international. Ce mémoire intègre deux théories connues du commerce international en régime de concurrence imparfaite – le modèle du goût pour la variété de Krugman et celui du commerce intra-industrie de Brander – en un seul cadre analytique. Une fonction d'utilité quadratique permet d'encadrer ces deux théories en postulant que le consommateur a un goût pour la variété dans une gamme de produits différenciés où le degré de différenciation est reliéà l'intensité de l'interaction stratégique entre les entreprises. Le modèle engendre des prévisions quant aux effets du degré de différenciation des produits sur le volume de commerce international et la composition des gains résultant de ce commerce en régime de concurrence imparfaite.     

Domestic and international mixed models with price competition

This article examines domestic (respectively, international) mixed competition in which a state-owned welfare-maximizing public firm competes on price with a domestic (respectively, foreign) profit-maximizing private firm. The article presents and compares the equilibrium outcomes of the two mixed models.     

全球化与技术跨越

全球化带来技术经济范式的转换，技术经济范式的转换使发展中国家在追赶发达国家过程中陷入困境，由此提出技术跨越是赶超之利器。     

Business cycles through international shocks: A structural investigation

This paper investigates the sources of output volatility by decomposing the international shocks into finance and trade shocks. Through structural Bayesian estimations of an open-economy DSGE model on 16 countries, on average, international shocks explain around 70% of output fluctuations.     

The impacts of export competition on international technology flows

Knowledge flow is a key to building technological capabilities. This article investigates how competition in international trade affects knowledge flow between countries using patent data and trade data for analysis. The main finding is that export competition in the third market (in our study, the US market) seems to have a positive impact on the flow of knowledge. The findings from this study contribute to the debate on ‘learning-by-exporting’.     

Determinants of international transmission of business cycles to Turkish economy

This study aims to investigate the channels through which international business cycles are transmitted to Turkish economy. Our analysis follows two steps: i) business cycle transmission is measured using Longest Common Subsequence (LCS) method, a pattern recognition algorithm that accounts for the nonlinear and time-varying nature of business cycles and ii) the potential mechanisms of propagation of international business cycles are examined by specifying a panel regression model in which the LCS measure of synchronization is used as the dependent variable. Applying several panel estimation methods to the bilateral data from 22 countries over the 1998–2009 periods, we find that both trade and financial similarities are significant in the transmission of business cycles to Turkish economy. Especially, the results highlight the role of trade integration indicating that Turkish business cycles are closely linked with the business cycles of the members of European Custom Union.     

Measuring international business cycles by saving for a rainy day

Macroeconomics inevitably begins with a trend‐cycle decomposition of a nation's output. We propose a decomposition in which consumption is the trend component and savings is the cycle component. Using data from the G‐7 plus Australia, we show that this decomposition identifies international business cycles that are: (i) more volatile, (ii) of longer mean duration and (iii) less correlated across countries than the cycle component from the Hodrick‐Prescott filter. We argue that this difference stems from the fact that our method imposes a basic theoretical restriction arising from the permanent income hypothesis similar to the restriction used in Cochrane's ( 1994 ) decomposition.     

Noisy information,risk sharing,and international business cycles

We introduce a noisy information structure into an otherwise standard international real business cycle model with two countries. When domestic firms observe current foreign technology with some noise, predictions of the model on international correlation can be very different from those of a standard perfect information model. We show that the model can explain: (a) positive output correlation both in complete and incomplete market models, (b) consumption correlation smaller than output correlation with an introduction of information‐constrained consumers, and (c) observation of both positive and negative productivity–hours correlation in two countries.     

Corporate social responsibility,vertical product differentiation and international competition

Would a foreign firm’s consumer‐oriented corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities be rewarded by an importing country’s voluntary tariff reduction? The current paper addresses this question in an import‐competing duopoly model with vertical product differentiation. It is shown that the tariff will decrease if the foreign firm switches from a purely profit‐driven firm to a CSR firm. A consumer‐oriented CSR strategy will always hurt the domestic firm’s profit, whereas the relationship between the foreign firm’s profit and CSR sensitivity (the degree to which a firm cares about consumer welfare) is invertedly U‐shaped. When firms’ decisions to switch to CSR are endogeneized, only the foreign firm will become a CSR firm.