The effects at home of initiating production abroad: evidence from matched French firms

Based on matching techniques in combination with a difference-in-difference estimator, this paper estimates the effects at home of initiating production abroad through the establishment of a foreign production affiliate. The analysis covers manufacturing and service firms active in France during the period 1987–1999. We show that the motivation to start producing abroad is an important determinant of its impact at home. Market-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI) in manufacturing is associated with significant scale effects, resulting in job creation. By contrast, factor-seeking FDI in manufacturing has no significant effect on employment. However, there is some evidence that this type of FDI is associated with technology effects, in the form of greater capital-intensity and efficiency, as well as larger exports. Finally, FDI in service sectors is associated with significant positive employment effects, presumably reflecting the importance of the market-seeking motive in these sectors.     

Market integration and market efficiency: The case of 19th century Italy

This paper examines market integration in Italy in the 19th century, focusing on wheat. Wheat prices converged well before political Unification (1859-1861) but the process halted during the 1860s only to resume in the 1870s and 1880s. The first wave of integration was caused mainly by improvements in market efficiency while the second wave owed much to a reduction in transport costs.     

The ladder of internationalization modes: evidence from European firms

How do firms enter international markets? To answer this question, this paper uses a unique multi-country firm-level dataset which, besides direct exporting and FDI, provides explicit information on a number of internationalization modes: indirect exporting, outsourced manufacturing and service FDI. We present a theoretical framework in which modes requiring higher and higher commitment have progressively higher fixed and lower marginal costs. By estimating multinomial and ordered logit models, we present evidence in line with such a sorting framework with respect to TFP and innovativeness. We identify three ’clusters’ of modes: indirect exporters are similar to non-exporters, direct exporters and outsourced manufacturers constitute a second cluster while service and manufacturing FDI are the most demanding internationalization modes.     

National and international market integration in the 19th century: Evidence from comovement

This paper analyzes relative wheat price fluctuations to investigate market integration among 72 European and US cities. Applying a Dynamic Factor Model, which has seldom been used in market integration analysis, prices are decomposed into international, national and local components. Thus, national and international market integration are identified by a statistical restriction, and results for each single market are obtained. The first result is that globalization has accelerated faster in the first than in the second half of the 19th century, putting the post-1850 transport revolution into perspective. The USA integrated only later into the European market, discounting the role of the “grain invasion” for trade history. I also show that the European nations that turned protectionist after 1880 reduced the impact of foreign shocks, while free traders fully integrated into the international economy.     

Production smoothing, firms' heterogeneity, and financial constraints: evidence from a panel of UK firms

In this paper we provide an empirical analysis of heterogeneityin firms' inventory behavior, using a panel of UK manufacturingfirms. We first investigate how the relative variance of productionand sales differs across firms. We then use variants of thelinear quadratic inventory model in order to analyze potentialheterogeneity in firms' incentives to smooth production. Theresults suggest that incentives to smooth production are notprevalent This conclusion also holds when firms are partitionedaccording to whether they are more or leu likely to face finanrialconstraints.     

The Paris financial market in the nineteenth century: complementarities and competition in microstructures1

This article sets out to explain why the Paris Bourse was highly successful in the nineteenth century in spite of the supposedly inefficient monopoly of the official market, the Parquet. The literature argues that the official monopoly was sidelined by a free, innovative market known as the Coulisse, but it fails to explain how the Coulisse emerged despite the monopoly and how the two markets persisted alongside each other during the entire century. We provide a detailed history of how these two markets emerged and interacted. The Parquet increasingly developed as a high‐end market, providing security, transparency, and effective settlement‐delivery to unsophisticated investors trading on the spot market. The Coulisse provided liquidity, immediacy, and opacity to professional investors trading mostly forward. In line with recent theoretical developments, we argue that the juxtaposition of heterogeneous organizations had important virtues for market participants, since it allowed the exchanges to specialize in different investors and services and made the exchanges complementary to each other. We demonstrate our claim by looking at both the formal rules and the actual functioning of the Parquet, drawing on its archives which we have recently classified.     

The financial integration of China: New evidence on temporally aggregated data for the A-share market

In the presence of de jure capital account inconvertibility, but in spite of high trade openness of China, existing empirical work, using daily data, has not found any evidence of international financial integration of its A-share market. In this paper we shed new light on this issue, examining a long sample of active trading, over 1992–2005, within the framework of a regime-switching error correction model, with a major focus on the role of temporal aggregation. With end-of-week closing prices we do not find any long run relationship between the Shanghai market and either the New York or the Hong Kong market, thus replicating previous findings. However, with weekly-averaged indices, up to late 1996, the Shanghai index was cointegrated with the S&P 500. Subsequently, this relationship broke down and a long run relationship with the Hang Seng index gradually arose. Information flows, as well as the prospects of de jure financial opening, and the growing awareness of valuation concepts among Chinese domestic investors, in the presence of identical fundamentals (multiple listing of Mainland firms), help explain the evidence of long run financial integration in spite of capital controls.     

The demand for foreign workers by foreign firms: evidence from Africa

Foreign workers play a crucial role in channelling resources and information flows both within the boundaries of firms and between foreign firms and the host country economy. In this study we employ a novel firm-level database (UNIDO Africa Investor Survey 2010) in order to investigate the factors that determine the employment of foreign workers by foreign firms in Sub-Saharan African countries. We shed light on important firm-level as well as host–home country characteristics which shape the demand of foreign workers in developing countries. We show that differences between investors are largely explained by the role played by economic and institutional distance between home–host countries as well as by firm-level heterogeneity in the degrees of knowledge intensity and local embeddedness.     

The value of institutions for financial markets: evidence from emerging markets

This paper investigates the value of political institutions for financial markets, using panel data from emerging market countries. We test the hypothesis that changes in political institutions, such as improvements in democratic rights and increased government accountability, have a direct effect on sovereign interest rate spreads. We find that financial markets value institutions over and above the economic and fiscal outcomes these institutions shape. Democracy and accountability generally lower sovereign spreads, political risk tends to increase them, and financial markets view election years negatively.     

The state of the market and the contrarian strategy: evidence from China's stock market

Using the most comprehensive weekly dataset of ‘A’ shares listed on the Chinese stock market, this paper examines short-term contrarian strategies under different market states from 1995–2010. We find statistically significant profits from contrarian strategies, especially during the period after 2007, when China (along with other countries) experienced an economic downturn following the worldwide financial crisis. Our empirical evidence suggests that: (1) no significant profit is generated from either momentum or contrarian strategies in the intermediate horizon; (2) after microstructure effects are adjusted for, contrarian strategies with only four to eight weeks holding periods based on the stocks’ previous four to eight week's performance generate statistically significant profits of around 0.2% per week; (3) the contrarian strategy following a ‘down’ market generates higher profit than those following an ‘up’ market, suggesting that a contrarian strategy could be used as a shelter when the market is in decline. The profits following a ‘down’ market are robust after risk adjustment.     

二十世纪九十年代以来中日通货紧缩的比较

中国与日本在二十世纪九十年代以来所经历的通货紧缩有诸多的相似点，由于两国对经济过热和通货紧缩的认识态度和治理措施的不同，中日两国的通货紧缩及其影响呈现出不同的态势。本文拟对两国通货紧缩的异同进行深入的比较分析。     

The role of banks in financial integration: evidence from new EU members

EU enlargement involves the simultaneous liberalisation of goods and financial markets. While the issue of free trade in capital versus goods has frequently been the subject of study in international economics, the emphasis has typically been on physical capital (machines etc) rather than financial capital. This paper considers this distinction in a world with asymmetric information, moral hazard and hence credit rationing, and explores the resulting ambiguous theoretical predictions via an econometric analysis of the entry of the Central and Eastern European Countries to the EU.     

Japanese industrial finance at the close of the 19th century: Trade credit and financial intermediation

In a series of recent studies, several economic historians (most prominently Richard Sylla) argue that successful economies experience “financial revolutions” before undergoing rapid growth. In the U.S., they suggest Hamilton masterminded the financial revolution by putting the public finance in order and facilitating private banks. Might Matsukata, they continue, have done the same in Japan? Japan did indeed experience a financial revolution in the late 19th century. Matsukata, however, did not mastermind the revolution in advance of private-sector demand. Instead, private investors created much of the financial infrastructure in response to demand from industrial firms. What is more, most firms (at least in the pivotal silk industry) raised the funds they needed through trade credit rather than securities markets or banks.     

Labor market effects of import competition: Theory and evidence from the textile and apparel industries

Since the early 1980s, much attention has been given to the possibility of trade-related job losses and wage effects in the textile and apparel industries. This paper uses aggregate time series data from the Annual Survey of Manufacturers [Bartlesman and Gray, 1996] with import price data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics [Alterman, 1991] for 1977–91 to test the effect of imports on employment and wages in textiles and apparel. Theoretical models suggest that import competition should be a factor in the determination of employment, and possibly wages, regardless of whether the U.S. is represented as a price-setter or price-taker. The empirical analysis provides some support. The author appreciates the helpful comments of Barry T. Hirsch, participants at the Georgia Southern University economics seminar in November 1997, and the editorial assistance of a reviewer for theAtlantic Economic Journal.     

The spirit of capitalism? Ethnicity, religion, and self-employment in early 20th century Canada

This paper examines self-employment in Canada at the beginning of the 20th century. Self-employment 100 years ago was associated with greater human capital and negatively related to earnings in employee occupations in the local district. We also find strong evidence of immigrant assimilation in self-employment and modest evidence of higher self-employment in enclaves with greater concentration of immigrants. An analysis of recent immigrants supports the hypothesis that liquidity constraints were an important determinant of self-employment. Christian affiliation had little impact on self-employment outcomes.     

The value impact of name changes evidence from Chinese firms during the technology boom

For a sample of US stocks in the period 1998–1999, Cooper, Dimitrov, and Rau (2001) report dramatic value increases in the 10 days around the announcement of dotcom name changes. We find much smaller value changes for a sample of Chinese listed firms with changes to internet-related dotcom names for the 1998 to 2002 period. This result is surprising given the high proportion of retail trading in China and the prohibition to short sell Chinese stocks. Also in contrast to Cooper, Dimitrov, and Rau (2001), we find that most of the value increase for our sample firms is realized gradually prior to the announcement. Further investigation reveals that our sample firms experience more frequent CEO-turnover, significant increase in return-on-assets, and involve more restructure activities around the name change event. These results suggest that the value increases for firms with name changes are the consequence of substantial and successful operational changes, and that the name change is simply part of that process, instead of the cosmetic effects of name change or investor mania suggested by previous studies.     

科举制的废除与二十世纪初中国文化的断层

科举制度在中国历史上起着维系传统的社会精英阶层之间的社会流动性、传承儒家文化、保持社会凝聚力的作用，但由于它禁锢人们思想，使国人无法应对民族危机和现代化挑战，改革它是完全必要的，但清末的废除科举制使社会凝聚力迅速削弱，中国文化在二十世纪出现断层，其影响至今仍可看到。回顾这段历史将给我们民族的现代化转型过程提供若干有益的启示。     

Market structure,the exchange rate,and pricing behavior by firms: Some evidence from computable general equilibrium trade models

Zusammenfassung Marktstruktur, Wechselkurs und Preisverhalten der Firmen: Einige Rechenergebnisse aus einem Modell des allgemeinen Gleichgewichts für den internationalen Handel. - Die Verfasserin benutzt ein Modell des allgemeinen Gleichgewichts für den internationalen Handel, um die Auswirkungen einer zehnprozentigen Aufwertung des US-Dollar auf das Preisniveau in den Vereinigten Staaten im Verh?ltnis zu den Preisen auf anderen M?rkten abzusch?tzen. In einigen Industrien werden die M?rkte segmentiert, und von den Firmen wird angenommen, da\ sie den Absatz der jeweils anderen Firmen als fix ansehen. Die Autorin kommt zu dem Ergebnis, da\ eine solche Aufwertung des Dollar das Preisniveau auf dem amerikanischen Markt um 2 bis 3 vH senkt und die Preise in der restlichen Welt um 0 bis 6 vH erh?ht. Das bedeutet, da\ im Gefolge der Aufwertung einer W?hrung signifikante Abweichungen von der Kaufkraftparit?t eintreten k?nnen.

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Resumen Estructura de mercado, tasa de cambio y politica de precios de la empresa: evidencia en modelos de equilibrio general computable de comercio. - La autora utiliza un modelo de equilibrio general computable de comercio para evaluar el efecto de una revaluation del dolar USA del 10 por ciento sobre el nivel de precios prevaleciente en el mercado estadounidense en comparación con los precios de otros mercados. En algunas industrias los mercados están segmentados; se asume que las empresas presentan un comportamiento tipo Cournot. Los resultados demuestran que una revaluatión reduce el nivel de precios en el mercado estadounidense en un 2–3 por ciento y aumenta los precios en el resto del mundo en un 0–6 por ciento. Esto implica que pueden ocurrir deviaciones significativas de la paridad de poder adquisitivo después de una revaluación de la moneda.

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Résumé Structure du marché, taux de change et politique de prix des entreprises: Quelque évidence d’un modèle d’équilibre général de commerce international. - L’auteur se sert d’un modèle d’équilibre général pour estimer l’effet d’une réévaluation de 10 pour cent du US dollar sur le niveau des prix dans les Etats-Unis comparé au niveau des prix sur les marchés dans les autres pays. Les marchés de quelques industries sont segmentés et on suppose que les entreprises regardent les ventes des concurrents comme fixes. L’auteur trouve qu’une telle réévaluation réduit le niveau des prix sur les marchés des Etats-Unis de deux à trois pour cent et augmente les prix dans les autres pays de zéro à 6 pour cent. Cela indique que des déviations considérables de la parité du pouvoir d’achat peuvent se passer en conséquence d’une réévaluation de la monnaie.