Asymmetric Country-of-Origin Effects on Intraindustry Trade and the International Quality Race

A model of North–South intraindustry trade in quality differentiated products is proposed to examine the role of country-of-origin reputation in determining the competitive edge of emerging industries. It is shown that if consumers rationally harbor negative expectations about the quality of Southern products, economic progress in either the North or the South shifts the terms of trade against Southern exports, and worsens Southern producers' incentive to produce high-quality products. In addition, the paper illustrates the role of income redistributive policies in shifting consumer's demand in favor of Southern high-quality products.     

本土保卫战的六大秘笈

根据《经济学人智库》预测，到2010年，新兴市场将占到全球GDP的45％，以及GDP增长的60％。中国、印度、东盟等市场都变得愈发重要，但这并不意味着这些市场将自然地归属本土企业，他们必须面对跨国公司来势汹汹的挑战。跨国公司无论在实力还是经验上，通常都更胜本土企业一筹，但也并不总是大获成功。Yahoo!和eBay在中国市场上就因百度与淘宝的抵抗而止步。许多西方汽车制造商在印度试图建立业务，也步履艰难。NEC和松下退出中国的手机市场。日本零售商八佰伴放弃了其在中国的运营。     

Random iterates of monotone maps

In this paper we prove the existence, uniqueness and stability of the invariant distribution of a random dynamical system in which the admissible family of laws of motion consists of monotone maps from a closed subset of a finite dimensional Euclidean space into itself.     

Mortgage‐Backed Securities (MBS): Is It a Curse or a Blessing for the Australian Home Loan Market? A Natural Experiment

The Australian home loan market has seen a significant and persistent boom over more than two decades. The extant literature exploring the underlying factors explaining this boom has predominantly looked at the demand side rather than the supply side. In this paper, we look at a major supply‐side issue, the introduction of mortgage‐backed securities and its likely impact on the home loan market. In doing so, we have developed a mathematical model that theorises this likely relationship. Our mathematical model predicts possible existence of an unstable equilibrium in the home loan market in the presence of mortgage‐backed securities. We have subsequently backed up our theoretical exercise with sound empirical evidence acquired and analysed as a natural experiment in the Australian scenario using quarterly market data on home loans and mortgage‐backed securities data for a 36‐year period from 1976 to 2012. Using unknown structural break tests, we have identified significant breaks around late 1992 to mid‐1995, clearly indicating that there were significant changes in the housing market due to the introduction of mortgage‐backed securities in early 1993. We have also performed a stability test confirming that under certain conditions this market can become unstable.     

Determinants of Innovation

The study examines how firm size, market structure, profitability and growth influence innovative activity in small to medium sized Australian manufacturing businesses, using the recently released Confidentialised Unit Record File drawn from the Business Longitudinal Survey of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Regression analysis is conducted to determine the factors that effect subsequent innovative activity for the full sample of businesses, as well as for sub-samples of firms from high and low-technological opportunity industries. Most variables, including size, R&D intensity, market structure and trade shares are found to be conducive to further innovative activity for the full sample and for high-tech firms. For low-tech industries, fewer variables are significant.     

Determinants of violent and property crimes in England and Wales: a panel data analysis

We examine various determinants of property and violent crimes by using police force area level (PFA) data on England and Wales over the period of 1992–2008. Our list of potential determinants includes two law enforcement variables namely crime-specific detection rate and prison population, and various socio-economic variables such as unemployment rate, real earnings, proportion of young people and the Gini Coefficient. By adopting a fixed effect dynamic GMM estimation methodology we attempt to address the potential bias that arises from the presence of time-invariant unobserved characteristics of a PFA and the endogeneity of several regressors. There is a significant positive effect of own-lagged crime rate. The own-lagged effect is stronger for property crime, on an average, than violent crime. We find that, on an average, higher detection rate and prison population leads to lower property and violent crimes. This is robust to various specifications. However, socio-economic variables with the exception of real earnings play a limited role in explaining different crime types.     

Housing submarkets and the impacts of foreclosures on property prices

The dramatic rise in the number of foreclosed properties since 2006 has come to assume the proportions of a national crisis. It is widely acknowledged that foreclosures hurt neighborhoods by devaluing the nearby properties through various channels. This paper offers a new way of conceptualizing and then estimating the potential effects of foreclosures on property values. Housing stock heterogeneity in the central city old neighborhood allows for the possibility that the impacts of nearby foreclosures may differ across types of housing. This study uses a dataset that covers twenty years of housing values from the City of Worcester (MA), and finds evidence that foreclosures of multi-family houses in close proximity influence the sales price of surrounding single-family properties after controlling for impact from foreclosure of nearby single-family houses. The most preferred estimate suggests that each multi-family foreclosure that occurs between 660 and 1320 feet away from the sale lowers the predicted sales price by approximately 3%. Nearby multi-family spillover impacts also persist over time. In addition, a new approach advocating for an alternative definition of housing submarket suggests that a distant foreclosure within the same submarket also lower sales price of a single-family home by 0.1%.     

Rural-urban migration in economic development

Abstract. This paper provides a review of the theoretical literature on rural–urban migration in contemporary LDCs. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the Lewis model before going on to discuss the Todaro and the Harris–Todaro models and the large literature which these models have spawned. The question of job search in the context of migration and the role of family members in migration decisions are considered next. The paper then takes a closer look at the Informal sector and also sets out alternative migration functions to the ones usually employed in the literature. The paper concludes with a brief note on some of the important implications arising from our study.     

INDUSTRIAL PERFORMANCE AND COMPETITION: THE CASE OF JAPANESE MANUFACTURING

Abstract.  The paper analyses the competitive process and performance behaviour of Japanese manufacturing between 1985 and 1997. Technological changes, international competition and reducing barriers in domestic and international markets are playing a significant role to speed up the performance behaviour in Japanese manufacturing. Scale economies, product differentiation and openness of the economy are used in explaining profit behaviour of manufacturing firms. Findings are compared with existing studies from Japan as well as from other developed countries such as Australia and the USA.     

Raising the bar (7)

This editorial summarises the papers published in issue 13.1 so as to raise the bar in applied spatial economic research and highlight new trends. The first paper adopts a scale neutral approach to investigate the spatial mechanisms that cause regional innovation and growth. The second paper claims that population-weighting when calculating indices of regional inequality might lead to inconsistent outcomes. The third paper estimates the effect of distance between family residence and higher education institution on a student's academic performance, thereby accounting for endogenous regressors. The fourth paper shows an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic development at region of origin and the propensity to migrate using a multilevel approach. The fifth paper provides spatial econometric evidence of price competition between sellers of used books on Amazon.com. The last paper estimates a hedonic housing price equation and parameterizes the spatial weight matrix to determine how far back in time buyers, sellers and realtors are looking at the housing market.