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Economic science and ethical neutrality II: The intransigence of evaluative concepts

This paper returns to a perennial controversy I examined in a previous paper in the Journal of Business Ethics (Vol. 2, 1983). Is economic theory an ethically neutral discipline or do its statements presuppose a commitment to moral values? Once again this issue is addressed via a case study of the neo-classical theory of rational choice. In the present paper I focus on behaviourist forms of “operationalist” attempts to short-circuit any argument that would seek to infer moral presuppositions from the use of evaluative discourse. In particular, I examine strategies that have sought to excise from economic theory the “mentalistic” vocabulary required to describe valuations per se. And I argue that such tactics are deficient since they i) impoverish the explanatory power of economic theory, (ii) fail to recover the normative usefulness of the theory of choice, and (iii) camouflage the continued presupposition of moral commitments within neo-classical theory.     

Methods for multicountry studies of corporate governance: Evidence from the BRIKT countries

We discuss empirical challenges in multicountry studies of the effects of firm-level corporate governance on firm value, focusing on emerging markets. We assess the severe data, “construct validity”, and endogeneity issues in these studies, propose methods to respond to those issues, and apply those methods to a study of five major emerging markets—Brazil, India, Korea, Russia, and Turkey. We develop unique time-series datasets on governance in each country. We address construct validity by building country-specific indices which reflect local norms and institutions. These similar-but-not-identical indices predict firm market value in each country, and when pooled across countries, in firm fixed-effects (FE) and random-effects (RE) regressions. In contrast, a “common index”, which uses the same elements in each country, has no predictive power in FE regressions. For the country-specific and pooled indices, FE and RE coefficients on governance are generally lower than in pooled OLS regressions, and coefficients with extensive covariates are generally lower than with limited covariates. These results confirm the value of using FE or RE with extensive covariates to reduce omitted variable bias. We develop lower bounds on our estimates which reflect potential remaining omitted variable bias.     

Économie sociale et économie publique: nouvelles formes de coopération à l'ère de la mondialisation

En choisissant le thème du congrès CIRIEC/IFIG 2000 à Montréal, "Économie sociale et économie publique: nouvelles formes de coopération à l'ère de la mondialisation", les instances du CIRIEC international ont voulu inscrire les évolutions récentes des relations entre entreprises publiques et d'économie sociale dans un contexte international en pleine mutation, à l'ère de la mondialisation.     

Do price-tags influence consumers’ willingness to pay? On the external validity of using auctions for measuring value

This paper considers the external validity of the growing corpus of literature that reports the use of laboratory auctions to reveal consumers’ willingness to pay for consumer goods, when the concerned goods are sold in retail stores through posted price procedures. The quality of the parallel between the field and the lab crucially depends on whether being informed of the actual field price influences a consumer’s willingness to pay for a good or not. We show that the elasticity of the WTP revision according to the field price estimation error is significant, positive, and can be roughly approximate to one quarter of the error. We then discuss the normative implications of these results for future experiments aimed at eliciting private valuations through auctions.     

Money growth,uncertainty and macroeconomic activity: a multivariate GARCH analysis

The impact uncertainty has on money growth has received much attention in recent years and is an issue of critical importance to central banks, particularly for those, such as the European Central Bank (ECB), which place a strong emphasis on monetary analysis in monetary policy formulation. Some recent papers examining this issue use ad hoc estimates and measure variability rather than uncertainty. We employ a multivariate GARCH model, which measures uncertainty by the conditional variance of the data series, to investigate whether macroeconomic uncertainty and monetary uncertainty Granger-cause changes in real money. The estimated model also allows us to investigate how monetary uncertainty impacts economic activity. We find that macroeconomic uncertainty impacts positively on US real M2 growth over a two-year horizon but that monetary uncertainty does not cause changes in real M2. Instead, our results indicate that real money growth causes monetary uncertainty. Monetary uncertainty is found to have a negative effect on real economic activity and on macroeconomic uncertainty. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results and the methodological approach used for institutions such as the ECB that give monetary analysis a prominent role in their monetary policy strategy.     

Trade reorientation and post-reform productivity growth in Bulgarian enterprises

This paper analyzes the importance of integration into world markets following the collapse of central planning in explaining the productivity growth performance of Bulgarian firms. Using a large panel data set on 1,300 manufacturing firms for 13 quarters, we find that a shift towards sourcing from - and exporting to - OECD markets is a significant factor explaining firm-level total factor productivity growth.