Stagflation,new products,and speculation

The paper looks at the macroeconomic implications of some recent developments in the theory of industrial organization. In a Kaleckian model, firms are assumed to invest heavily early in the product life cycle, thus creating effective demand. Conversely, it is assumed that late in the product life cycle firms hoard, waiting for new products in which to invest. Under reasonable conditions, the rates of growth, unemployment, and inflation can be related to the fraction of new products in the economy.     

Competitive strategy under uncertainty

Competitive strategy under uncertainty involves a trade-off between acting early and acting later after the uncertainty is resolved, and another trade-off between focusing resources on one scenario and spreading resources on several scenarios, thus maintaining flexibility. This paper analyzes both these trade-offs taking into consideration the nature of uncertainty, industry economics, intensity of competition, and the position of a firm relative to its competitors.     

Forecasting with Monetary Aggregates: Recent Evidence for the United States

We investigate the out-of-sample forecasting performance of various monetary aggregates in four-variate models of real output growth, inflation, changes in an interest rate, and nominal money growth from 1992 to 2004 using vector autoregressive (VAR) and regime-switching (RS) VAR models. We consider both Divisia and simple sum monetary aggregates for M1, M2M, M2, and M3 as well as sweep-adjusted M1 measures. We find little evidence that either aggregation method or level of aggregation has a big impact on the forecasting performance of our model with respect to inflation and real output growth. Our results indicate that VAR models with monetary aggregates appear to produce at best marginal improvements in RMSE over VAR models that omit money growth altogether. We also find that RS-VAR models usually provide better one quarter ahead forecasts than comparable VAR models, but often did worse when forecasting inflation four quarters ahead.     

Organizational Languages

This paper is concerned with communication within a team of players trying to coordinate in response to information dispersed among them. The problem is nontrivial because they cannot communicate all information instantaneously but have to send longer or shorter sequences of messages, using coarse codes. We focus on the design of these codes and show that members may gain compatibility advantages by using identical codes and that this can support the existence of several, more or less efficient, symmetric equilibria. Asymmetric equilibria may exist only if coordination across different sets of members is of sufficiently different importance. The results are consistent with the stylized fact that firms differ even within industries and that coordination between divisions is harder than coordination inside divisions.     

Die wahrscheinliche Le bensdauer und die Sterblichkeitsmessung

Im Gegensatz zur durchschnittlichen Lebensdauer hat die wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer in der Versicherungstechnik wohl kaum je eine wirkliche Anwendung gefunden. Der Grund hierfür dürfte hauptsächlich in der recht schwierigen mathematischen Definition dieser Masszahl zu such en sein. Während die durchschnittliche Lebensdauer bekantlich explicite definiert ist, so ist die wahrscheinliche Lebensdauer — wir werden sie mit t^tx bezeichnen — implicite durch die Gleichung definiert.     

Deutsche Privathochschulen — ein „emerging market“?

Zusammenfassung  Die Universit?t Witten/Herdecke stand kurz vor einer Insolvenz. Im Sog der Geschehnisse ist ihr Pr?sident Birger P. Priddat im Dezember 2008 von seinem Amt zurückgetreten. Er skizziert hier den Bildungsmarkt in Deutschland. Prof. Dr. Birger P. Priddat, 59, ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Politische ?konomie an der Universit?t Witten/Herdecke und war dort bis vor kurzem Pr?sident.     

Foreign Institutional Investment,Ownership, and Liquidity: Real and Informational Frictions

The literature widely documents the negative liquidity impact of foreign participation in firms that permit high foreign institutional ownership. This paper employs a unique setting for the limited participation of qualified foreign institutional investors (QFIIs) in China's A-share market and examines how this impacts on stock liquidity in emerging markets. Contrary to the findings in the literature, foreign investor participation helps enhance the liquidity of affected stocks by promoting trade activities and price discovery. The improvement in liquidity does not occur through the information friction channel, but rather the real friction channel. Our results are robust to endogeneity issue and the possible influence of the global financial crisis, industry effects and the stock exchange. Further, the liquidity improving effects of QFII are even stronger when the analysis is performed on a subsample of QFII firms.     

Concentration ratios,strategy and performance: The case of the Norwegian telecommunications industry

This article explores how changes in industry structure are reflected in changes in performance and strategy. A set of interrelated hypotheses is proposed and examined in one industry (the Norwegian telecommunications industry). Increasing competition was found to be positively related to increasing industry concentration but negatively related to new entries and performance as measured by value added. Large and small firms were found to vary in performance, and they are seemingly applying different strategies in coping with stagnating market opportunities.