Bank competition in Russia: An examination at different levels of aggregation

We analyze bank competition in Russia at different levels of aggregation. First, we compute a country-level measure of competition and compare it to that for similar-sized economies. Second, we contrast competition across different groups of banks in Russia. Third, we analyze bank competition across Russian regions. We find that banks in Russia are less competitive than those in Brazil, but more so than those in China and India. Large and state-owned banks exert more market power than others. Finally, competition is stronger in regions where there is less bank concentration, greater presence of banks, and greater financial and/or economic development.     

Citizens’ Europe: Crowded out by economic focus

Over the last ten years the European unification project seemed to rely overwhelmingly on progress in economic terms. The most prominent achievements — the Single Market, the harmonisation of market regulation, the euro — were all driven by an economic rationale. However, attempts to rescue Europe from the ongoing financial crisis call for mutual support and solidarity, concepts that can hardly be derived from pure economic reasoning. This leads to an important question that has been too long neglected: what is the political and civic motivation for a united Europe? Besides a great desire to stabilise peace in Europe, the origins of the unification activities also included mutual interest in language, culture, habits and people in neighbouring countries. Has this been abandoned in favour of a purely economic vision? Or are the economic arguments merely the easiest to promote to the European population? What message does this send in times of mistrust in markets and dim economic prospects for the eurozone? Can a political, cultural and civic European spirit still be reinvigorated, and if so, how?     

Short-term wholesale funding and systemic risk: A global CoVaR approach

We use the CoVaR approach to identify the main factors behind systemic risk in a set of large international banks. We find that short-term wholesale funding is a key determinant in triggering systemic risk episodes. In contrast, we find weaker evidence that either size or leverage contributes to systemic risk within the class of large international banks. We also show that asymmetries based on the sign of bank returns play an important role in capturing the sensitivity of system-wide risk to individual bank returns. Since short-term wholesale funding emerges as the most relevant systemic factor, our results support the Basel Committee’s proposal to introduce a net stable funding ratio, penalizing excessive exposure to liquidity risk.     

Globally networked: Intraorganizational boundary spanning in the global organization

Multinational corporations (MNCs) need to sense, source, and mobilize knowledge when and where it arises, whether at home, or elsewhere in the world. For this reason, MNCs benefit from employee networks of relationships that span across intraorganizational barriers, allowing for the efficient mobilization of knowledge across boundaries. Yet, which organizational members are more likely to be able to develop these boundary spanning networks? We leverage a unique data set from a large multinational corporation to empirically test a comprehensive model that captures the effect of an employee’s mandate, expertise, and behavioral orientations on her likelihood to span intraorganizational boundaries that manifest themselves in the form of hierarchies, intra-functional domains, and geographic territories. We find that the employees that are more likely to be boundary spanners are those having mandates with a global impact, high levels of expertise, and a collaborative orientation in their networking behaviors. In addition, we find that these effects are stronger for those employees that have large formal workflow networks.     

Bergstrom,Blume, and Varian: Voluntary contributions and neutrality

Bergstrom, Blume, and Varian provided a neutrality result for the private provision of public goods that has inspired a considerable literature. The result has significant implications for income redistribution and broader policy interventions. This paper reviews the basic result and its applications, and discusses extensions to general private provision economies.     

Decomposing the growth in residential land in the United States

This paper decomposes the growth in land occupied by residences in the United States to give the relative contributions of changing demographics versus changes in residential land per household. Between 1976 and 1992 the amount of residential land in the United States grew 47.7% while population only grew 17.8%. At first glance, this suggest an important role for per-household increases. However, the calculations in this paper show that only 24.5% of the growth in residential land area can be attributed to state-level changes in land per household. 37.3% is due to overall population growth, 22.6% to an increase in the number of households over this period, 6% to the shift of population towards states with larger houses, and the remaining 9.6% to interactions between these changes. There are large differences across states and metropolitan areas in the relative importance of these components.     

How Strategic Groups Act Competitively Within and Across Markets

Our study analyzes rivalry within and across markets of size‐defined strategic groups in the banking industry. We consider that, owing to group‐level effects, like efficiency and funding, the degree of rivalry of size‐defined strategic groups depends on whether the competitor is acting in the same or in a different market and whether the competing firms are within the same strategic group or in different groups. We estimate the effect of group interactions within and across loans and deposits markets on firm performance in the Spanish banking industry. We find evidences of rivalry as described in our hypotheses. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Agriculture and aggregate productivity: A quantitative cross-country analysis

A decomposition of aggregate labor productivity based on internationally comparable data reveals that a high share of employment and low labor productivity in agriculture are mainly responsible for low aggregate productivity in poor countries. Using a two-sector general-equilibrium model, we show that differences in economy-wide productivity, barriers to modern intermediate inputs in agriculture, and barriers in the labor market generate large cross-country differences in the share of employment and labor productivity in agriculture. The model implies a factor difference of 10.8 in aggregate labor productivity between the richest and the poorest 5% of the countries in the world, leaving the unexplained factor at 3.2. Overall, this two-sector framework performs much better than a single-sector growth model in explaining observed differences in international productivity.     

Gobierno corporativo,financiamiento y género: un estudio de las pymes emisoras de títulos en los mercados de valores argentinos

The aim of this work is to study corporate governance (CG) in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) from a gender perspective. In particular, we study the participation of women in ownership, management (board and senior management) and external audit in SMEs participating in the Argentinean Securities Market. The results show that participation of women in ownership and in external audit has a significant relationship with financing decisions. However, we do not find evidence of relations among different levels of GC and gender.