Exchange Rate Regime and Demand for Reserves: Evidence from Kenya,Mexico and Philippines

This paper empirically investigates the demand for international reserves (and foreign exchange reserves) during fixed and floating exchange rates periods in three developing countries: Kenya, Mexico and Philippines. Based on theoretical models, three factors are identified as important for the demand of international reserves and foreign reserves: average propensity to import, volume of imports and variability of reserves. The paper employs the cointegration methodology and error correction method to investigate the relationships. Cointegration tests results indicate a reliable long-run stationary relationship between the international reserves (and foreign exchange reserves) and the stated explanatory variables across countries and sub-periods of fixed and clean float. The error correction results indicate causality from the explanatory variables to the reserves during both the short and long run. This is true during both the fixed and the floating periods.

测量中国

通过选择宏观经济增长和大宗商品消费的若干基础性指标,系统观察中国在这些指标上的全球总量占比和增量贡献比,文章对中国经济相对体量及其成长前景加以估测。基本观察结果显示,中国现阶段经济相对体量可用人均量较小,总量较大,增量很大概括。定量指标刻画的发展阶段性特征,构成中国重新审视对外经贸政策和战略思维的现实背景。     

国际投资保护主义的历史演进、特点及应对策略研究

近年来,中国跨国公司的全球化进程不断加快,海外并购和绿地新建的规模和速度不断提升,但与此同时,并购受阻、整合失败的案例不绝于耳,中国企业在走出去的过程中遇到很多障碍和壁垒,受到很多歧视。为此,回顾了二战后国际投资保护主义的演进历史,并对其特点进行分析梳理,总结归纳出应对国际投资保护主义的对策建议。     

Gibrat’s Law with Mild Nonrandom Growth

Gibrat’s Law (GL) has repeatedly failed to gain full empirical confirmation in specific industries. This study offers a deliberately favorable opportunity for full confirmation in the truckload sector of the U.S. trucking industry where firms are highly homogeneous. As such, most nonrandom determinants of growth remain very similar for all firms, so significant differences in growth rates are not expected. Still, there is only incomplete support: (1) long term growth rates are not equal for all firms, but the differences are small and not size-related except for the smallest firms, and (2) the size distributions better approximate lognormal when the smallest firms are excluded, but in no case does the variance rise over time. This suggests that for most other industries, where nonrandom growth should be much stronger, GL would seem unlikely to play more than a minor role in portraying actual firm growth or the evolution of market structure.     

简析国际矿产品价格波动的影响因素

随着量化宽松政策的实施,美国的低利率时代到来。美国政府拟通过增加基础性货币投放量等方式促进银行借贷规模,进而促进投资和消费的增长,复苏本国经济。在全球经济一体化时代及美元作为世界性货币的今天,美国的量化宽松政策导致了全球的流动性泛滥,而影响国际矿产品价格波动的因素也变得日趋复杂。除了国际宏观经济状况、矿产品市场供需状况和矿产品市场结构等传统因素外,诸如新兴经济体工业化进程和期货市场的投机行为也成为影响国际矿产品价格波动的新兴因素。在传统因素与新兴因素的相互作用与影响下,当前的国际矿产品价格呈现出频繁波动的态势。     

Teaching the coase theorem: Are we getting it right?

The authors examine current textbook representations of Coase's analysis of negative externalities [Coase, 1960]. Standard treatments identify Coase's ideas with Stigler's Coase Theorem: a zero transaction cost world in which efficient solutions emerge automatically, regardless of legal rules and the initial allocation of rights. Yet Coase's seminal paper breaks from this mode of analysis. The authors use this intellectual history to distinguish two approaches to negative externalities: blackboard (Pigou, Stigler, Samuelson) and Coasean. They survey 45 microeconomics textbooks and find that 80 percent misrepresent Coase's arguments. They argue that a Coasean approach increases students' critical thinking skills by challenging them to move beyond simple laissez faire or interventionist solutions.     

Internationalization of Blue-Chip versus Mid-Cap Stock Indices: an Empirical Analysis for France,Germany, and the UK

The paper analyzes the question whether blue-chip stock indices provide a larger degree of internationalization than mid-cap stock indices. Specific focus lies on internationalization of indices in France, Germany, and the UK. Additionally, we analyze whether the degree of internationalization differs between industries. The dataset covers the CAC40, the DAX30 and the 30 largest firms in the FTSE100 as blue-chip indices and the CAC Next 20 and CAC Mid 60, the MDAX and TecDAX, and the remaining 70 companies in the FTSE100 as mid-cap indices. The comparison of blue-chip and mid-cap indices is based on three indicators of internationalization: percentages of employees based outside the firms’ home country, percentages of foreign sales, and percentages of foreign corporate tax payments. Blue-chip and mid-cap indices exhibit high levels of internationalization. Internationalization is stronger in German and UK blue-chip indices than in these countries’ mid-cap indices, whereas internationalization in French mid-cap and blue-chip indices is similar. Blue-chip and mid-cap firms in the energy/materials/utilities and industrials sectors exhibit similar levels of internationalization, whereas blue-chip firms in the consumer and health sectors exhibit higher levels than corresponding mid-cap firms. The research question and results are of particular importance for retail and institutional investors, because investing in indices typically represents a low cost alternative to individual stock picking. The question whether stock index characteristics, such as market capitalization and industry, influence the degree of international diversification within the index is largely unanswered in the literature. The paper addresses this question.     

Digitale Perspektiven in der Kommunikations- und Mediengeschichte

In the discussion about the future of communication and media science in digital times, this article focuses on the position and perspective of communication and media history. The challenges, problems and potentials associated with digitization are illustrated using the example of historical press research. Within the media ensemble of classical mass communication, the periodic press in particular benefits from the retrospective digitization of historical media and their digital edition in databases and portals. For historical press research, digitized newspapers and digital newspaper portals represent an originally new, because increasingly digital research situation: Digital newspaper portals as a novel, originally digital world for newspapers not only facilitate the path to newspapers and their contents, they also open them up as digital resources machine-readable and thus open up completely new paths for research—not least supported by digital methods.The main objective of this article is to discuss the epistemological-methodological problems and the practical operationalization of digitally framed or supported research processes in historical press research and to present concrete perspectives of knowledge and research strategies for practice. With this aim in mind, the paper discusses three points:(1.) Methodological and practical consequences of historical press research in digital research environments. With the digitization of newspapers and their digital reproduction in newspaper portals, their source character shifts essentially in three dimensions: They are edited and indexed digitally and their complete content is made accessible through optical character recognition. This makes previously unimportant technical aspects such as data formats, portal interfaces, search algorithms and programming interfaces very relevant for the methodology of historical press research. A primary methodological effect of the digital reorganization of newspapers in data and portals is the reversal of the usual reading practice: from “top down” to “bottom up”. With the help of “keyword searching”, newspapers can now be searched comprehensively and transversely to the order of the newspaper original. Nevertheless, there is a warning against an all too naïve and uncritical usage of digitized newspapers and newspaper portals. In practice, some problems and risks are crucial for the conception of historical newspaper research in digital research environments: Besides a hardly standardized and in large parts “wild”, because often uncoordinated and selective digitization of newspapers, the newspaper portals are different in their conception as well as characterized by different content, technical, legal and entrepreneurial conditions.(2.) Historical newspapers as digital sources in practice. The methodological and technical framework are fundamental and far-reaching for the further practical use of newspapers as digital sources in research. In each research step, it must be considered that digitized newspapers are genuinely new and, depending on the quality and depth of digitization, very complex sources with information gains and losses compared to the originals. Newspapers are not simply digitized, they are digitally constructed and differ in this construction from each other. In this respect, historical press researchers are increasingly becoming “users”. However simple and uncomplicated newspaper portals may be in practice, one must incorporate the implicit functions (hidden in algorithms, data and code) and the limits of these knowledge engines and their “correct” use into the research process. Combining and mediating classical hermeneutic methods with search technologies is an essential moment in the practical handling of digitized newspapers.(3.) Historical press research and digital methods. In the light of the new research situation which is emerging with digitized newspapers and newspaper portals, it is obvious that historical press research should increasingly open up to the possibilities of digital methods. In the digital method discussion of historical press research, one concept in particular forms a central point of reference: Franco Moretti’s concept of “Distant Reading”. Basically, “Distant Reading”—and this is what makes this perspective so interesting for historical press research in dealing with the considerable metadata and full text volumes of digitized newspapers—is about the quantitative-automatic indexing of large text corpora using methods and techniques of “Text Mining”. Digital text methods are thus seriously changing the way we look at texts and the research practice with texts such as newspapers: In parts, they automate and accelerate reading processes, produce “new” text extracts by the computer, generate new interpretation contexts between individual text, corpus and condensate, and thus set new orientation points for “close reading”. Computers and digital text methods thus do not relieve researchers of interpretation. Rather, they constantly challenge them to interpret in a continuous interplay in order to give meaning to the text patterns discovered by machines.In spite of all these advantages, digital methods have so far only been used sporadically in historical press research. For this reason, finally a digital workflow for research processes in historical press research will be presented, which illustrates and summarizes essential challenges, problems, solutions and potentials of digitally framed or supported research in press history.