The reluctance of construction purchasers towards project partnering

While the literature argues that there are several benefits for construction purchasers who join forces to co-develop the project with contractors and to increase cooperation between the various project stakeholders (construction partnering), little research has been done on the reasons for the lack of extensive diffusion of such methods in the construction industry. This paper aims at understanding the rationale behind the reluctance of construction purchasers for this coordination mechanism in France. In particular the paper investigates the impact of the characteristics of the project but also of the characteristics of the purchasing companies in their project procurement behaviour. The findings reveal that the characteristics of the purchasing companies in terms of purchasing strategy, structure and culture seem more explanatory of their procurement behaviour than of the project characteristics. The paper suggests that the lack of diffusion and understanding of construction partnering may be due to the resistance of purchasers who feel threatened by the structural changes it involves in their purchasing habits.     

Gold rush fever in business cycles

A flexible price model of the business cycle is proposed, in which fluctuations are driven primarily by inefficient movements in investment around a stochastic trend. A boom in the model arises when investors rush to exploit new market opportunities even though the resulting investments simply crowd out the value of previous investments. A metaphor for such profit driven fluctuations are gold rushes, as they are periods of economic boom associated with expenditures aimed at securing claims near new found veins of gold. An attractive feature of the model is its capacity to provide a simple structural interpretation to the properties of a standard consumption and output Vector Autoregression.     

Tax Pot Episodes in OECD Countries

How to use an unexpected increase in tax revenues (tax pots) was an important issue in most OECD countries in the second half of the 1990s, the question being more precisely what to do with those windfall revenues: decrease taxes, reduce debt, increase expenditures? In this paper, we study such tax pot episodes in OECD countries over the past 40 years. To that end, we propose a definition of a fiscal pot episode. Once identification is complete, we examine the macroeconomic environment within in those episodes, the way this surplus of revenues has been used, and the degree of success in reducing public debt and in fostering growth. As in the fiscal adjustment literature, we then obtain relatively orthodox conclusions about the use of windfall tax revenues, as it is generally better for future growth and debt level to use the money to reduce expenditures and taxes. J. Japan. Int. Econ., December 2002, 16(4), pp. 436–461. University of Toulouse (IDEI), Toulouse, France; and University of Toulouse (GREMAQ, LEERNA, and IDEI), Toulouse, France, Institut Universitaire de France, and CEPR. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA).Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E6, H6.     

A comparison between qualitative and quantitative histories: the example of the efficient market hypothesis

ABSTRACT

This paper uses the example of the history of the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) and citation analysis in order to investigate some differences between qualitative history and a quantitative history. The history of the EMH provides a telling example of the way quantitative analyses can supply different perspectives on the qualitative history of this hypothesis or complement it. For instance, since the EMH was proposed, several criticisms emerged. In addition, the definition and the scope of this hypothesis have been modified several times. Although the qualitative history of the EMH refers to these criticisms and these alternative definitions and scopes, qualitative tools cannot provide a clear measure of the impact of these criticisms and these modifications among economists. By studying the dissemination of the EMH, its major criticisms, and the answers economists provided, citation analysis sheds a different light on the history of the EMH.     

Judicial impartiality in politically charged cases

This paper examines under which institutional and political circumstances tenured public officials make partisan decisions. It analyzes the decisions of the judges from the French supreme administrative court regarding the validity of controverted mayoral elections between 1958 and 2007 and uses the vote differential between winners and losers in each election as a quasi-natural experiment to assess the judges’ impartiality. It appears that the judges became partisan after 1981, when the far-right Front National party started to gain more votes. Before 1981, judges cancelled elections only when the vote differential between the election winner and the closest challenger was small. Afterwards, the affiliation of the parties’ candidates also mattered as judges seldom cancelled elections won by communist, mainstream left-wing and mainstream right-wing politicians.     

An exploration into Pigou's theory of cycles

This paper explores a theory of business cycles in which recessions and booms arise due to difficulties encountered by agents in properly forecasting the economy's future needs in terms of capital. The idea has a long history in the macroeconomic literature, as reflected by the work of Pigou (Industrial Fluctuation, MacMillan, London, 1926). The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we illustrate the type of general equilibrium structure that can give rise to such phenomena. Second, we examine the extent to which such a model can explain the observed pattern of U.S. recessions (frequency, depth) without relying on technological regress. We argue that such a model offer a framework for understanding elements of both the recent U.S. recession and of the Asia downturns of the late 1990s.     

Modeling the business risk of financially weakened firms: A new approach for corporate bond pricing

Most structural models of default risk assume that the firm's asset return is normally distributed, with a constant volatility. By contrast, this article details the properties that the process of assets should have in the case of financially weakened firms. It points out that jump-diffusion processes with time-varying volatility provide a refined and accurate perspective on the business risk dimension of default risk. Representative Arrow-Debreu state price densities (SPD) and term structures of credit spreads are then explored. The credit curves show that the business uncertainties play a major in the pricing of corporate liabilities.     

Does Contact Between Employees and Service Recipients Lead to Socially More Responsible Behaviours? The Case of Cleaning

Cleaning occupations, which in recent years have accounted for a not inconsiderable share of employment and job creation in France, are characterised by particularly bad working conditions and low pay. Is this situation inevitable? Are there not in fact mechanisms that might lead employers in the cleaning sector to adopt socially more responsible behaviours towards their employees? After all, the literature on corporate social responsibility suggests that the actions of consumers could be one of these mechanisms. The aim of our paper is to test the impact on job quality of contact between cleaning workers and service recipients. To this end, we analyse data from a survey carried out by the French Ministry of Labour and supplemented by interviews. Our results indicate that contact with service recipients does indeed have an influence.     

The Predictive Power of the French Market Volatility Index: A Multi Horizons Study

The main purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the time series properties of the French Market Volatility Index (VX1). We also examine the VX1's ability to forecast future realized market volatility and finds a strong relationship. More importantly, we show how the index can be used to generate volatility forecasts over different horizons and that these forecasts are reasonably accurate predictors of future realized volatility.