The impact of demand management policies on black vs. white employment

This article uses vector autoregression analysis to examine the relative impacts on black and white employment growth of monetary and fiscal actions. It was found that the employment responses to anticipated policy actions, while significant, were generally short-lived, with the exception of the effects of anticipated money growth on white employment. The influences of unanticipated policy changes are of a longer duration. The predominant finding in which black employment growth responded differently from white employment growth was in response to a monetary shock. The black employment response was sharply negative while the white employment response was a gradual increase over nine quarters. The results indicate that this difference occurred only during the 1980s and not in the 1970s and suggests that the effects of bank failures and credit rationing during this period may have significantly hurt minority employment opportunities.     

UK Industrial Policy: Old Tunes on New Instruments?

This paper discusses the current Labour government's industrialpolicy—as most recently reflected in its document on manufacturingstrategy—in the context of industrial policy in the UKover the last 50 years and the form that it has taken elsewherein Europe. It concludes that the thematic priorities for UKindustrial policy in the 1960s—international competitiveness,innovation, competition, and skills—continue to be thekey themes of UK policy today. The paper presents data thatillustrate the gaps that exist in key indicators of performancebetween the UK and its main economic competitors. The differencebetween the 1960s and the 2000s is that there are new instrumentsof policy. Two areas in particular are focused on—competitionpolicy and technology policy—and an attempt is made toassess the likely effectiveness of these new instruments. Thepaper concludes that the international evidence base for thesenew approaches is reasonably robust but that it is still toosoon to tell if they are having the hoped-for impact on theperformance of the UK economy.     

Medical Malpractice Liability and Physician Migration

This paper uses national data on individual physicians and two control groups to provide evidence on the extent to which each of five medical malpractice reforms impacts the decision to move one's medical practice to another state. We find robust evidence that states that have implemented noneconomic damage caps experience less out-migration of physicians than states that do not have these reforms. In addition, we find some evidence that joint and several liability reforms and patient compensation funds also impact the migration decisions of physicians.     

International Financial Cooperation and the Number of Adherents: The Basel Committee and Capital Regulation

Theoretical analyses of international cooperation point to cooperation being optimized with a small number of participants. History is consistent with this view. However an anomaly is the international capital standards created by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). Basel I has over 100 adherents, and approximately that number of countries have been identified in a survey as candidates for Basel II. The author demonstrates that this is not an anomaly. First, Basel I was a product of a duopoly and then an oligopoly prior to approval by the BCBS. Secondly, self-interest and other factors explain why more than 100 countries have agreed to accept these standards. JEL Classification Numbers: E58, F33, G15, G28     

Spatial determinants of Japanese FDI in China

Research on foreign direct investment in China has spawned an increasingly large literature. Whilst regional cleavages with respect to the distribution of foreign direct investment (FDI) are acknowledged, empirical research on the spatial determinants of FDI in China has been limited. Furthermore, research on the spatial determinants of home country FDI in China has thus far been neglected due to difficulties in accessing the appropriate data. The objective of this paper is to examine the spatial determinants of Japanese direct investment in China by using an econometric model. To that purpose, a dataset is created from the Toyo Keizai directory on the overseas activities of Japanese companies. The results show that tertiary education, inland waterways, as well as coastal location are positive and significant determinants of Japanese investment in China.     

Earnings on the Information Technology Roller Coaster: Insight from Matched Employer-Employee Data

This article uses matched employer-employee data for the State of Georgia to examine workers' earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector's employment boom of the mid-1990s and bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for pre-boom individual characteristics, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than workers who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is no benefit to having been touched by technology, likely because of the nontransferability of manufacturing experience to other industries.