How do financial cycles affect public debt cycles?

We employ the duration framework to study determinants of public debt cycles in 57 advanced and emerging economies over the 1960–2014 period, with a particular focus on the impact of financial cycles. The results suggest that the association between financial and debt cycles is asymmetric. Debt expansions preceded by overheating in credit and financial markets tend to last longer than other expansions, but there is no significant association between financial cycles and debt contractions. There is strong evidence of duration dependence in both phases of the cycle, with the likelihood of expansions and contractions to end increasing with the length of their respective spells. Higher initial level of debt increases the spell of contractions (persistence of adjustment effort hypothesis) and reduces the spell of expansions (debt sustainability hypothesis). The results are robust to the inclusion of global factors, openness, political stability, and debt crisis indicators as additional controls.     

Strategic decisions on bilateral bidding behavior: evidence from a wholesale electricity market

This article analyzes the strategic bilateral bidding behavior in the Spanish electricity wholesale market (OMEL). The collection of data includes information regarding weekly averages of spot prices, the quantity bid in the wholesale market, the quantities purchased in the wholesale market and sold in the open market, and the behavior of conduct parameters for the period from January 2002 to April 2007 for the four largest firms of the Spanish electricity market: Endesa, Iberdrola, Unión Fenosa and Hidrocantábrico. This article employs the New Empirical Industrial Organization approach. The empirical analysis was based on the autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration and on the Toda–Yamamoto Granger causality tests to validate the standard version of the theoretical formulation of the standard Cournot model, and its theoretical extension, to encompass the hypothesis of the presence of bid interdependence for electricity quantities sold and bought in the Spanish electricity wholesale market. The results of cointegration and causality analysis reinforce the empirical results of the extended Cournot model with the inclusion of the two main bidding variables that solved the optimization problem of profit maximization for each of the four firms analyzed.     

Bootstrap LM tests for higher-order spatial effects in spatial linear regression models

This paper first extends the methodology of Yang (J Econom 185:33–59, 2015) to allow for non-normality and/or unknown heteroskedasticity in obtaining asymptotically refined critical values for the LM-type tests through bootstrap. Bootstrap refinements in critical values require the LM test statistics to be asymptotically pivotal under the null hypothesis, and for this we provide a set of general methods for constructing LM and robust LM tests. We then give detailed treatments for two general higher-order spatial linear regression models: namely the \(\mathtt{SARAR}(p,q)\) model and the \(\mathtt{MESS}(p,q)\) model, by providing a complete set of non-normality robust LM and bootstrap LM tests for higher-order spatial effects, and a complete set of LM and bootstrap LM tests robust against both unknown heteroskedasticity and non-normality. Monte Carlo experiments are run, and results show an excellent performance of the bootstrap LM-type tests.     

All grown up? The fate after 15 years of a quarter of a million UK firms born in 1998

The theory of firm growth is in a rather unsatisfactory state. However, the analysis of large firm-level datasets which have become available in recent years allows us to begin building an evidence base which can, in turn, be used to underpin the development of more satisfactory theory. Here we study the 239 thousand UK private sector firms born in 1998 over their first 15 years of life. A first, and quite striking, finding is the extraordinary force of mortality. By age 15, 90% of the UK firms born in 1998 are dead, and, for those surviving to age 15, the hazard of death is still about 10% a year. The chance of death is related to the size and growth of firms in an interesting way. Whilst the hazard rate after 15 years is largely independent of size at birth, it is strongly affected by the current (age 14) size. In particular, firms with more than five employees are half as likely to die in the next year as firms with less than five employees. A second important finding is that most firms, even those which survive to age 15, do not grow very much. By age 15 more than half the 26,000 survivors still have less than five jobs. In other words, the growth paths – what we call the ‘growth trajectories’ – of most of the 26,000 survivors are pretty flat. However, of the firms that do grow, firms born smaller grow faster than those born larger. Another striking finding is that growth is heavily concentrated in the first five years. Whilst growth does continue, even up to age 15, each year after age five it involves only a relatively small proportion of firms. Finally, there are two groups of survivors which contribute importantly to job creation. Some are those born relatively large (with more than 20 jobs) although their growth rate is quite modest. More striking though, is a very small group of firms born very small with less than five jobs (about 5% of all survivors) which contribute a substantial proportion (more than one third) of the jobs added to the cohort total by age 15.     

Minimum investment requirement,financial market imperfection and self-fulfilling belief

We develop a model in which a strategic complementarity in saving decisions arises due to a minimum investment requirement and financial market imperfection. We explore the role of self-fulling beliefs in determining the long run dynamics. The model exhibits a wide range of dynamic phenomena such as a poverty trap, a big push and a sunspot equilibrium, depending on the level of financial market imperfection. They account for excessive volatility and a sudden change in the saving rate and its macroeconomic consequences without any shocks to fundamentals.     

Testing evolutionary theory of household consumption behavior in the case of novelty - a product characteristics approach

This article tests and extends the evolutionary theory of household consumption behavior, which is an alternative to neoclassical theory. Evolutionary economists offer novel approaches to the analysis of consumption behavior that emphasize the major role of learning in the evolution of consumer preferences and wants. As a possible inspiration for further progress in evolutionary thought, this paper examines the idea of consumer learning by studying the nature of what consumers should learn in the context of ‘novelty’. Our empirical results regarding novelty during the learning process show that consumers learn the ‘new characteristics’ of consumer goods, contrary to the Lancasterian approach, which suggests that the characteristics space of goods is fixed. We show that during the process of consumption, ‘consumer learning’ extends the characteristics space of consumer goods; this phenomenon is far from negligible and differs across product types. Moreover, our results show that the emergence of new characteristics cannot be modeled as a Poisson process because these new characteristics exhibit clear interdependence over time.     

Learning by replicator and best-response: the importance of being indifferent

This paper compares two learning processes, namely those generated by replicator and best-response dynamics, from the point of view of the asymptotics of play. We base our study on the intersection of the basins of attraction of locally stable pure Nash equilibria for replicator and best-response dynamics. Local stability implies that the basin of attraction has positive measure but there are examples where the intersection of the basin of attraction for replicator and best-response dynamics is arbitrarily small. We provide conditions, involving the existence of an unstable interior Nash equilibrium, for the basins of attraction of any locally stable pure Nash equilibrium under replicator and best-response dynamics to intersect in a set of positive measure. Hence, for any choice of initial conditions in sets of positive measure, if a pure Nash equilibrium is locally stable, the outcome of learning under either procedure coincides. We provide examples illustrating the above, including some for which the basins of attraction exactly coincide for both learning dynamics. We explore the role that indifference sets play in the coincidence of the basins of attraction of the stable Nash equilibria.     

Going up and down: rethinking the empirics of growth in the developing and newly industrialized world

Growth dynamics are remarkably heterogeneous, in particular when one focuses on developing countries. Economic miracles and failures are embedded within extended phases of either growth or decline. In this paper, we analyze the growth patterns of developing and newly industrialized countries on the basis of structural breaks and growth regimes experienced. Emphasizing the presence of broken trends, we focus on the difference between expansionary and recessionary regimes of medium length, and we show that models of takeoffs and exponential growth are inadequate to characterize the majority of observed growth dynamics. Then, we move to a systematic classification of different patterns and we isolate an additional stylized fact characterizing the process of growth and development. In particular, our results show that expansionary regimes are associated with convergence and positive correlation between growth and (short run) volatility. By contrast, in recessionary regimes, poorer countries face deeper failures and a negative correlation between growth and volatility is found, indicating that output fluctuates less around the trend during strong rather than mild recessions. Catching-up phenomena are infrequent but more likely to occur across categories of growth patterns rather than within. Finally, we discover that regimes of growth and recession show similar average length (about 16 years). Although recessions are, on average, remarkably pronounced (14% loss of GDP per capita), the magnitude of growth is much larger during expansions. In sum, our results underline that stable positive growth is hardly achieved in developing countries, which rather alternate long phases of expansions with equally long phases of recession. Moreover, cross-sectional empirical regularities are found to differ between regimes of positive and negative growth.     

The biological hypothesis in cliometrics of growth: a methodological critique of Fogel (post 1982) and Ashraf & Galor (2013)

The resort to biological “analogies”, “metaphors” and “concepts” is an important aspect of the history of the relationships between economics and biology and has long been greatly controversial. This controversy continues today in the most recent work of three cliometricians, i.e. Fogel (post 1982) and Ashraf and Galor (2013). We focus on the theories of historical growth relying on biological explanations which have been formulated by these economists, from the specific angle of biological reductionism. We propose a methodological critique of their use of biological variables as determinants of the historical dynamics of economic growth. Based upon the transposition to the field of economics of Ernst Mayr’s distinction between functional and evolutionary biology and his definitions of reductionism, we argue that despite some similarities, the questions raised by Fogel’s and Ashraf & Galor’s theories are of distinct nature. Nonetheless, we stress the need for a careful examination of the biological mechanisms supporting these researches.     

Market failure vs. system failure as a rationale for economic policy? A critique from an evolutionary perspective

This paper reconsiders the explanation of economic policy from an evolutionary economics perspective. It contrasts the neoclassical equilibrium notions of market and government failure with the dominant evolutionary neo-Schumpeterian and Austrian-Hayekian perceptions. Based on this comparison, the paper criticizes the fact that neoclassical reasoning still prevails in non-equilibrium evolutionary economics when economic policy issues are examined. This is more than surprising, since proponents of evolutionary economics usually view their approach as incompatible with its neoclassical counterpart. In addition, it is shown that this “fallacy of failure thinking” even finds its continuation in the alternative concept of “system failure” with which some evolutionary economists try to explain and legitimate policy interventions in local, regional or national innovation systems. The paper argues that in order to prevent the otherwise fruitful and more realistic evolutionary approach from undermining its own criticism of neoclassical economics and to create a consistent as well as objective evolutionary policy framework, it is necessary to eliminate the equilibrium spirit. Finally, the paper delivers an alternative evolutionary explanation of economic policy which is able to overcome the theory-immanent contradiction of the hitherto evolutionary view on this subject.