Misalignment of the Baht and its Trade Balance Consequences for Thailand in the 1980s and 1990s

This paper examines Thailand's pre‐crisis exchange rate policy, focusing on the degree of the country's real exchange rate misalignment pre‐crisis and its consequent effects on Thailand's trade balance with its two large trading partners, the US and Japan, in the 1980s and 1990s. Defining misalignment as the difference between actual and ‘equilibrium’ exchange rates, we estimate three key ‘equilibrium’ exchange rates of the Thai baht: (a) the real effective equilibrium exchange rate of the Thai baht against its twenty‐two major trading partners; (b) the bilateral real equilibrium exchange rates of the baht against the US dollar; and (c) the bilateral real equilibrium exchange rate of the baht against the Japanese yen.     

Border Effects Before and After 9/11: Panel Data Evidence Across Industries

The paper builds a unique industry‐level panel data set to estimate the border effects associated with US–Canada trade for each year from 1992 to 2005. We first establish the theoretical foundation of our empirical model as a multisector version of Anderson and van Wincoop. Estimates from data aggregated at the province/state level yield border effects that increase slightly in the early 1990s, then decline after the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), but then increase significantly after 2001. Results based on three‐digit NAICS level data reveal higher border effects in the early 1990s and substantial heterogeneity across industries. The results are robust to a variety of specifications and models, and they suggest that the security measures adopted in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001 had considerable adverse effects on US–Canada trade.     

STRATEGIC OUTSOURCING UNDER ECONOMIES OF SCALE

We show that economies of scale in upstream production can lead both the disintegrated downstream firm as well as its vertically integrated rival to outsource offshore for intermediate goods, even if offshore production has a moderate cost disadvantage compared to in‐house production of the vertically integrated firm.     

Economic development and capability expansion in historical perspective

This paper is the text of a lecture given by the author at the Academic Conference on Charitable Services and Social Forces in History, at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, on 8 December 1999.     

Implied Lévy volatility

We study the cause of large fluctuations in prices on the London Stock Exchange. This is done at the microscopic level of individual events, where an event is the placement or cancellation of an order to buy or sell. We show that price fluctuations caused by individual market orders are essentially independent of the volume of orders. Instead, large price fluctuations are driven by liquidity fluctuations, variations in the market's ability to absorb new orders. Even for the most liquid stocks there can be substantial gaps in the order book, corresponding to a block of adjacent price levels containing no quotes. When such a gap exists next to the best price, a new order can remove the best quote, triggering a large midpoint price change. Thus, the distribution of large price changes merely reflects the distribution of gaps in the limit order book. This is a finite size effect, caused by the granularity of order flow: in a market where participants place many small orders uniformly across prices, such large price fluctuations would not happen. We show that this also explains price fluctuations on longer timescales. In addition, we present results suggesting that the risk profile varies from stock to stock, and is not universal: lightly traded stocks tend to have more extreme risks.     

股利政策告示效应的成因分析

公司的净利润主要有两个用途，一是作为股利发放给股东，二是留在公司进行再投资。股利政策就是以公司发展为目标、以股价稳定为核心、在平衡企业内外相关利益团体利益的基础上，对于净利润在提出了各种公积金后，如何在发放红利和再投资二者之间进行分配而采取的基本态度和方针政策。适当的股利政策不仅可以树立良好的公司形象，而且还能激发广大投资者对公司持续投资的热情，从而使公司因此获得长期、稳定的发展条件与机会。股利政策一般涉及股利支付率的高低、股利支付的具体形式的选择、股利支付率增长政策、股利发放率政策以及股利发放程序策划等5个方面。在非对称的信息条件下，公司发布股利政策将给投资者传递一定的信息。投资者可以从股利政策中解读到关于该公司的财务状况，发展前景等方面的信息，     

Terms of Trade and Welfare for a Developing Economy with an Imperfectly Competitive Sector

The effect of terms of trade on the welfare of a small open economy is analyzed. It exports a homogeneous good and imports some brands of a differentiated good. It also produces some brands of the differentiated good which are not traded. A terms-of-trade deterioration causes resources to move to the nontraded, import-competing sector. The economy's income rises and the price index for the differentiated good falls, resulting in higher welfare. This accords well with the experience of developing economies of East and Southeast Asia.