WHAT MAKES INTERNATIONAL CAPITAL FLOWS PROMOTE ECONOMIC GROWTH? AN INTERNATIONAL CROSS‐COUNTRY ANALYSIS

This paper re‐examines the relationship between international capital flows and economic growth within the context of various ‘conditional factors’ that possibly have the potential to influence such relationships. It achieves this by employing panel data for 80 countries that cover 1976–2007. International capital inflow is broken down into foreign direct investments (FDI) and foreign portfolio investments (FPI). We find interesting evidence that only FDI has a positive effect on growth and that FPI has an unfavorable, if not negative, effect on growth. The conditional variables of banking liberalization, high‐income level, twin crises, lower corruption, and human capital mitigate the positive impacts of FDI on growth. In contrast, the middle‐income level and good shareholder protection have a positive effect. As concerns FPI, the level of financial liberalization, being in a Latin American region, the wealth of countries, and market governance all influence the way that FPI affects growth, whereas the conditional variables of twin crises and human capital do not influence the effect of FPI on economic growth.     

Depositary Receipts, Country Funds, and the Peso Crash: The Intraday Evidence

We study the intraday impact of exchange rate news on emerging market American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) and closed-end country funds during the 1994 Mexican peso crisis. Peso exchange-rate changes affect prices and trading volumes of Latin American equities, and some closed-end fund behavior is consistent with "noise trader" theories of small investors. However, there is no evidence that peso depreciation triggers a significant sell-off of non-Mexican securities or that other non-Mexican trading patterns change at times of high peso news flow. Thus, the "Tequila Effect" is largely confined to price changes.     

Evaluating travel website motivational communication using a structural equation modelling approach

This study examines online information value structure and its motivational communication competence using the motivational language theory (MLT). MLT explains how communication acts directed by managers to employees generate a greater motivation for work. Five information value dimensions — functional, hedonic, innovation, aesthetic and sign — were identified through literature on the subject of MLT and applied to online information. This study confirmed the multidimensionality of online information and proposed four online information dimensions: experiential (hedonic–innovation), sign, functional and aesthetic. The findings also suggested that experiential (hedonic–innovation) and functional information values have significant effects for travel motivation, including exploration, family togetherness, novelty, escape and socialisation. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Real-world evidence of improved healthcare utilization in patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder after early treatment of paliperidone palmitate once-monthly treatment in Hong Kong

Background: Very few data are available to demonstrate the economic benefit of early paliperidone palmitate once-monthly long-acting injectable (PP1M) treatment in patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder.

Methods and materials: This study has retrospectively compared the healthcare utilization and associated costs of pre- and post-PPIM treatment in 413 patients with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder recruited from three major public hospitals providing psychiatric services in Hong Kong. Patients were categorized into early treatment (≤3 years since diagnosis) and chronic (>3 years) groups, and also whether they were receiving polypharmacy (POP).

Results: It was found that patients who were started on early therapy with no POP had the most favourable outcomes. Overall results of the entire cohort, including both early and late treatments, indicate that there was a slight increase in annual in-patient days (IP) per patient and outpatient visit (OP) by 3.18 and 1.87, respectively, and a decrease in emergency room visit (ER) of 0.9 (p?p?p?p?Conclusions: From the 413 patients studied, potential annual savings is higher by early administration of PPIM in patients with NP. Analysis using multivariate linear regression based on generalized estimating equations and sensitivity analysis using a linear mixed model supported the findings.     

A situational analysis of how barriers to systemic failure are undermined during accident sequences

The concept of barriers to accident sequences is an important one in reasoning about the ways in which risks in a system can be reduced to acceptable levels. An attempt was made to characterize the phenomena that, in practice, undermine such barriers. This involved an analysis of 50 accident reports from the hydrocarbons drilling industry. The analysis characterized the barriers that had failed in terms of their source and effect, and it identified what had undermined them – concentrating on aspects of the situation, rather than the dispositions of the people involved in the accidents. These undermining phenomena varied widely, but in general there was some element that made them intrinsically difficult for designers of systems to discern: for example, the indirectness of causal paths in which some aspect of the design induced some behaviour on the part of an operator, which then created some condition that circumvented the action of a barrier. In a few cases it was the barrier itself that lay at the start of this causal path, making the barrier essentially self-limiting. A simple planning tool was developed to exploit this analysis by helping system designers reason about the ways in which the barriers they incorporate are vulnerable to being defeated.     

Mortality,Health, and Marriage: A Study Based on Taiwan's Population Data

Life expectancy has been increasing significantly since the start of the 20th century, and mortality improvement trends are likely to continue in the 21st century. Stochastic mortality models are used frequently to predict the expansion in life expectancy. In addition to gender, age, period, and cohort are the three main risk factors considered in constructing mortality models. Other than these factors, it is also believed that marital status is related to health and longevity, and many studies have found that married persons have a lower mortality rate than the unmarried. In this study, we have used Taiwan's marital data for the whole population (married, unmarried, divorced/widowed) to evaluate if the marital status can be a preferred criteria. Furthermore, we also want to know whether the preferred criteria will be valid in the future. We chose two popular mortality models, the Lee-Carter and age-period-cohort, to model the mortality improvements for various marital statuses. Because of a linear dependence in the parameters of the age-period-cohort model, we used a computer simulation to choose the appropriate estimation method. Based on Taiwan's marital data, we found that married persons have significantly lower mortality rates than the single, and if converting the difference into a life insurance policy, the discount amount is even larger than that for smokers/nonsmokers.     

Liquidity and Returns to Target Shareholders in the Market for Corporate Control: Evidence from the US Markets

In this paper we analyze how stock market liquidity affects the abnormal return to target firms in mergers and tender offers. We predict that target firms with poorer stock market liquidity receive larger announcement day abnormal returns based on the following considerations. First, target firms with poorer stock market liquidity receive greater liquidity improvements after a merger or tender offer. Second, deals that involve less liquid targets are less anticipated and/or more likely to be completed. Third, less liquid stocks have more diverse reservation prices across shareholders and thus require a higher takeover return. Consistent with these expectations, we show that abnormal returns to target firms’ shareholders are significantly and positively related to the difference in liquidity (measured by the bid‐ask spread) between acquirers and targets as well as the magnitude of target firms’ liquidity improvement.     

Permutation flowshop scheduling to minimize the total tardiness with learning effects

Scheduling with learning effects has received considerable attention recently. Often, numbers of operations have to be done on every job in many manufacturing and assembly facilities. However, it is seldom discussed in the general multiple-machine setting, especially without the assumptions of identical processing time on all the machines or dominant machines. With the current emphasis of customer service and meeting the promised delivery dates, we consider a permutation flowshop scheduling problem with learning effects where the objective is to minimize the total tardiness. A branch-and-bound algorithm and two heuristic algorithms are established to search for the optimal and near-optimal solutions. Computational experiments are also given to evaluate the performance of the algorithms.     

Wage Discrimination Against Workers with Sensory Disabilities

We link information on occupation‐specific job demands to data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation to provide first‐ever estimates of wage discrimination against workers with sensory disabilities. Estimates are derived from wage models that control for job demands related to sensory abilities, and interactions between job demands and workers' sensory limitations. Results indicate approximately one third (one tenth) of the male (female) disability‐related wage differential is potentially attributed to discrimination. The results differ from estimates of discrimination against workers with physical disabilities obtained with similar methods, underscoring the importance of accounting for heterogeneity of the disabled population in discrimination studies.     

Location strategies for agglomeration economies

Because agglomeration economies may create competitive advantage and each location has a unique array of agglomeration economies, where should firms locate? We combine fundamental economic and strategy concepts to: (1) determine when firms must locate proximately to access factor pools; (2) show that factor pools controlled by fewer firms are less useful to new entrants; and (3) demonstrate that certain firms risk aiding competitors when contributing to efficient factor pools. We find support for our predictions with a test on new U.S. manufacturing entrants from 1985 to 1994, using an empirical specification that separates agglomeration levels from agglomeration economies. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.