The inside scoop: Acceptance and rejection at the journal of international economics

There is little work on the inner workings of journals. What factors seem to affect the ability to publish in a journal? Could simple rules (which are already used by some journals) like the desk rejection of a significant minority of papers, help to streamline the process? At what cost? How well do journals seem to do in choosing papers? What can we say about the extent of type 1 and type 2 errors? Do editors seem to have uniform standards or are some harsher than others? We use data on submissions to the Journal of International Economics to help answer these questions.     

The simultaneous berth and quay crane allocation problem

This paper addresses efficient berth and crane allocation scheduling at a multi-user container terminal. First, we introduce a formulation for the simultaneous berth and crane allocation problem. Next, by employing genetic algorithm we develop a heuristic to find an approximate solution for the problem. The fitness value of a chromosome is obtained by crane transfer scheduling across berths, which is determined by a maximum flow problem-based algorithm based on a berth allocation problem solution defined by the chromosome. The results of numerical experiments show that the proposed heuristic is applicable to solve this difficult but essential terminal operation problem.     

Interpenetration of organization and market : Japan's firm and market in comparison with the U.S.

Resource allocation mechanisms used in the market and within the firm are quite often a mixture of the pure market principle and the pure organization principle. Market principles penetrate into the firm's resource allocation and organization principles creep into the market allocation. Interpenetration occurs to remedy the failure of pure principles other in the market or in the organization. After presenting this new perspective, we analyze resource allocation mechanisms in Japan and the U.S. One conclusion is that interpenetration patterns are rather different between the two countries due to institutional, economic and societal differences. We also analyze the ways in which these differences affect Japanese and American corporate behavior in such areas as diversification strategy, corporate financing, and innovation and venture business activity.     

Protection for sale or surge protection?

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman “protection for sale” model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occurring in response to import surges, but only for organized industries, is simulated and shown to provide parameter estimates consistent with the protection for sale framework. This suggests that the standard approach may be less of a test than previously thought.     

Local risk-minimization for Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard models

We obtain explicit representations of locally risk-minimizing strategies for call and put options in Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard models, which are Ornstein–Uhlenbeck-type stochastic volatility models. Using Malliavin calculus for Lévy processes, Arai and Suzuki (Int. J. Financ. Eng. 2:1550015, 2015) obtained a formula for locally risk-minimizing strategies for Lévy markets under many additional conditions. Supposing mild conditions, we make sure that the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard models satisfy all the conditions imposed in (Arai and Suzuki in Int. J. Financ. Eng. 2:1550015, 2015). Among others, we investigate the Malliavin differentiability of the density of the minimal martingale measure. Moreover, we introduce some numerical experiments for locally risk-minimizing strategies.