Political Commodities and Sovereignty Management: Cigarette Smuggling across Brazil’s Southern Borders

Cigarette smuggling across Brazil’s borders with Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina involves large amounts of merchandise and money. The public in Brazil associates this activity with images of war, contamination and other threats to state sovereignty. This article assesses the political meaning and uses of smuggling in order to challenge the assumption that smuggling threatens the sovereignty of the Brazilian state. With the help of a literature review, fieldwork at the border, interviews with practitioners, a cartographic analysis of news coverage of seizures, the tobacco production and consumption, the market and its regulation, actors, routes and networks were mapped and analysed. In the Southern Cone of South America, an integrated transborder territory emerges where tobacco is cultivated, prepared and distributed, and cigarettes are manufactured, transported, sold and smoked. These flows cross distinct legal framings and lead to an increase in danger and profit. Thus, the market is segmented between national legal products and imported cigarettes that are cheaper and illegal but easily obtainable. The concepts of political commodities understood as the acts of powerful agents who barter advantages related to their authority and sovereignty management, understood as the use of legal (state-managed) structures according to private interests at different scale levels, provide useful theoretical tools to examine the territorialisation of the cigarette smuggling and its control by the state and private agents. We conclude that tobacco production and trade, as well as cigarette smuggling, are connected via agents who use the border to build the legal market and, consequently, to increase the trade value of national tobacco. Cigarette smuggling across the state borders of the Southern Cone combines networks and places in such a way that is integrated into the legal economy and the national territories, and it does not defy state’s sovereignty.     

Differences in measures of the fiscal multiplier and the reduced-form vector autoregression

The literature has recently asked whether the effects of fiscal policy vary with the state of the economy (Christiano, Eichenbaum, and Rebelo 2011; Rendahl 2014; Auerbach and Gorodnichenko 2012). We study this question in the context of vector autoregression (VAR) estimation. We show formally that, if (asymptotically) the parameters of the reduced-form VAR differ, then the dynamic effects of fiscal policy differ as well, generically and for any set of identification assumptions. Thus, in theory, the econometrician can detect these differences (either across time or space) generically just by relying on reduced-form VAR estimation.     

Tourism coopetition: An introduction to the subject and a research agenda

This paper aims to verify the current status of the research on coopetition applied to Tourism. In order to overcome the lack of tools for analyzing competitive advantage generated by relational components, this paper suggests the use of the coopetition construct as a methodological tool for analyzing the cooperation in networks for the management of tourism destinations. To that end, we performed a bibliometric analysis on ‘tourism coopetition' in scientific research papers published from 1995 to 2015 and indexed in the Web of Science and SciVerse Scopus databases. This helped us to conclude that coopetition is a behavior representing the key organizational methods of tourism destinations, especially when considering the interdependence and complementarity of this sector; thus, it should be a fundamental topic of tourism research. In this sense, the paper presents a research agenda in order to establish coopetition as key to understanding the behavior of all those involved in tourism at a particular destination.     

Accounting Ratios and the Cross‐section of Expected Stock Returns

Under clean‐surplus accounting, the log return on a stock can be decomposed into a linear function of the contemporaneous log return on equity, the contemporaneous log dividend–price ratio (if the stock pays a dividend), and both the contemporaneous and lagged values of the log book‐to‐market equity ratio. This paper studies the implications of this decomposition for the cross‐section of conditional expected stock returns. The empirical analysis reveals that the log accounting ratios capture cross‐sectional variation in both the conditional mean and conditional variance of log stock returns, which is consistent with the decomposition. It also brings fresh insights to the relation between firm size (market equity) and conditional expected stock returns. The evidence indicates that the conditional median return increases with firm size, while the conditional return skewness decreases with firm size. Empirically, the skewness effect outweighs the median effect, leading to the well‐documented inverse relation between size and average returns. The results of out‐of‐sample tests suggest that investors could use the information provided by the observed values of the log accounting ratios to formulate more effective portfolio strategies.     

Why does shareholder protection matter for abnormal returns after reported insider purchases and sales?

We use a unique data set of more than 240,000 reported insider transactions across 15 European countries and the USA to analyze the link between country-level shareholder protection and abnormal returns following insider trades. We show that abnormal returns after insider transactions are positively correlated with country-level shareholder protection against expropriation by corporate insiders, which supports the information-content hypothesis. Market reaction to insider purchases increases with shareholder protection because shareholder protection enhances the transparency and trustworthiness of insiders’ actions, and limits possibilities for direct profit diversion, so that more information is eventually reflected in stock prices. For insider sales, shareholder protection decreases their negative information content. We conjecture that this is due to the effect of greater transparency and trustworthiness strengthening the diversification and liquidity reasons for selling in better shareholder protection countries. We find limited support for the rent-extraction hypothesis that conjectures that shareholder protection is associated with insider trading dollar profits.     

MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY

Abstract Quantifying productivity is a conditio sine qua non for empirical analysis in a number of research fields. The identification of the measure that best fits with the specific goals, as well as being data driven, is currently complicated by the fact that an array of methodologies is available. This paper provides economic researchers with an up‐to‐date overview of issues and relevant solutions associated with this choice. Methods of productivity measurement are surveyed and classified according to three main criteria: (i) macro/micro; (ii) frontier/non‐frontier and (iii) deterministic/econometric.