Wealth, Enterprise and Credit Policy

Empirical evidence suggests that capital-market constraints prevent low-wealth individuals from setting up in business. This paper shows this finding to be consistent with socially excessive lending and an interest-rate tax being welfare-improving. One feature of the model, banks' inability to identify entrepreneurial quality, leads to excessive bank lending and investment in low-return projects. The reduction in the probability of bankruptcy lowers the cost of borrowing and eliminates deadweight costs and hence promotes entry. If the incentive effects are sufficiently large, wealth and the volume of entrepreneurial activity move together. A key result of the paper is to show that a market equilibrium in which there is a positive relationship between entry and the level of wealth is consistent with either subsidies to inactivity or taxes on interest raising welfare.     

进言中国企业:如何攻略美国市场

我们正看到一种趋势初露端倪.这种趋势将很快成为下个10年里中国商业战略的"主流".更多的有战略头脑的中国公司开始在全世界展开直接的兼并业务,尤其是在美国.     

WHY HEDGE? SOME EVIDENCE FROM OIL AND GAS PRODUCERS

Despite the prevalence of corporate risk management, there are no widely accepted explanations for why companies hedge or how shareholders benefit from hedging. This article provides some evidence on these issues by reporting the results of a study of the risk management policies of 100 oil and gas producers from 1992 to 1994.
The first notable finding is the considerable variety of the hedging policies of the oil and gas producers. For example, in 1993 slightly more than half of the companies did not hedge, while a quarter of the firms in the sample hedged more than 28' of their production, and some firms hedged almost 100'. The second main finding was that the extent of hedging was related to a variety of factors, largely those related to financing costs. In particular, companies with higher leverage—and thus presumably facing greater difficulties in accessing the capital markets—tended to hedge a larger fraction of their output than firms with lower leverage ratios. This result is consistent with the idea that corporations manage risks to help ensure they have sufficient capital to finance their investment opportunities and to reduce the likelihood that low oil and gas prices will push them into financial distress. Under either of these interpretations, financial theory would suggest that corporate hedging increases shareholder value. Whether it actually does so is a matter for future research.     

Mapping global sustainability report scoring: a detailed analysis of Europe and Asia

This study maps the General Reporting Initiative (GRI) relations for a set of global enterprises. Enterprise interrelationships are built using the Mutual Information (MI) of the data reported by enterprises. From the MI topology, we describe interrelationships among the enterprises using chord diagrams to represent the inter- and intra-connectivity between geographical regions and economic sectors globally, by continent and country. Detailed maps are presented for European and Asian regions/sectors, including the relationship between Europe and Asia’s top reporting countries. Our findings reinforce previous research regarding the role of Europe as a driver of sustainability and its influence worldwide. We also determined that Spain is a major player in Europe and that Northern Europe does not have the assumed leading role mentioned in related studies. Eastern Asia is, by far, the leader of the region, and the GRI maps demonstrate the preponderant role of China in the region and the minimal role of India. MI topology maps outline the behavior of the economic sectors, for all the studied regions. Furthermore, a measure that relates the inter- to intra-connections is presented to describe the internal an external relationships among regions/sectors.     

The relation between municipal and government bond yields in an era of unconventional monetary policy

In this paper, we investigate how the 5‐year Swedish municipal bond yield has been related to the corresponding yield on government bonds during the period that the Riksbank has conducted unconventional monetary policy in terms of bond purchases. Using daily Swedish data on bond yields from February 2015 to January 2018, we first conduct an event study to assess the short‐run effects of the Riksbank's bond‐purchase announcements. We then estimate bivariate vector autoregressive models to study the dynamic relationship between the yields. Results from the event study suggest that the accumulated short‐run effect of the Riksbank's announcements was to lower the government bond yield by approximately 40 to 50 basis points and municipal bond yields by 30 to 35 basis points. Our vector autoregressive analysis indicates—in line with the event study—that an unexpected decrease in the government bond yield initially increases the municipal bond‐yield spread. However, after approximately 4 weeks, the effect has been reversed and the municipal bond‐yield spread is lower than it was initially. By conducting this analysis, we contribute to the understanding of the transmission of unconventional monetary policy.     

Differentiating ambiguity: an expository note

Ghirardato et al. J Econ Theory 118:133–173, 2004 propose a method for distinguishing between perceived ambiguity and the decision-maker’s reaction to it. They study a general class of preferences which they refer to as invariant biseparable. This class includes CEU and MEU. This note presents some examples which illustrate their results. Research supported by ESRC grant no. RES-000-22-0650. For comments and discussion we would like to thank Klaus Nehring and a seminar audience at ESEM, Vienna 2006.     

The “Business Climate” and Economic Inequality

“Business climate indexes” characterize state economic policies, and are often used to try to influence economic policy debate. However, they are also useful in research as summaries of a large number of state policies that cannot be studied simultaneously. Prior research found that business climate indexes focused on productivity and quality of life do not predict economic growth, while indexes emphasizing taxes and costs of doing business indicate that low‐tax, low‐cost states have faster growth of employment, wages, and output. In this paper, we study the relationship between these two categories of business climate indexes and the promotion of equality or inequality. We do not find that the productivity/quality‐of‐life indexes predict more equitable outcomes, although some of the policies underlying them suggest they might. We do find, however, that the same tax‐and‐cost‐related indexes that are associated with higher economic growth are also associated with increases in inequality.     

Optimal Retirement with Increasing Longevity

We develop an optimizing life‐cycle model of retirement with perfect capital markets. We show that longer healthy life expectancy usually leads to later retirement, but with an elasticity less than unity. We calibrate our model using data from the US and find that, over the last century, the effect of rising incomes, which promote early retirement, has dominated the effect of rising lifespans. Our model predicts continuing declines in the optimal retirement age, despite rising life expectancy, provided the rate of real wage growth remains as high as in the last century.     

Spillovers between Bitcoin and other assets during bear and bull markets

This article contributes to the embryonic literature on the relations between Bitcoin and conventional investments by studying return and volatility spillovers between this largest cryptocurrency and four asset classes (equities, stocks, commodities, currencies and bonds) in bear and bull market conditions. We conducted empirical analyses based on a smooth transition VAR GARCH-in-mean model covering daily data from 19 July 2010 to 31 October 2017. We found significant evidence that Bitcoin returns are related quite closely to those of most of the other assets studies, particularly commodities, and therefore, the Bitcoin market is not isolated completely. The significance and sign of the spillovers exhibited some differences in the two market conditions and in the direction of the spillovers, with greater evidence that Bitcoin receives more volatility than it transmits. Our findings have implications for investors and fund managers who are considering Bitcoin as part of their investment strategies and for policymakers concerned about the vulnerability that Bitcoin represents to the stability of the global financial system.     

The long memory model of political support: some further results

This article extends the results of Byers et al. (1997 Byers, JD, Davidson, JEHD and Peel, DA. 1997. Modelling political popularity: an analysis of long range dependence in opinion poll series. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 160: 471–90. Series A [Google Scholar]) on long memory in support for the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK using longer samples and additional poll series. It finds continuing support for the ARFIMA(0,?d,?0) model, though with somewhat smaller values of the long memory parameter. We find that the move to telephone polling in the mid-1990s had no apparent effect on the estimated value of d for either party. Finally, we find that we cannot reject the hypotheses that the parties share a common long memory parameter which we estimate at around 0.65.