Politico-economic cycles of regulation and deregulation

This paper considers politico-economic cycles that do not depend on the exogenous electoral cycles. More precisely, the paper develops a positive model of intertemporal subsidy strategies for an authoritarian and dynastic government. It will be shown — applying the Hopf bifurcation theorem — that cyclical strategies, i.e. waves of regulation, populism alternating with deregulation, cuts in social programmes, etc., may be optimal.     

INFORMED TRADING RISK AND BID-ASK SPREAD CHANGES AROUND OPEN MARKET STOCK REPURCHASES IN THE NASDAQ MARKET

Microstructure theory contends that dealers' bid-ask spreads should vary intertemporally with changes in the asymmetric information component of the spread. Corporate theory suggests that stock repurchase announcements signal management's private information to the securities markets. An examination of dealers' spread behavior around firms' open market repurchases in the NASDAQ market reveals a decline in spreads adjusted for dealers' inventory-holding and order-processing costs. This decline is attributed to a reduction in informed trading risk associated with the open market repurchase announcements.     

On optimal growth when there are many goods and factors

This paper summarizes some findings with respect to optimal growth when saving and the state of the arts are endogenous, natural resources shrink, and the numbers of goods and basic factors are possibly large. Outcomes of some numerical experiments are reported. The dynamic-programming algorithm is used for time-optimization and linear programming for instantaneous optimization. Progress can plausibly balance out depletion, without the help of capital accumulation. Many goods can produce a multiplicity of maximal extreme points in solution space, from which the productioin-possibility frontier becomes a multiple-dimensional hyperplane, moving outward over time.Presidential Address presented at the Forty-Third International Atlantic Economic Conference, London, England, March 11–18, 1997.     

MRSA – Angemessen reagieren

Nosokomiale Infektionen - Multiresistente Mikroorganismen haben sich weltweit zu einem gro?en Problem entwickelt. Neben den Methicillin-resistenten Staphylokokken (MRSA) steigen auch die Resistenzzahlen anderer Mikrobenarten dramatisch. Insbesondere kritisch kranke Patienten sind durch sie gef?hrdet. Doch wie sieht ein angemessener Umgang mit Problemkeimen aus? Franz Sitzmann diskutiert übliche Strategien und zeigt Alternativen auf.     

Neo-protectionism and economic growth

The world economy is threatening to find itself in a vicious circle of escalating protectionism. Franz Peter Lang explains the dangers and consequences of this. Gary Banks argues that the “new protectionism” is not so much a temporary by-product of the recession as the external manifestation of internal domestic struggles between vested interests and the public interest, and pleads for the establishment of a “transparency institution”.     

Die Zusammenhänge zwischen den Veränderungen der Nachfragestruktur und dem wirtschaftlichen Wachstum

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Rural development and financial markets in Romania

In the transition from a centrally planned to a market-oriented economy, such as in Romania, the domestic financial market plays two important roles. First, the financial market itself must be fundamentally restructured. Second, its efficient functioning is a crucial precondition for economic transformation. In transition economies, however, financial market institutions tend to concentrate their services on urban or larger rural enterprises. So far, small rural enterprises, even those with profitable investment plans, often do not have access to the financial market. This paper briefly characterizes the key issues of agricultural production units and their institutional environment and analyzes the depth and the efficiency of rural finance and its effect on Romania's rural economic transformation. It concludes with policy and institutional recommendations to strengthen rural finance.