Wage rigidity and capital mobility in an optimizing model of a small open economy

Summary This paper formulates an optimizing model of a small open economy with a representative (immortal) household, a firm and a government. The asset menu consists of domestic currency, non-traded bonds and traded bonds. There is a risk premium on traded bonds, which leads to deviations from perfect capital mobility and uncovered interest parity. Taxes are lump-sum, so that finance by bonds and by taxation are equivalent. The model allows for current-account and wealth dynamics. The model assumes either purchasing power parity or imperfect substitution between home and foreign goods and either labour market equilibrium, nominal wage rigidity or real wage rigidity. The steady-state effects of a fiscal contraction, a monetary disinflation and an increase in the world interest rate are discussed. The transient effects of these policies are analysed with the aid of a multiple shooting algorithm.We thank Gerard Staarink for implementing the multiple shooting algorithm used in section 4 and we thank Professors M. Fase and J. Pen for their constructive comments on a previous version of this paper. The paper is a shortened version of discussion paper No. 168 of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.     

Maximizing purchase decision factors other than price

Assessing and acquiring technology does not have to be chaotic, driven solely by price, clinical preference, and emotion. With the tools available, it can be distilled to a process of organized common sense, which results in maximum flexibility for the user and allows materiel managers to procure the best, most cost-effective equipment for the hospital.     

Small firm mutual funds: Additional evidence on the small firm effect

Returns generated with small firm mutual fund data are used to examine the extent to which identification of a small firm effect is due to the difficulty in measuring the direct and indirect transaction costs involved in investing in the common shares of small capitalization stocks. Little if any evidence of the excess risk-adjusted returns is obtained for either of the period 1978–1983, when the small firm effect was observed, or the period 1984–1989, when it was not. The small firm effect may therefore be attributed to (1) higher direct transaction costs including bid-ask spread and broker fees and (2) higher indirect transaction costs including portfolio management expenses and market impact costs.The authors thank an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper, and Brett Salazar for valuable assistance in data collection. Errors remain our own.     

Managers’ Corporate Entrepreneurial Actions and Job Satisfaction

Through the development and extension of theories and scholars’ subsequent empirical analyses of significant, theoretically grounded research questions, the knowledge about corporate entrepreneurship (CE) and its successful use continues to advance. Moreover, the literature suggests important relationships between the corporate environment, managers’ entrepreneurial behavior and successful implementation of corporate entrepreneurship actions. In an attempt to test some of those relationships, we describe an empirical study of 523 managers that examines the relationships among the antecedents to managers’ entrepreneurial behavior, a decision to implement entrepreneurial actions, and resulting job satisfaction and reinforcement practices.     

Hölder continuity of the policy function approximation in the value function approximation

We show that given a value function approximation V of a strongly concave stochastic dynamic programming problem (SDDP), the associated policy function approximation is Hölder continuous in V.     

Human capital and the internationalisation of venture capital firms

We examine the neglected area of internationalisation by VCs. Using a representative sample of 195 VCs, we show that the decision of a European VC firm to invest internationally is driven by its human resources. Having more VC executives in general and more VC executives with previous international experience in specific, results in a higher probability of investing internationally. In contrast, more VC executives with experience in the VC industry or with an engineering background lead to a higher probability of remaining domestic.     

Inter-market competition for exchange traded funds

We examine how the different mix of informed and liquidity trading in the market for ETFs affects the nature of inter-market competition. We find that both the characteristics of the securities and the structures of the competing markets jointly determine the nature of inter-market competition. Given the superior execution quality on the ECNs and the low adverse selection costs in the ETF market, anonymous market such as the ECNs, attract both liquidity and informed traders. We also find that markets compete in a subset of ETFs. In addition, we find that quotebased competition is prevalent in the market for ETFs.     

Seasonality and non-linear price effects in scanner-data-based market-response models

Scanner data for fast moving consumer goods typically amount to panels of time series where both N and T are large. To reduce the number of parameters and to shrink parameters towards plausible and interpretable values, Hierarchical Bayes models turn out to be useful. Such models contain in the second level a stochastic model to describe the parameters in the first level.