Intermodal containerized shipping in foreign trade and regional accessibility advantages

Intermodalism has become one of the most significant transformations of freight transportation in the United States over the past two decades. The coupling of shipping modes has enabled shippers to more fully realize the respective time and costs advantages of respective modes. The opportunity to take advantage of intermodalism when shipping manufactured goods overseas may provide an essential competitive edge to a company or to an entire region engaged in world commerce. The change in the freight accessibility map of the United States to foreign markets that can be ascribed to intermodal infrastructures and operations has so far not been studied. With the help of a geographic information system, this paper analyzes this transformation in the United States by mapping integral place accessibility measures of five-digit zip code areas with respect to gateways for export of manufactured goods, especially containerized freight. The performance of the intermodal freight network is evaluated by comparing accessibility measures based on the highway network and on the intermodal network, respectively, for all North American container ports, as well as for subgroups of container ports on the Eastern Seaboard, the Western Seaboard, and the Gulf Coast of North America. The paper discusses regional winners and losers in the new national freight transportation system.     

Central Banking in the Crisis: Conceptual Convergence and Open Questions on Unconventional Monetary Policy

The advanced economies — financial crisis that began in 2007 was triggered by factors that could not have been easily foreseen but also by factors that had been familiar since the Great Depression but were ignored or forgotten. However, once the crisis was apparent, central banks of the major advanced economies — the European Central Bank, the U.S. Federal Reserve System, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan reacted quickly and with a remarkable convergence of policy with respect to defining price stability, communication, enhanced banking surveillance, the role of money and monetary aggregates, unconventional liquidity supply, and forward guidance. These elements of convergence are discussed with respect to their strength and possible dangers in stabilizing the global financial system.     

Bilateral Donors’ Interest vs. Recipients’ Development Motives in Aid Allocation: Do All Donors Behave the Same?

I provide an overall empirical assessment of the motivations of ODA granted by rich countries to developing countries, as revealed by aid allocation behaviors. Aid motives combine self‐interested and altruistic objectives. I use a three‐dimensional panel dataset, combining the donor, recipient and time dimensions, which shows a lot of heterogeneity in donor behavior. Thanks to the width of this dataset, I can test differences of parameters among donors and, in particular, compare their degrees of altruism. Switzerland, Austria, Ireland and most Nordic countries are among the most altruistic. Australia, France, Italy, and to some extent Japan and the United States are among the most egoistic.     

A Contribution to the Empirics of Finance-growth Nexus in China: A Complex System Perspective

Abstract

The paper empirically examines the causal interactions between Chinese financial development and economic growth using the perspective of complex systems as a metaphor in an attempt to provide a better understanding of the co-evolution of China's real and financial sectors. Using Hsiao's version of the Granger causality tests, the empirical results support a complex set of bidirectional causality between the financial development proxies and economic growth variables. Despite numerous alleged financial intermediation's inefficiencies, bidirectional causality would suggest a coherent and effective finance-growth ecosystem.     

SPECULATION AND THE MARKET FOR RECOMMENDATIONS

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the theoretical value of information in a speculative securities market. A model of speculative equilibrium is developed in a market where an independent profit-seeking advisor sells information in the form of buy and sell recommendations. These recommendations and the record of the advisor determine traders' speculative commitments, which take explicit account of informational risk. The model leads to a complete specification of the speculative equilibrium which includes stock prices as well as the price that the advisor can charge for providing recommendations.     

The Re-emergence of Sweatshops

In spite of legislation enforcing standards of health and safety at work, at least in the West, sweatshops are still a feature of the business scene. The long term ethical aim must be clear, but there is a need for a gradual approach rather than an absolutist one. The author is completing his MBA at London Business School, and is of Lebanese origin with a background in finance.     

Nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation in a non locally compact setting

Maximum likelihood estimation is considered in the context of infinite dimensional parameter spaces. It is shown that in some locally convex parameter spaces sequential compactness of the bounded sets ensures the existence of minimizers of objective functions and the consistency of maximum likelihood estimators in an appropriate topology. The theory is applied to revisit some classical problems of nonparametric maximum likelihood estimation, to study location parameters in Banach spaces, and finally to obtain Varadarajan’s theorem on the convergence of empirical measures in the form of a consistency result for a sequence of maximum likelihood estimators. Several parameter spaces sharing the crucial compactness property are identified. This research was supported by grants from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Fonds FCAR de la Province de Québec.     

The role of state and foreign owners in corporate risk-taking: Evidence from privatization

Using a unique database of 381 newly privatized firms from 57 countries, we investigate the impact of shareholders' identity on corporate risk-taking behavior. We find strong and robust evidence that state (foreign) ownership is negatively (positively) related to corporate risk-taking. Moreover, we find that high risk-taking by foreign owners depends on the strength of country-level governance institutions. Our results suggest that relinquishment of government control, openness to foreign investment, and improvement of country-level governance institutions are key determining factors of corporate risk-taking in newly privatized firms.