Has International Financial Integration Increased?

This paper compares the behavior of real interest rate differentials across the major countries under the Bretton Woods regime and the regime of floating exchanges that replaced it. The primary object is to investigate both the extent of market integration and its changes over time. For all fifteen possible country pairs real interest differentials are mean reverting, and in two-thirds of these cases indistinguishable from zero statistically. For all country pairs on average and for most such pairs individually, moreover, the estimated differentials are not appreciably different in absolute value than the differentials that we estimate for various money-market rates within the United States. Additional evidence points to a narrowing of differentials under floating rates over time and an increase in speeds of convergence.     

Deadly Drugs and the Doctrine of Double Effect: A Reply to Tully

In a recent contribution to this journal, Patrick Tully criticizes my view that the doctrine of double effect does not prohibit a pharmaceutical company from selling a drug that has potentially fatal side-effects and that does not treat a life-threatening condition. Tully alleges my account is too permissive and makes the doctrine irrelevant to decisions about selling harmful products. In the following paper, I respond to Tully’s objections and show that he misinterprets my position and misstates some elements of the doctrine of double effect. I also show how the doctrine constrains some decisions about marketing drugs with potentially fatal side-effects.     

Marketing in the global economy: Creditworthiness

The importance of accurate credit information on potential clients and customers is even more critical when doing business overseas—a thorough check before committing resources is always a good idea.     

Managerial evaluation of exogenous forecast sources

This paper concerns the managerial evaluation of forecast vendors—individuals or firms offering for sale future forecasts of random variables relevant to managerial decision making. Assuming the forecasts are exogenous in the sense they are generated by a methodology unknown or unproven to management, the paper uses a logistic regression model to present a statistical test for informativeness that allows for an interpretation of the vendor's abilities. The advantage of the approach is that it requires as input only knowledge of the unconditional probability distribution of the variable being forecast and a relatively small historical track record of the vendor's forecasting performance. No benchmark forecast is necessary and few assumptions are required about the statistical process that generates the forecasts. As an illustrative empirical application, the paper presents an evaluation of the informativeness of the published long-range price forecasts by a veteran analyst of the Iowa hog market.     

Innovative practices in public procurement partnerships: The case of the United States

Public procurement partnerships represent a new approach to conducting government acquisition. These partnerships are predicated on the notion that governments today simply lack the requisite knowledge, skills and financing to provide core public services and acquire sophisticated services, IT and knowledge development by themselves. Instead, governments need to enlist the collective energies of the governmental, business and non-profit (third) sectors. This research looks at the concept of public procurement partnerships in the United States and the major trends promoting their use. Two case examples of public procurement partnerships are presented; one from the perspective of a government partner, the other from the perspective of a private (third) sector partner.     

The Sensitivity of the General Price Level to Changes in the Price of Crude Oil

There are many direct and indirect effects of changing crude oil prices on the inflation rate, so it is not surprising that there are different views about the resulting effects on the general price level and also on other aspects of the general economy. This study, estimates the direct and indirect effects of oil price changes on the economy-wide rate of inflation, which then has effects on spending and producing decisions. However, in this forum, we do not try to estimate the full indirect effects on the level of economic activity, such as effects on real GDP. JEL Classification E310, E370