Creative Mediations of the City: Contemporary Public Art as Compass of Metro Manila's Urban Conditions

In this article, public art is proposed as creative agency mobilized to form urban imaginaries. These alternate visions are largely facilitated by artists and art collectives using urban communities as performative grounds. These projects promote a view of art as an effective channel for ‘recentering’ — the identification of a multitude of centers that endlessly fracture and shift, very much resembling the nature of cities themselves. An alternate vision of the city through cartography informed by contrast, temporality and ephemerality is proposed alongside dominant representations of the city. Works by artists Alma Quinto, Mark Salvatus and Wire Tuazon are representative examples of such strategies. Diverse in tactics and platforms, defined by site‐specific mediations, the projects facilitated by these artists reveal the uneven conditions that beset Metro Manila and its outlying areas. Quinto's altered Urban Plan/Duyan is the result of her engagement with women in an informal settler community in San Andres Bukid, Manila, while Salvatus's web‐based Neo‐Urban Planner is an astute observation of the obsessive yet futile ordering of people and space by the state. Tuazon's Amphibian installation is a commentary on the encroachment of multinational interests in local communities. These interventions are foils to state‐ and private‐led urban development schemes. Their strength lies in their direct engagement with the sphere of public dialogue and self‐determination. These artistic practices and strategies are shaped by community interaction, revealing that meanings residing in urban forms are relentlessly negotiated by the numerous actors that inhabit the city.     

Employee reactions to voice and choice in the workplace: the influence of culture

The present study investigated the effect of culture on a much-prescribed management practice, that of employee participation in decision making. A survey was conducted among employees from two countries culturally distinct in the dimensions of power distance and individualism, namely Canada and the Philippines. Given eight decision-making scenarios that varied in terms of whether voice and/or choice was given to the employee and in terms of the importance of the outcomes, the respondents were asked about their perceptions of fairness of the procedures and outcomes, satisfaction with the procedures and outcomes, and preference for the decision-making procedures. Results show a highly significant country decision-making mode outcome importance interaction effect, but not in the directions expected. Overall, the Philippine sample registered more positive reactions to participation in decision making, although the Philippines' higher rank in power distance and lower rank in individualism than Canada seem to indicate otherwise. The results, together with a previous study conducted in high power distance-low individualism Mexico, forcefully suggest that employee participation in decision making may be successfully transferred.     

Movements of People for Movements of Goods?

Whilst it is well established to think of international tourism as a type of exports, namely ‘home’ exports, the potential of tourism flows as an engine for fostering trade among countries is a poorly studied topic. In this paper, we show that this relationship can be studied at a very detailed level by exploiting the disaggregation of existing information on international trade and inbound tourism. We consider a sample of 25 countries belonging to the European Union, a region that has been interested by common shocks such as the establishment of the euro as the new currency for many countries and the liberalisation in the air transport market. We carry out a panel data analysis by means of which we assess whether international tourist arrivals by a given country activate additional exports towards the same country. We find not only that tourism can promote exports, but also that this effect displays important differences depending on whether or not consumption goods are considered. This finding is consistent with the idea that the experience of tourists in a given destination reduces the fixed costs of trade, thus facilitating access to the advantages of international trade for more peripheral economies.     

Exchange Rate Volatility and Output Volatility: A Theoretical Approach*

This paper makes an attempt to determine the factors influencing exchange rate and exchange rate uncertainty, as well as output and output variability. In the context of a small open economy under flexible exchange rates regime it is found that the level both of exchange rate and output is affected by monetary and inflationary shocks, as well as shocks in government spending, output, and trade balance. Further, the uncertainty of exchange rate and output is associated positively with the uncertainty of all shocks while the contemporaneous occurrence of selected shocks imposes either a positive or negative impact on exchange rate and output volatility. Finally, it is shown that the effect of the determinants either of exchange rate volatility or output volatility is very sensitive to the parameter values.     

Technological specialization in industrial countries: Patterns and dynamics

Technological Specialization in Industrial Countries: Patterns and Dynamics. — This paper employs distribution dynamics and patent data to study the empirical dynamics of technological specialization in industrial countries. Large countries spread innovation activities across a wider range of technologies, and their specialization level in a field displays lower probability to move around its initial level (country size effects). Mobility is high and asymmetric: it is difficult to improve specialization in very disadvantaged technologies, while high comparative advantages revert towards lower specialization levels. These findings undermine the theory of technological accumulation and path dependence, its implication of persistence in trade specialization patterns and the effectiveness of targeted industrial and technology policies.     

Estimating Income and Price Elasticities of Trade in a Cointegration Framework

This paper presents further evidence on the empirical regularity known as the "45-degree rule." Income and price elasticities of trade are estimated for 21 countries in a cointegration framework. More specifically, the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) modeling approach and the DOLS procedure are adopted to estimate the long-run structure. The empirical results confirm the existence of a systematic relationship between growth rates and income elasticity estimates: faster growing economies have high income elasticities of demand for their exports but lower import elasticities, which implies that faster growth can be observed without any marked secular trend in real exchange rates.     

Capacity Constraints and Hedge Fund Strategy Returns

Hedge funds have generated significant absolute returns (alpha) in the decade between 1995 and 2004. However, the level of alpha has declined substantially over this period. We investigate whether capacity constraints at the level of hedge fund strategies have been responsible for this decline. For four out of eight hedge fund strategies, capital inflows have statistically preceded negative movements in alpha, consistent with this hypothesis. We also find evidence that hedge fund fees have increased over the same period. Our results provide support for the Berk and Green (2004) rational model of active portfolio management.