The Origins and Development of the Latin American Structuralist Approach to the Balance of Payments, 1944–1964

The paper offers an historical account of the origins and development of the Latin American structuralist approach to the balance of payments between 1944 and 1964. We focus on the contributions by Raul Prebisch, Celso Furtado and Juan Noyola, all of them members of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) during the 1950s. Prebisch used the foreign trade multiplier concept to distinguish the business cycle mechanisms at the ‘centre’ and at the ‘periphery’. Noyola introduced the notion of external disequilibrium as a feature of the industrialization process. This was further elaborated by Prebisch's formula connecting the relative rates of growth to the ratio of income-elasticities of import. Furtado examined the implications of the external demand constraint for economic growth, an important element of the two-gap models of the 1960s. The main piece of empirical structuralist research was the CEPAL 1957 report about Mexican external disequilibrium elaborated by Furtado and Noyola, not published at the time; we discuss that report in the context of the Mexican devaluation of 1954.     

The spectrum policy reform paving the way to cognitive radio enabled spectrum sharing

The increasing amount of data and video traffic carried by mobile networks has recently risen the demand for enhanced network capacity, more efficient use and more effective management of spectrum. Cognitive radio technologies candidate to respond to these urgent needs by allowing a near simultaneous band sharing. The regulation plays a crucial role in promoting the adoption of these technologies, in order to overcome the traditional paradigms of authorizations for exclusive spectrum usage. The article outlines spectrum management regimes where the implementation of frequency sharing technologies, including cognitive technologies, is foreseeable and brings them back to a comprehensive taxonomy of dynamic spectrum access and sharing models, in the effort to reconcile partially diverging approaches and nomenclatures suggested in literature. Theoretic analysis is supported by a number of illustrations and practical experiments with shared spectrum usage. Based on suggested taxonomy, the research aims at showing the evolutionary path toward the introduction and spreading of cognitive and other spectrum sharing technologies, pointing out relevant trends and instruments made available by the reform of EU Telecom Package, as well as at outlining the status of regulation, policy and standardization in Europe.     

Price expectations, capital accumulation and employment: Lindahl's macroeconomics from the 1920s to the 1950s

Erik Lindahl's approach to macroeconomics focused on the non-neutralityof monetary policy (in the short and the long run) and on thedenial of the existence of natural rates of interest and unemployment.From the 1920s until his death in 1960, Lindahl advocated theuse of norms for monetary policy to fight inflation and deflationprecisely because he would not rely on the market system's returnto natural rates. Making use of hitherto unexplored material,this paper analyses the development of Lindahl's thinking aboutprice level changes, investment and employment from the 1920sto the 1950s.     

沃顿商学院：中国的私有化之路

中国的全面经济改革,在短短四分之一世纪的时间内,就为中国赢得了在全球经济圈中举足轻重的地位;相对于其他国家而言,在中国的经济改革中,公司从国有化向私有化转变的这一过程更加平稳。与此同时,一个充满活力的富于     

Export-oriented FDI in the UK

It is well known that the performance of foreign firms comparedto domestic companies is superior with respect to employment,wages, and productivity. In this paper we detail the exportbehaviour of foreign affiliates in the United Kingdom relativeto indigenous firms. Our findings show that foreign firms aremore likely to export, and when they do so they are more exportintensive and overall contribute disproportionately to totalmanufacturing exports from the UK. While firm-level advantagesexplain some of these differences in export behaviour, strategicconsiderations dominate, where these include the differentialin costs, productivity, and market size between the UK and foreigncountries. That is, both horizontal and vertical motives canbe found for the use of the UK as an export platform by foreignfirms.     

Su un piano ottimale d'ammortamento di un prestito diviso in obbligazioni

Viene considerato il problema della determinazione della «politica ottima» di un'impresa che deve ammortizzare un prestito diviso in obbligazioni, noti i tassi di interesse del prestito, la redditività del capitale disponibile e prefissati vincoli sul numero massimo di obbligazioni da rimborsare nei singoli anni. Il problema viene risolto coi metodi della programmazione lineare.     

Switching generalized autoregressive score copula models with application to systemic risk

Recent financial disasters have emphasized the need to accurately predict extreme financial losses and their consequences for the institutions belonging to a given financial market. The ability of econometric models to predict extreme events strongly relies on their flexibility to account for the highly nonlinear and asymmetric dependence patterns observed in financial time series. In this paper, we develop a new class of flexible copula models where the dependence parameters evolve according to a Markov switching generalized autoregressive score (GAS) dynamics. Maximum likelihood estimation is performed using a two‐step procedure where the second step relies on the expectation–maximization algorithm. The proposed switching GAS copula models are then used to estimate the conditional value at risk and the conditional expected shortfall, measuring the impact on an institution of extreme events affecting another institution or the market. The empirical investigation, conducted on a panel of European regional portfolios, reveals that the proposed model is able to explain and predict the evolution of the systemic risk contributions over the period 1999–2015.     

Markups,import competition and exporting

This paper analyses the relationship between markups and international trade at the firm level using a large sample of French manufacturing firms for the period 1995–2007. In particular, the paper investigates the effect of increasing import competition from China on firms' price–cost margins and the way in which exporting interacts with this effect. The results show robust evidence that firms in more direct competition with Chinese imports decrease their markups. However, firms that become exporters experience a smaller reduction in their price–cost margins. Consistent with these findings, the results also show that firms facing tougher competition from China are more likely to start exporting to avoid such competitive pressures.     

Consumer arbitrage in cross‐border e‐commerce

In today’s internet markets consumers can search for, find and compare prices worldwide. Online, information circulates faster than offline and arbitrage opportunities such as the ones arising from currency shocks are easily unveiled. In this paper, we estimate for the first‐time exchange rate elasticities for cross‐border e‐commerce transactions. Exploiting a new high‐frequency database on international transactions of parcels, we find that a 1% appreciation of the domestic currency increases e‐commerce imports by 0.7%. Comparing the result with traditional estimates in offline markets, this implies a 50% exchange rate pass‐through online.     

Knowledge distance and R&D collaboration in Cournot oligopoly

A Cournot collaboration game is complemented with the hypothesis that the cost of R&D collaboration depends on firm’s directed knowledge distance with respect to potential R&D partners. The further hypothesis that directed distance may be non‐uniform and pair‐wise asymmetric reconciles theoretical predictions with qualitative evidence about concentration and multiplicity of components in industrial R&D networks. The welfare properties of sparse stable networks are also affected.