Rural credit and the time allocation of agricultural households: The case of PRONAF in Brazil

This paper evaluates the impact of Brazil's National Program to Strengthen Family Farming (PRONAF) on the time allocation of household members. We use data from the 2014 Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios, and we apply propensity score methods to complex surveys recently recommended in the literature. We find that PRONAF helps to increase focus on agricultural activities, but it also stimulates female partners to engage in unpaid work. The results show significant effects of PRONAF on child labor and on the gender‐specific division of labor within households, although it does not have the usual adverse effects of rural credit programs on school attendance.     

Does international cross-listing improve the information environment

We investigate whether cross-listing in the U.S. affects the information environment for non-U.S. stocks. Our findings suggest cross-listing has an asymmetric impact on stock price informativeness around the world, as measured by firm-specific stock return variation. Cross-listing improves price informativeness for developed market firms. For firms in emerging markets, however, cross-listing decreases price informativeness. The added analyst coverage associated with cross-listing likely explains the findings in emerging markets, rather than changes in liquidity, ownership, or accounting quality. Our results indicate that the added analyst coverage fosters the production of marketwide information, rather than firm-specific information.     

Reconstruction of money supply over the long run: the case of England, 1270–1870

This article provides a time series of coin and money supply estimates for six hundred years of English history. Two main estimation methods are proposed. The first (the direct method) is used to measure the value of government‐provided, legal‐tender coin supply only. Two varieties of the direct method are proposed. Additionally, an indirect method is proposed which relies on a combination of information about nominal GDP with an assumption regarding the evolution of velocity in time, and which can be used to calculate coin supply and M2. Both methods rely on benchmark values known for certain years, but no particular benchmark is determinant for the results. The new methodologies set out here may serve as a blueprint for a similar reconstruction of coin and money supply series for other economies for which analogous data are available.     

Portfolio efficiency analysis with SFA: the case of PSI-20 companies

This study aimed to assess the technical efficiency (TE) of individual companies and their respective sectors that are traded on the Portuguese stock market. We accomplished this by combining the internal input variables (e.g., ‘market value and return’) with exogenous variables (e.g., ‘interest income’, ‘depreciation’, ‘cost of goods’, ‘employees’ and ‘net sales’) into a Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) model. The TE of the PSI-20 (Portuguese Stock Index) was estimated using factors that affect efficiency variability. The main advantage of using the SFA approach is its potential to discriminate between measurement error and systematic inefficiencies in the estimation process. The results demonstrated that TE is higher for enterprises in the industrial, construction and distribution sectors, whereas the commercial banking sector has the lowest TE scores. The ‘employees’ and ‘depreciation’ are the variables which most contribute to stock market inefficiency.     

Explaining divorce rate determinants: new evidence from Spain

This article examines the main determinants of divorce rates in Spain for the period 1995 to 2010. According to the results, the so-called Express Divorce Law (passed in 2005) seems to be positively associated with divorce rates in the short term. Income level and growth, female employment rate, and the proportion of foreign population are also positively related to divorce rates. However, as expected, the percentage of conservative vote seems to have a negative impact.     

Escape from New York: The market impact of loosening disclosure requirements

We examine the first significant deregulation of U.S. disclosure requirements since the passage of the 1933/1934 Exchange and Securities Acts: the 2007 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 12h-6. Rule 12h-6 has made it easier for foreign firms to deregister with the SEC and thereby terminate their U.S. disclosure obligations. We show that the market reacted negatively to the announcement by the SEC that firms from countries with weak disclosure and governance regimes could more easily opt out of the stringent U.S. reporting and legal environment. We also find that since the rule's passage, an unprecedented number of firms have deregistered, and these firms often had been previous targets of U.S. class action securities lawsuits or SEC enforcement actions. Our findings suggest that shareholders of non-U.S firms place significant value on U.S. securities regulations, especially when the home country investor protections are weak.     

Vertical Intra-Industry Trade and Foreign Direct Investment between Japan and European Countries

In this paper, we provide an overview of the development of vertical intra-industry trade (VIIT) between Japan and various European countries, including both old and new EU members, as well as emerging Central and Eastern European countries. VIIT indices constructed in this paper cover a much wider range of margins of unit price ratio than existing studies. Our empirical model attempts to explain the distributional characteristics of VIIT through foreign direct investments (FDI), in addition to traditional determinants of IIT, such as differences in GDP per capita, average GDP, and smaller and larger GDPs. Our sample covers the period from 1988 to 2004 for bilateral trade between Japan and 31 European countries. Our econometric methodology for these panel data uses fixed-effect model estimation with a variable transformation determined by a Box-Cox approach. We find that intra-industry trade between European countries and Japan increases with their corresponding Japanese FDIs, especially for new EU member countries. Our results also indicate that it is important to measure a wider range of quality based on relative prices rather than the traditional ratio used in the literature.     

Spend as I say,not as I do: Children,families and household consumption in different socio‐economic contexts

This article aims at contributing to a body of work about children and families by exploring the importance of socio‐economic context and social capital for understanding the ways in which money is perceived, obtained and used by children. Alleged contrasts in terms of money management, consumption priorities and postponement of gratification, especially among middle and working classes, have already been debated. It seems thus relevant to investigate if these presumable contrasts apply to children and why. Do children from different socio‐economic contexts reveal the traits that have been attributed to their households? To this end, a mixed methods research project was developed involving 245 children attending different primary schools in Portugal—one private school targeted at upper class children and one state‐sponsored school located in a working‐class area. The results revealed significant differences by school and household typology.     

Economic development and inflation: a theoretical and empirical analysis

This paper studies the relation between inflation and economic development. The literature is largely silent regarding both the theoretical and empirical perspectives that undeveloped countries endure higher average inflation than developed economies. We present a simple theoretical model linking the inflation phenomenon to the tradition of development economics. Empirical evidence is garnered to test the hypothesis that economic development engenders a downward bias to inflation rates. Through the feasible-GLS estimator in a panel of 65 countries from 2001 to 2011, we aim at listing a number of variables most commonly used to explain differences in the stage of economic development across countries and identifying the most statistically relevant ones to account for differences in inflationary patterns. While our results show that inflation is inversely correlated with the level of the technological content of the economy (measured by share of high-tech exports), human capital and cyclical unemployment, it is directly related to the degree of inflation persistence and terms of trade growth. However, our findings still present an inverse and low correlation between inflation persistence and economic development, implying that development-sensitive variables allowed into the model can only partially account for the differences in inflation at different levels of economic development.