Speculative attack against the Hungarian forint

In mid-January 2003 a severe speculative attack was launched against the exchange rate of the Hungarian forint. The attack was very unusual in the history of foreign exchange speculations, since it was aimed at enforcing the appreciation — and not the depreciation — of the currency targeted. The specific nature of this kind of speculation is closely related to Hungary’s accession to the European Union in general and to EMU in particular. Since the other Central and Eastern European acceding countries face similar problems and challenges, the Hungarian experience may involve some instructive lessons on monetary and economic policy for them too.     

International health law and consumer autonomy

Today, international health law and international consumer law are developing in the same direction and with much interaction. But the developments are not uniform. As international health law takes consumer protection into account, it tends to increase the gap between a Western international law and a Third World international law, and to emphasize the negative harmonization approach towards international health protection.Another problem concerns the unification of the rules of international health law and those of international consumer law. This problem is particularly difficult to solve, as the rules of international consumer law themselves are still far from being unified.

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Internationales Gesundheitsrecht und Verbraucherautonomie

Zusammenfassung Internationales Gesundheitsrecht und internationales Verbraucherrecht entwickeln sich heute in gleicher Richtung, obwohl sie anderen Quellen entspringen. Die wechselseitige Durchdringung nimmt zu, auch wenn die Enwicklung nicht einheitlich vor sich geht. Je mehr das internationale Gesundheitsrecht den Verbraucherschutz in sich aufnimmt, destomehr trennt es sich in ein Recht für entwickelte Staaten und ein solches für Dritte Welt-Länder. Ein vorwiegend negativ-abwehrender Zugang herrscht vor.Ein anderes Problem beinhaltet die Harmonisierung der Regeln des internationalen Gesundheits- und des internationalen Verbraucherrechts. Dies ist schon deshalb schwer erreichbar, weil das Verbraucherrecht selbst nicht einheitlich vorgeht. Die Probleme verschärfen sich, wenn man — ohne eine internationale Verbraucherinstitution wie die WHO — eine gemeinsame positive Gesundheitspolitik für Verbraucher erreichen will.

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Michel Bélanger teaches health law at the U.F.R. de Droit Public et Science Politique, Université de Bordeaux I, Avenue Léon Duguit, F 33604 Pessac, France.     

In search of the meaning of entrepreneurship

This paper is an attempt to build a bridge between the popular and the academic usage of the terms entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, and to identify the raw materials needed to construct an interpretive framework capable of illuminating the nature of entrepreneurship and its role in economic theory. We review briefly the contributions made to this topic by Cantillon, Schumpeter, Schultz and Kirzner. We advance a synthetic definition of the entrepreneur as someone who specializes in taking responsibility for and making judgemental decisions that affect the location, the form, and the use of goods, resources, or institutions. We then conclude with some observations on the basic choice confronting economics regarding the place of entrepreneurship in economic analysis.     

Force and Influence in Content Analysis: The Production of New Social Knowledge

We examine the two traditions of content analysis: the first in which one substitutes words of a text with categories, and the second in which one looks for clusters of words that may refer to a theme. In the first tradition, preexisting dictionary categories give meaning to the words; in the second, meaning comes after the fact. Preexisting dictionary categories (the substitution model) are calibrated instruments applied within experimental designs that leave no space for doubt; meanwhile, the ability of the correlational model to conjure up complex themes from fragments of a text yields no unique solution. These differences have bearings on the production of new social knowledge. We expound on the epistemological foundations of the two traditions of interpretation and draw from them decision rules upon which one may rely for choosing among appropriate content-analytic tactics. Two reasons make this essay timely and critical: (1) the increasing variety of new content-analyticsoftware for particular purposes and (2) the almost exclusive focusing on software and technology at the expense of adjusting the choice of the software to the nature of the text. Two studies, one in historiometry, the other in autobiography, illustrate the liabilities and benefits of the two models of content analysis.     

Measuring Hospital Performance in the Presence of Quasi-Fixed Inputs: An Analysis of Québec Hospitals

This research proposes an approach to measure hospital performance based on a generalization of Banker and Morey (1986) and Førsund (1996). This approach considers quasi-fixed inputs explicitly, calculates their implicit cost, and quantifies returns to scale. The performance measure is decomposed into allocative and technical inefficiencies. Based on a very complete data set of Québec hospitals, we find that significant inefficiencies of up to 17% ($700 CAN million) could have been saved through improved performance. Postestimation analyses that include qualitative measures of care suggest that differences in performance are attributable to differences in management or unobservable quality of care rather than patient case mix.     

Ambiguity in election games

We construct a model in which the ambiguity of candidates allows them to increase the number of voters to whom they appeal. We focus our analysis on two points that are central to obtain ambiguity in equilibrium: restrictions on the beliefs that candidates can induce in voters, and intensity of voters' preferences. The first is necessary for a pure strategy equilibrium to exist, while the second is necessary for ambiguity in equilibrium when there exists a Condorcet winner in the set of pure alternatives (e.g. the spatial model of electoral competition), and when candidates' only objective is to win the election. In this last case, an ambiguous candidate may offer voters with different preferences the hope that their most preferred alternative will be implemented. We also show that if there are sufficiently many candidates or parties, ambiguity will not be possible in equilibrium, but a larger set of possible policies increases the chance that at least one candidate will choose to be ambiguous in equilibrium. We would like to thank Alberto Alesina, Antonio Cabrales, Steve Coate, Olivier Compte, Tim Feddersen, Itzhak Gilboa, Joe Harrington, Michel Le Breton, Alessandro Lizzeri, George Mailath, Steve Matthews, Steve Morris, Ignacio Ortuno, Tom Palfrey, Larry Samuelson, Murat Sertel, Fernando Vega, Eyal Winter and an anonymous referee for helpful comments. The first author acknowledges financial support from DGICYT-PB 95-0983. This work was done while the first author was visiting the Center in Political Economy at Washington University, and visiting the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University. Their hospitality is gratefully acknowledged. The support of the second author's research by the National Science Foundation is also gratefully acknowledged.     

Micro-level product-market dynamics: Shared knowledge and its relationship to market development

This work draws on consumer and psychology research to explain sociocognitive aspects of product-market dynamics at a higher level of specificity than prior research. The authors extend the field’s understanding of market-shaping shared knowledge through a theory-informed discussion of how shared product knowledge comes to exist and how it changes as product markets develop. They define shared knowledge as the aspects of product representations that are common across the minds of market actors, making it possible for them to understand one another. The authors also discuss ways to track shared knowledge content that is expressed in market narratives. As the characteristics of shared knowledge are explained and linked to stages of product-market development, the authors develop a set of researchable propositions to guide future research. The theoretical arguments and propositions in this article complement extant marketing strategy research by integrating individual-level consumer theory with market evolution models. José Antonio Rosa (jose.rosa@case.edu; Ph.D., University of Michigan) is an assistant professor of marketing at Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include product markets as sociocognitive phenomena, embodied knowledge in consumer and managerial sensemaking, consumer illiteracy and coping, commitment and motivation among members of network marketing organizations, and buying group satisfaction. His research has been published in marketing and management publications, including theJournal of Marketing and theAcademy of Management Journal. Before entering academia, he worked in the automotive and information systems industries. Jelena Spanjol (jspanjol@tamu.edu; Ph.D., University of Illinois) is an assistant professor of marketing at Texas A&M University. Her research interests include product market dynamics, product portfolio management, innovation, sensemaking, and organizational and managerial cognition in marketing strategy. Her research has been published in marketing and management publications, including theJournal of Marketing and several book chapters. Before academia, she worked in the scientific software industry.     

Forecasting recovery rates on non-performing loans with machine learning

We compare the performance of a wide set of regression techniques and machine-learning algorithms for predicting recovery rates on non-performing loans, using a private database from a European debt collection agency. We find that rule-based algorithms such as Cubist, boosted trees, and random forests perform significantly better than other approaches. In addition to loan contract specificities, predictors that refer to the bank recovery process — prior to the portfolio’s sale to a debt collector — are also shown to enhance forecasting performance. These variables, derived from the time series of contacts to defaulted clients and client reimbursements to the bank, help all algorithms better identify debtors with different repayment ability and/or commitment, and in general those with different recovery potential.     

Multiple Species Boreal Forests – What Faustmann Missed

Recent research in natural sciences shows that the dynamics in boreal forests are much more complex than what many models traditionally used in forestry economics reflect. This essay analyzes some challenges of accounting for such complexity. It shows that the optimal harvesting strategy for forest owners is history dependent and for some states of the forest, more than one strategy may be optimal.This paper confirms earlier literature on shallow lakes and coral reefs and shows that this kind of phenomena seem much more common than previously thought. They are valid for a wide range of ecosystems that cover large surfaces and they do not depend on the choice of some specific function to model the non-linearity. There are also indications that theses results could be obtained even for resources with concave growth if at least one species with non-linear growth affects their dynamics.