The ECONOMIC IMPORTANCE OF PUBLIC ENTERPRISE IN BELGIUM

The economic importance of the public enterprises has been established on the basis of the following criteria: Own capital, personnel employed, gross added value and various factors giving rise to appreciation.
This survey is of a purely preliminary nature, since, in actual fact, given the present situation of the published data, it has not so far been possible to arrive at more precise figures, taking enterprise by enterprise according to a systematic plan.
Moreover, it would have been desirable to fill out the above-mentioned criteria by data concerning turnover and investment, As the data collected in the course of this study are so extremely fragmentary, we have been obliged to exclude any statement concerning these two factors.     

结构金融产品系列讲座(摘登)——市场中的普通信托和代理服务

受托人欧洲债券发行中,受托人的职能就是在债券发行的整个过程中充任债券发行人和债券持有人之间的桥梁。虽然实践中受托人的职责范围可以因结构的不同而不同,但是,受托人的职能本质都是按照需要、按照信托文件的规定维护和行使交易业务中     

Should We Worry about Government Debt? Thoughts on Australia's COVID-19 Response

No. While the COVID-19 crisis has required a dramatic increase in debt-financed government spending, in the current conditions the benefits from this debt are unusually high and the costs unusually low. While conditions can change, the Australian Government can right now hedge against these risks by lengthening the maturity structure of government debt, even at the cost of a modest increase in its current servicing costs.     

Non-Laplacian beliefs in a global game with noisy signaling

In standard global games, individual behavior is optimal if it constitutes a best response to agnostic—Laplacian—beliefs about the aggregate behavior of other agents. This paper considers a standard binary action global game augmented with noisy signaling by an informed policy-maker and shows that in this game, equilibrium beliefs depart in quite stark ways from the Laplacian benchmark. In the limit as signals become arbitrarily precise, so that all fundamental uncertainty is removed (leaving only strategic uncertainty), the equilibrium beliefs of the marginal individual concerning the aggregate action collapse to a discrete Bernoulli distribution, giving probability mass only to the polar extreme outcomes. By contrast in the underlying standard global game the marginal individual believes the aggregate action has a continuous uniform distribution, giving equal likelihood to all possible outcomes.     

Economies of superscale in commercial banking

Most previous studies of scale economies in banking have excluded banks larger than $1 billion in assets. Thus study, by contrast, estimates cost functions for the 100 largest US commercial banks. ‘Hedonic’ terms are incorporated to correct for the aggregated nature of the Call Report data available for these banks. In addition, we attempt to quantify the cost benefit of diversification in the model. We estimate efficient bank scale to range from $15 billion to $37 billion in total assets, a thousandfold increase over some previous findings. These results are supported by comparison of actual average costs, as well as by casual historical observation and the level of widespread concern over interstate banking. Our findings suggest some cost incentive or benefit to expansion or consolidation among large regional banks, including interstate expansion or consolidation.     

Household Debt,Consumption, and Income Inequality

Using the Johansen and Engle–Granger cointegration tests, we show that there is one cointegrating relationship between household debt, consumption, and income inequality in the United States for the period from 1929 to 2009. Given this result, we use a Vector Error-Correction model to further understand the dynamics among the three variables. Results indicate that increases in income inequality and consumption directly contribute to increases in household debt. Interestingly, the results reveal some feedback from household debt to income inequality. We also show that debt-driven consumption should be viewed with caution as the results show that increases in household debt correspond with future declines in the rate of consumption.     

The effect of the informal economy on bilateral exports from sub-Saharan African countries

The purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of the informal economy on bilateral exports in sub-Saharan African countries. We use a gravity model, to which we add indicators of the informal economy and indicator variables for different economic regions. The study used Pseudo-Poisson Maximum Likelihood (PPML) and Heckman estimation techniques on data from the period 2002–2018. The results show that the informal economy has a negative impact on bilateral inter-community exports and a positive impact on bilateral intra-community exports. These results thus support the idea that the informal economy can accelerate the integration of regional economic communities and ultimately facilitate the establishment of bilateral export free trade areas at the continental level.