A Methodological Note on Long-Period Positions

This brief paper seeks to overcome a number of methodologicaldisagreements among economists who use the long-period methodof analysis. In particular, it attempts to clarify the key distinctionsbetween convergence and stability, convergence and gravitationand chronological and theoretical persistence. The conclusionis that the theoretical soundness of the long-period methoddepends on the convergence of actual magnitudes towards theirlong-period counterparts, an empirical issue to which theoreticalconsiderations of stability are irrelevant.     

The cyclical behaviour of inventories: European cross-country evidence from the early 1990s recession

This paper employs data for a panel of firms from France, Italy and the UK to study the effect of the recession of the early 1990s on inventory investment, controlling for cyclical fluctuations at the firm level. The results clearly show some common patterns across countries, pointing to the relevance of financial factors (namely, the level of leverage) in propagating initial recessionary shocks. Moreover, Italian firms, especially if ‘small and young’, seem more likely to suffer from a reduction in the value of collateralizable assets possibly originated by restrictive policy actions.     

Business cycle comovement in the G-7: common shocks or common transmission mechanisms?

What are the sources of macroeconomic comovement among G-7 countries? Two main candidate explanations may be singled out: common shocks and common transmission mechanisms. In the article it is shown that they are complementary, rather than alternative, explanations. By means of a large-scale Factor Vector Autoregressive (FVAR) model, allowing for full economic and statistical identification of all global and idiosyncratic shocks, it is found that both common disturbances and common transmission mechanisms of global and country-specific shocks account for business cycle comovement in the G-7 countries. Moreover, spillover effects of foreign idiosyncratic disturbances seem to be a less important factor than the common transmission of global or domestic shocks in the determination of international macro-economic comovements.     

How Long is a Piece of Cable? Equilibrium Determination of Local Telephone Areas

This paper studies the endogenous determination of telephone local calling areas. In many telephone systems, calls between users in the same calling area are local; calls to outside the calling area are long distance and priced differently. We allow the extension of this area to be treated as a strategic variable. We show the extension of the calling areas which maximizes the carrier's profit to be the same which a welfare maximizing regulator would choose. Under a price cap regime in which prices are required to meet an average price constraint, the firm manipulates strategically the extension of the local calling areas. We end the paper by considering the case of a competitive market. In this case, again, the owner of the local loop extends the local calling areas in response to decreased efficiency or increased competition of its competitors. Received April 25, 2002; revised version received September 9, 2002 Published online: April 30, 2003     

The value added by government venture capital funds compared with independent venture capital funds

Government venture capital (GVC) funds have been a common policy initiative in European countries to overcome funding gaps in the promotion of early-stage ventures. In this work, we focus on the performance of such government funds. We compare the importance for the firm's development of post-investment, valueadded activities by GVC firms and independent venture capital (IVC) firms.We use a unique data set based on the results of a survey addressed to young high-techVC-backed firms from seven European countries. The survey gauged the importance of the contribution by the first lead investor in a variety of activity areas, as assessed by the investee companies. Attention was paid to potential adverse effects of the post-investment engagement of investors.Using a composite indicator of the value added, we find no statistically significant difference between the two types of investors. However, the profiles of value added differ across investor types, and, in particular, the contributions of IVC funds prove to be significantly higher than those of GVC funds in a number of areas, including the development of the business idea, professionalisation and exit orientation.     

Does it matter (for equilibrium determinacy) what price index the central bank targets?

What inflation rate should the central bank target? We address determinacy issues related to this question in a two-sector model in which prices can differ in equilibrium. We assume that the degree of nominal price stickiness can vary across the sectors and that labor is immobile. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate that a modified Taylor Principle holds in this environment. If the central bank elects to target sector one, and if it responds with a coefficient greater than unity to price movements in this sector, then this policy rule will ensure determinacy across all sectors. The results of this paper have at least two implications. First, the equilibrium-determinacy criterion does not imply a preference to any particular measure of inflation. Second, since the Taylor Principle applies at the sectoral level, there is no need for a Taylor Principle at the aggregate level.     

Climate Change and Adaptation: The Case of Nigerian Agriculture

The present research offers an economic assessment of climate change impacts on the four major crop families characterizing Nigerian agriculture. The evaluation is performed by shocking land productivity in a computable general equilibrium model tailored to replicate Nigerian economic development up to 2050. The detail of land uses in the model has been increased by differentiating land types per agro-ecological zones. Uncertainty about future climate is captured, using, as inputs, yield changes computed by a crop model under ten general circulation models runs. Climate change turns out to be negative for Nigeria in the medium term, with production losses and increase in crop prices, higher food dependency on foreign imports, and GDP losses in all the simulations after 2025. In a second part of the paper, a cost effectiveness analysis of adaptation in Nigerian agriculture is conducted. The adaptation practices considered are a mix of cheaper “soft measures” and more costly “hard” irrigation expansion. The main result is that the cost effectiveness of the whole package depends crucially on the possibility of implementing adaptation by exploiting low-cost opportunities which show a benefit-cost ratio larger than one in all the climate regimes.     

Risk measures with the CxLS property

In the present contribution, we characterise law determined convex risk measures that have convex level sets at the level of distributions. By relaxing the assumptions in Weber (Math. Finance 16:419–441, 2006), we show that these risk measures can be identified with a class of generalised shortfall risk measures. As a direct consequence, we are able to extend the results in Ziegel (Math. Finance, 2014, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mafi.12080/abstract) and Bellini and Bignozzi (Quant. Finance 15:725–733, 2014) on convex elicitable risk measures and confirm that expectiles are the only elicitable coherent risk measures. Further, we provide a simple characterisation of robustness for convex risk measures in terms of a weak notion of mixture continuity.