Merging Markets

We study the causes and effects of the competition for order flow by U.S. regional stock exchanges. We trace the origins of competition for order flow to a change in the role of regional exchanges from being venues for listing local securities to being more direct competitors for the order flow of NYSE listings. We study the way regionals competed for order flow, concentrating on a series of stock-exchange mergers that occurred in the midst of this transition of the regional exchanges. The merging exchanges attracted market share and experienced narrower bid-ask spreads.     

Fatal and serious road crashes involving young New Zealand drivers: a latent class clustering approach

The over-representation of young drivers in road crashes remains an important concern worldwide. Cluster analysis has been applied to young driver sub-groups, but its application by analysing crash occurrence is just emerging. We present a classification analysis that advances the field through a holistic overview of crash patterns useful for designing youth-targeted road safety programmes. We compiled a database of 8644 New Zealand crashes from 2002 to 2011 involving at least one 15–24-year-old driver and a fatal or serious injury for at least one road user. We considered crash location, infrastructure characteristics, environmental conditions, demographic characteristics, driving behaviour, and pre-crash manoeuvres. The analysis yielded 15 and 8 latent classes of, respectively, single-vehicle and multi-vehicle crashes, and average posterior probabilities measured the odds of correct classification that revealed how the identified clusters contain mostly crashes of a particular class and all the crashes of that class. The results raised three major safety concerns for young drivers that should be addressed: (1) reckless driving and traffic law violations; (2) inattention, error, and hazard perception problems; and (3) interaction with road geometry and lighting conditions, especially on high-speed open roads and state highways.     

Toward a Political Economy of Markets

In the post-Washington Consensus era, increasing emphasis on private sector-led strategies for economic growth has contributed to the focus of policymakers on entrepreneurship. However, many programs designed to support entrepreneurship are based on an erroneous and biased image of the entrepreneur, with important consequences for development processes and outcomes. Longstanding ideology underlying the entrepreneur as a rugged individual hero shapes not only the masculinist notion of entrepreneurship in most societies, but also the narrow focus and structure of entrepreneurship programs. Microfinance, however, is generally conceptualized as being "different" from other programs, particularly given its informal sector reach and common group lending model. This paper investigates the extent to which microfinance is able to build community, and to sustain individual entrepreneurs' attention to social solidarity economy. Alternative approaches to microfinance, which fundamentally restructure the way it works — specifically considering the issue of community-building — are discussed as a possible "next evolution" of this form of social enterprise.     

Price transmission and volatility spillovers in Asian rice markets: Evidence from MGARCH and panel GARCH models

ABSTRACT

This article examines world rice price transmission and volatility spillovers across six major Asian rice markets over the period 2005-13. In addition to the conventional GARCH models, we use a panel GARCH framework to estimate the spillover effects along with the consideration of heterogeneity and interdependence among countries. Empirical results suggest that changes in the world rice price affected not only the price levels of domestic rice markets but also their conditional variances. Moreover, interdependence across rice markets contributed to a strong spillover of a price shock in one country to another within the region.     

Self-Fulfilling Debt Crises

We characterize the values of government debt and the debt's maturitystructure under which financial crises brought on by a loss of confidence inthe government can arise within a dynamic, stochastic general equilibriummodel. We also characterize the optimal policy response of the government tothe threat of such a crisis. We show that when the country's fundamentalsplace it inside the crisis zone, the government may be motivated to reduceits debt and exit the crisis zone because this leads to an economic boom anda reduction in the interest rate on the government's debt. We show thatthis reduction can be gradual if debt is high or the probability of a crisisis low. We also show that, while lengthening the maturity of the debt canshrink the crisis zone, credibility-inducing policies can have perverseeffects.     

Promote or Perish? A brief note on academic social networking sites and academic reputation

ABSTRACT

This commentary explores some of the reputational issues of using academic social networking sites (ASNS) such as ResearchGate, ResearcherID, ORCID, Academia.edu, Google Scholar, and Mendeley for academic self-promotion and considers whether the adage of ‘Publish or Perish’ has been recently overshadowed by the new imperative of ‘Promote or Perish’?