Financial Insecurity in a World of Plenty

Abstract

The U.S. economy is addicted to the simulative impacts of household borrowing. Household debt has grown dramatically since the 1990s and has served to mitigate the detrimental effects of stagnant household wages. The accumulation of this debt has also had the macroeconomic impact of stimulating the economy, pushing it closer towards full employment. However does full employment stimulated by household indebtedness actually represent economic progress? It is argued that even the poorest citizen in a modern industrialized society is better off than a king of feudal Europe, yet in the United States such material prosperity is often tied to social insecurity thanks to debt. The growth of this debt has been enabled by a financial system that has evolved dramatically over the past forty years. The U.S. financial system’s primary role is no longer to finance investment but is rather a tool that enables a separation of ownership from use. Debt has fueled corporate profits which have enriched the shareholding class while at the same time the system has reduced the financial security of the majority of workers. This article crystalizes these issues by analyzing the differentials in financial circumstances faced by workers and shareholders in several major U.S. firms.     

The influence of the regional context on firms’ innovation patterns: evidence from Ecuador*

ABSTRACT

Using data from the Ecuadorean Innovation Survey of 2015, this paper identifies the innovation patterns that can be found in Ecuador. In addition, we analyse the influence of the regional innovation systems in determining these patterns. The results show that there are six differentiated patterns of innovation, although they all are related to the adoption and imitation of technologies. Finally, we observe that different regional characteristics condition the way in which firms organise innovation.     

《经济地理》创刊以来的知识溢出特征与变化

基于引证关系,利用知识图谱、社会网络分析等方法,对1981—2019年《经济地理》创刊以来知识溢出的特征与变化规律进行分析。经济地理学研究的专业综合性、学科交叉性特点,在《经济地理》期刊知识溢出的特征与变化中得以充分诠释。期刊知识溢出的作用与变化,不仅体现在促进作者合作网络形成与机构合作关系的深化上,也体现在对城市化、区域经济发展、区域旅游发展等研究领域的推动作用与变化上。期刊知识溢出的特征与变化在其主题构成、作者贡献、机构力量与前沿引领等的探讨中进一步得以明确。具体地,城市化研究的知识溢出作用,从城市化和城镇化、土地利用、生态环境等方面,逐渐转向新型城镇化、城市网络、生态环境、协调发展等主题;区域经济发展研究的知识溢出作用,经历了从经济联系转向产业集群、再转向空间相互作用关系的主题变化;区域旅游发展研究的知识溢出作用,则从旅游资源、旅游业、生态旅游等方面,逐步转向乡村旅游、旅游经济与协调发展等主题。以国家战略与发展政策为主要导向,促进国内经济地理学的研究与发展,是《经济地理》期刊知识溢出的核心内容与集中反映。     

Eliminate (don't automate) inventory tracking

Being competitive in today's global markets is not easy. As a result, most companies are investing heavily in upgrading their competitive posture through the implementation of advanced methodologies, which are now becoming affordable to even the smallest of companies. It is also true that technology is advancing too rapidly for most organizations to absorb and effectively implement new developments. We've learned that technology alone is insufficient to improve competitiveness... and when implemented improperly it adds cost, with very little advantage. We've further learned that the effective implementation of technology must be rooted in common sense, accompanied by fundamental shifts in thinking. A change in how we manage and track inventory is one of those fundamental shifts that must take place if we are to benefit from much of the new technology. This article discusses changing the inventory management and tracking mindset.     

A note on forecasting international tourism demand in Spain

This paper considers the extent to which price and income proxy variables help in forecasting tourist demand in Spain. Contrary to some recent studies, we found that the inputs' contribution in terms of fitting and forecasting is nil when compared with alternative univariate models. Whether these findings are the results of the restrictions embedded in building the proxy inputs or in a poor specification of the dynamics of these models remains to be seen. We also contend that when dealing with medium, long-term forecasting comparisons, the use of the traditional aggregate accuracy measures like RMSE and MAPE help very little in discriminating among competing models. In these situations, predicted annual growth rates may be a better alternative.     

Determinants of the stock price reaction to leveraged buyouts

This paper investigates the determinants of leveraged buyout activity through the use of an abnormal return premium from the time of the first announcement through the final trading day. Consistent with the free. cash flow theory, firms with either high free cash flow or low Tobin’s q have higher abnormal returns. However, the returns to firms with both high free cash flow and low Tobin’s q are lower than firms with just one of these characteristics. Firms which substantially increase leverage and management buyouts with high insider ownership prior to the buyout have lower abnormal returns. Firms with lower risk, and therefore greater debt capacity, have higher abnormal returns.     

On estimating the reliability after sequentially estimating the mean: The exponential case

Sequential estimation problems for the mean parameter of an exponential distribution has received much attention over the years. Purely sequential and accelerated sequential estimators and their asymptotic second-order characteristics have been laid out in the existing literature, both for minimum risk point as well as bounded length confidence interval estimation of the mean parameter. Having obtained a data set from such sequentially designed experiments, the paper investigates estimation problems for the associatedreliability function. Second-order approximations are provided for the bias and mean squared error of the proposed estimator of the reliability function, first under a general setup. An ad hoc bias-corrected version is also introduced. Then, the proposed estimator is investigated further under some specific sequential sampling strategies, already available in the literature. In the end, simulation results are presented for comparing the proposed estimators of the reliability function for moderate sample sizes and various sequential sampling strategies.     

A General Method of Deriving the Inefficiencies of Banks from a Profit Function

This article develops a new method of estimating inefficiencies in joint production and shows that unlike the approaches utilized in the previous studies of inefficiency, this method maintains a consistent relationship between the error term of a profit function and the error terms of its price derivatives. A useful by-product of the method is a proof of a Hotelling-like lemma that relates stochastic input demand and output supply functions to stochastic profit functions. While the previous studies fit a single frontier to data on all firms, this paper estimates a frontier unique to every observed firm to allow each one to have a different potential of achieving maximal levels of profit. The new method is applied in the analysis of annual data, 1984–1989, for U.S. commercial banks. Both the analytical and numerical results of the paper show that the residual that the previous studies attribute to inefficiency includes the effects of excluded variables and of inaccuracies in the specified functional forms. Once accurate estimates of these effects are subtracted from the residual, the distortions in the measured inefficiencies should be considerably reduced. Consequently, this article considers how such estimates might be obtained.     

Testing for unit roots in time series models with non-stationary volatility

Many of the key macro-economic and financial variables in developed economies are characterized by permanent volatility shifts. It is known that conventional unit root tests are potentially unreliable in the presence of such behaviour, depending on a particular function (the variance profile) of the underlying volatility process. Somewhat surprisingly then, very little work has been undertaken to develop unit root tests which are robust to the presence of permanent volatility shifts. In this paper we fill this gap in the literature by proposing tests which are valid in the presence of a quite general class of permanent variance changes which includes single and multiple (abrupt and smooth-transition) volatility change processes as special cases. Our solution uses numerical methods to simulate the asymptotic null distribution of the statistics based on a consistent estimate of the variance profile which we also develop. The practitioner is not required to specify a parametric model for volatility. An empirical illustration using producer price inflation series from the Stock–Watson database is reported.     

A critical test of the choice questionnaire for collecting informed public opinions

In the Choice Questionnaire (Neijens et al. 1992) respondents have to choose between several policy options. Within this questionnaire they are provided with information about the consequences of each option. Until now, only indirect evidence as to whether or not respondents base their preferences on the information provided was available and plausible alternative explanations for the Choice Questionnaire's effect could not be ruled out. In the present study, we demonstrate that Choice Questionnaire respondents do base their preferences on the information provided: different information resulted in significantly different choices.