Barriers to Exporting: What are They and Who do They Matter to?

The international trade literatures on gravity modelling and firm‐level export behaviour have established that nontariff barriers are important impediments to international trade flows. In this paper, we provide fresh evidence on the actual barriers to exports firms face and how they vary with firm‐level characteristics. Our results indicate that the higher the export experience of firms the lower are the trade costs they face. These barriers are not related to other firm‐level characteristics, such as productivity and size, found by the literature to be associated with export market entry. Overall, these results suggest the existence of a process of learning to export whereby firms learn how to cope with export barriers through direct experience in export markets.     

Der gegenwärtige Stand der reinen Theorie der Finanzwissenschaft in Italien. II

Ohne ZusammenfassungVgl. Heft 5, Bd. III, der Zeitschrift (Anm. d. Schriftleitung).Übersetzt von Oskar Lange, Krakau.     

Growth and democracy: Trade-offs and paradoxes

The present paper attempts to reveal the relationships between some long-run systemic processes (on the economic, ecological, social and symbolic levels) and the theme of democracy. Starting from the distinction between democracy and autonomy, the paper focusses on its main issue: the trade-off between growth and autonomy. Continual growth can be produced, and indeed has been produced throughout history, only if accompanied by a loss of autonomy, even, beyond a certain scale threshold, to the detriment of representative democracy. While this conflict has never been rejected by political theorists, it has, in actual fact, been removed from all political debate.The second part of the paper seeks to individuate some of the long-run basic dynamics that characterise the global system: the analysis starts from the growth/accumulation/innovation process which characterized industrial capitalism, first, and financial capitalism, later, pointing out its self-pursuing, multi-scale, emergent nature with its main consequences for both ecological and social sustainability. The outcome of these processes, such as the loss of well-being, the increasing social and ecological costs and the growing fragmentation of the collective imaginary, in the long run leads the global system towards a condition of non equilibrium, from which either scenarios of greater autonomy or fatal risks for democracy itself, may emerge.     

Quantifying structural subsidy values for systemically important financial institutions

Claimants to Systemically Important Financial Institutions (SIFIs) would receive transfers when governments are forced into bailouts. Ex ante, this bailout expectation lowers SIFIs’ daily funding costs. The funding cost advantage reflects both the structural level of the government support and the time-varying market valuation for such a support. Based on a large worldwide sample of banks, we estimate the value of the structural subsidy, by exploiting expectations of state support embedded in credit ratings and by applying the long-run average value of the rating bonus. The value of the structural subsidy was already sizable, 60 basis points (bp), as of the end-2007, before the crisis. It increased to 80 bp by the end-2009.     

Book Notes COPO No. 3 2009 by Lucia A. Reisch

Book Note

Book Notes COPO No. 3 2009 by Lucia A. Reisch     

Are output growth‐rate distributions fat‐tailed? some evidence from OECD countries

This work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth‐rate time series. We show that, in the majority of OECD countries, output growth‐rate distributions are well approximated by symmetric exponential power densities with tails much fatter than those of a Gaussian (but with finite moments of any order). Fat tails robustly emerge in output growth rates independently of: (i) the way we measure aggregate output; (ii) the family of densities employed in the estimation; (iii) the length of time lags used to compute growth rates. We also show that fat tails still characterize output growth‐rate distributions even after one washes away outliers, autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Notes and Communications

Summary The relationship between home ownership of Dutch elderly households and age is strongly negative. Other studies suggest that this age gradient should be attributed to a cohort effect. In this paper, we investigate where those cohort effects come from. We also observe that mortgage ownership among elderly home owners increased considerably during the nineties. Using panel data, we estimate models explaining home and mortgage ownership by age, cohort, and time effects, as well as other factors. Cohort and time effects are modelled explicitly using macro economic and housing market related variables. We find that the level of GDP per capita when the household head was young is the main factor explaining generation effects in home ownership among the elderly. After accounting for cohort effects it also appears that home ownership decreases slightly with age. Mortgage ownership among elderly home owners rose considerably during the nineties due to house price increases and due to financial innovation in the mortgage market. Cohort effects are also important. A supplementary analysis suggests that those cohort effects are due to the fact that the accidental bequest motive is becoming less important. We thank Maarten van Rooij, Konstantinos Tatsiramos, Casper van Ewijk, Wouter Vermeulen, Frederic Vermeulen, Frank de Jong and Marcel Lever for their useful comments     

THE PATTERN OF KNOWLEDGE FLOWS BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY FIELDS

This paper exploits recent contributions to the notions of modularity and autocatalytic sets to identify the functional and structural units that define the strongest systematic and self‐sustaining channels of knowledge transfer and accumulation within the network of knowledge flows between technology fields. Our analysis reconstructs the architecture of the empirical knowledge pattern based on the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) patent citation data at the level of resolution of three‐digit technology classes, for the period 1975–99.     

Demand‐led growth with endogenous innovation

This paper contributes to the recent macro‐dynamics literature on demand‐led growth, drawing upon the seminal idea that the implications of Harrodian instability may be tamed by a source of autonomous expenditure in the economy. Contrary to the other contributions in this literature, real autonomous expenditure is not growing at an exogenously given rate, and partly consists of a flow of profit‐seeking R&D and innovation expenditures raising labour productivity through time. If the state of distribution, hence the wage share, is exogenously fixed and constant, the model gives rise to dynamics in a two dimensional state space, that may converge to, or give rise to a limit cycle around, an endogenous growth path. An exogenous rise of the profit share exerts negative effects on long‐run growth and employment, showing that growth is wage led.