Testing the Unstable Middle and Two Corners Hypotheses About Exchange Rate Regimes

The recent rash of international currency crises has generated considerable interest in the role that exchange rate regimes have played in contributing to these crises. Many economists have argued that efforts to operate adjustably pegged exchange rate regimes have been a major contributor to “the unstable middle” hypothesis and some have argued that this unstable middle is so broad that only the two corners of hard fixes or floating rates will be stable in a world of high capital mobility—the two corners or bipolar hypothesis. Two recent empirical studies by researchers at the International Monetary Fund reach opposing conclusions on these issues. We examine the issue further and show that conclusions can be quite sensitive to how exchange rate regimes are grouped into categories and the measures of currency crises that are used. In general we find that the dead center of the adjustable peg is by far the most crisis prone broad type of exchange rate regimes, but that countries need not go all the way to freely floating rates or hard fixes to substantially reduce the risks of currency crises.

Prevailing Protectionism Challenge to International Mining

An overall adjustment of global industries is going on and the global resource allocation layout is changing.Developed countries attempt to maintain the existing resource allocation layout while emerging countries such as China and India are getting involved in global resource allocation and are playing an increasingly active role.The reporter from China's Foreign Trade magazine had an interview with relevant offcials,experts and professionals in mining investment on such issues as the current characteristics of international mining market,the situation of international mining market in the year 2012 and the foreign investment direction of Chinese mining,and analyzed the above issues.     

Heckscher–Ohlin theory when countries have different technologies

Rethinking the foundations of Heckscher–Ohlin theory when countries have different technologies, this paper shows how to make the proper adjustments for international productivity differences. The central tool is a factor conversion matrix that computes the local factor content of foreign Rybczynski effects. Factor-specific productivities are a special case of these more general linear relationships.     

The emergence of green talent

Several factors are driving an increase in the supply of and demand for "green talent", employees with the mindsets and skills to drive sustainability. But many business leaders do not fully understand the implications of this change in the workforce. John Glen, Chris Hilson and Eric Lowitt believe corporate chiefs need to learn – quickly.     

Robust Stability of Monetary Policy Rules under Adaptive Learning

Recent research has explored how minor changes in expectation formation can change the stability properties of a model ( 2007 ; 2009 ). This article builds on this research by examining an economy subject to a variety of monetary policy rules under an endogenous learning algorithm proposed by 2003 . The results indicate that operational versions of optimal discretionary rules are not robustly stable, as in 2009 . In addition, commitment rules are not robust to minor changes in expectational structure and parameter values.     

Non-cooperative exploitation of multi-cohort fisheries—The role of gear selectivity in the North-East Arctic cod fishery

North-East Arctic cod is shared by Russia and Norway. Taking its multi-cohort structure into account, how would optimal management look like? How would non-cooperative exploitation limit the obtainable profits? To which extent could the strategic situation explain today’s over-harvesting? Simulation of a detailed bio-economic model reveals that the mesh size should be significantly increased, resulting not only in a doubling of economic gains, but also in a biologically healthier age-structure of the stock. The Nash equilibrium is close to the current regime. Even when effort is fixed to its optimal level, the non-cooperative choice of gear selectivity leads to a large dissipation of rents.     

Foreign vs. domestic listing: An entrepreneurial decision

In this paper, we use a unique hand-collected dataset to analyze stock listing as an entrepreneurial decision. By comparing mainland Chinese entrepreneurial firms listed in Hong Kong with the same type of firms opting for a domestic listing on the Shenzhen second board market, we argue that the decision to list on a particular stock exchange is a question of entrepreneurial signaling, and often a trade-off between short-term financial considerations and the entrepreneur's pursuit of long-term benefits.     

Writing the differences: Poststructural ist pluralism,retextualization, and the construction of reflexive ethnographic narratives in consumption and market research

Representing social realities in a narrative form is central to the interpretive processes by which market‐oriented ethnographies are constructed. In recent years, the process of textualization has shifted from a taken‐for‐granted aspect of the ethnographic enterprise to a central focus of ethnographers’ reflexive considerations. This shift reflects the realization that textualization poses dilemmas of representation that can not be resolved through additional fieldwork or other methodological procedures. This paper addresses these workbench problems by devising an alternative narrative formretextualization‐based on a poststructuralist version of critical pluralistic analysis. We first discuss how non‐realist genres of ethnographic writing have emerged in response to a heightened sensitivity toward ideological positions embedded in research narratives. We then discuss how the use of retextualization can facilitate the development of reflexivity in consumption research by destabilizing the representational authority of the ethnographic text through expressions of divergence, dissensus, and contested interpretations.