A Reform in Search of a Purpose: French Insolvency Law Changes (Again!)

This article charts the additions made by the French legislator to the insolvency framework, reformed relatively recently in 2005 and 2008, consisting in a fresh set of amendments in 2014 aimed at encouraging more take up of upstream rescue proceedings as well as improving the existing procedures.     

Disclaiming onerous property in insolvency: A comparative study

Insolvency practitioners in charge of certain insolvency procedures have a facility open to them to disclaim property deemed to be onerous and whose retention as part of the debtor's estate may affect the mass of creditors. This article takes a comparative survey of a number of jurisdictions in the common‐law and civil‐law worlds. Its purpose is to assess whether work carried out at international level seeking to benchmark insolvency procedures generally should be revised to take into account enviornmental concerns in relation to such disclaimed property. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Embodied Technological Change,Learning‐by‐doing and the Productivity Slowdown*

The productivity slowdown in the US economy since the first oil shock has recently been associated with a larger decline rate of the relative price of equipment investment and a smaller rate of disembodied technical change. We set up a growth model in which learning‐by‐doing is the engine of both embodied and disembodied technological progress. A shift in the relative efficiency of learning‐by‐doing from the consumption to the investment sector is shown to imply a technological reassignment consistent with the above‐mentioned evidence. This result derives from the interaction between the obsolescence costs inherent in embodiment and the learning‐by‐doing engine.     

Towards a Democratic New Normal? Investor Reactions to Interim-Regime Dominance during Violent Events

Although interim regimes in former autocracies are generally tasked with initiating a democratic ‘new normal’, they may privately intend to become their country’s new autocratic rulers. We argue that, to cope with the uncertainty stemming from this possibility, investors infer an interim regime’s intentions from the dominance displayed by the regime during government-related violence, as reflected in the share of civilian fatalities. Specifically, we propose that investors interpret higher interim-regime dominance as a signal of weaker democratic intentions and associate such weaker intentions with a gloomier political outlook for local firms. We therefore hypothesize that investors react more negatively to violent events characterized by higher interim-regime dominance. We also hypothesize a less negative effect of such dominance for firms with larger foreign footprints, lower indebtedness, or more concentrated ownership, since investors will likely consider such firms more resilient to political deterioration. Applying event study methodology to 94 spells of violence in Egypt during the Arab Spring, we find substantial support for our hypotheses, thus contributing to management research on investor decision-making, violence, and political uncertainty.     

Operational model for planning the harvest and distribution of perishable agricultural products

This paper presents an operational model that generates short term planning decisions for the fresh produce industry. In particular, the application developed helps the grower to maximize his revenues by making production and distribution decisions during the harvest season. The main motivation for this model comes from the fact that the profitability of producers is highly dependent on the handling of short term planning in the harvest season. Some of the factors affecting profitability include the management of labor costs, the preservation of the value of perishable crops, and the use transportation modes that provide the best trade-off between time (quality of products) and cost. These issues are interrelated, and their judicious management is fundamental for attaining good financial results. The results of the proposed planning model indicate that significant savings can be obtained by managing the trade-off of the freshness at the delivery of the product with the added labor and transportation cost at the grower's side. Moreover the results also show that dynamic, information based, management practices might be preferred over traditional practices based in fixed labor allocation and distribution practices.     

International mobility of capital,wage indexation,and the cost of policy mistakes under ambiguity: a CGE evaluation

In this paper we focus on the role institutions and structural parameters play in macroeconomic policy design and test the differential effects of tax policies on two structural parameters: the degree of international capital mobility and the rules of wage indexation practiced in the economy. We evaluate counterfactual changes in taxation in the Argentine economy using a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) Model with unemployment, calibrated with 2006 data, showing that policy mistakes (diagnosis failures) are costlier when the degree of capital mobility is greater and the rules to determine salaries could amplify the losses. Among other taxes, we evaluate the choice of export taxation, historically one of the preferred revenue sources of Argentine governments. We discuss the choice of taxes that an optimistic and a pessimistic policymaker will make under Knightian uncertainty and find that, in the case of our CGE, an optimistic policymaker prefers to tax export goods, while a more pessimistic one tends to tax imports or non-tradable goods.     

Vintage Human Capital, Demographic Trends, and Endogenous Growth

We study how economic growth is affected by demographics in an OLG model with a realistic survival law. Individuals optimally chose the dates at which they leave school to work and at which they retire. Endogenous growth arises thanks to the accumulation of generation-specific human capital. Favorable shifts in the survival probabilities induce longer schooling and later retirement but have an ambiguous effect on per-capita growth. The long-term relationship between fertility and per-capita growth is hump-shaped. Increases in longevity can be responsible for a switch from a no-growth regime to a sustained growth regime and for a positive relationship between fertility and growth to vanish. Solving numerically the equilibrium, demographic changes can have important medium-term effects even if long-term changes are very small. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: 041, I20, J10.     

The Masakhane campaign: Alice and King William's Town case studies

The high‐profile media launch of the Masakhane campaign heightened awareness of issues associated with local government and service provision, However, delivery and improvement of services at local level have been slow or even non‐existent, resulting in a general feeling of despondency. Fortunately, this situation is being challenged as some towns implement their own campaigns with increasingly promising results, as this article will show by tracing developments in Alice and King William's Town. Their experiences, together with those of a number of other towns, point to some exciting possibilities in achieving the ideals of the Masakhane campaign at local level.     

The Trickle‐down Effect of the Mining Boom in Australia: Fact or Myth?

This paper examines the relationship between the output levels in the mining sector and various non‐mining sectors in an attempt to understand the role of the mining sector in Australia. The unobserved components time series model is used to estimate the effects of the output gap and the growth regime in the mining sector on the output level of each of several non‐mining sectors. Overall, the estimates obtained do not suggest an overwhelmingly positive effect running from the mining sector to other production and services sectors, implying that the trickle‐down effect of the mining boom may be a myth.     

On the permanent effect of an aggregate demand shock: Evidence from the G-7 countries

This paper extends the work of Cover, Enders and Hueng (2006) to examine the idea that an aggregate demand shock may have permanent effect on the output level by indirectly shifting the aggregate supply curve. We utilize the bivariate SVAR modeling and adopt an identification scheme, which allows for the possibility that a shift in the aggregate demand curve may induce the long-run aggregate supply curve to shift. We have shown that aggregate supply shocks are positively affected by the demand shocks in each of the G-7 countries. It is found that a one-time positive aggregate demand shock increases the output level permanently in these industrialized economies. We have also shown that our decomposition strategy can help resolve anomalies in the responses of inflation to a positive aggregate supply shock observed in a simple Blanchard-Quah decomposition.