Investment strategies in the long run with proportional transaction costs and a HARA utility function

We consider an agent who invests in a stock and a money market in order to maximize the asymptotic behaviour of expected utility of the portfolio market price in the presence of proportional transaction costs. The assumption that the portfolio market price is a geometric Brownian motion and the restriction to a utility function with hyperbolic absolute risk aversion (HARA) enable us to evaluate interval investment strategies. It is shown that the optimal interval strategy is also optimal among a wide family of strategies and that it is optimal also in a time changed model in the case of logarithmic utility.     

Rogoff revisited: The conservative central banker proposition under active fiscal policies

The paper re-examines Rogoff's [Rogoff, K., 1985. The Optimal Degree of Commitment to an Intermediate Monetary Target. Quarterly Journal of Economics 100, 1169–1189.] influential monetary policy result. It shows that responses of a conservative central banker and the resulting macroeconomic outcomes may be substantially different if interactions with (ambitious) fiscal policy are taken into account.     

Multinational corporations and tax havens: evidence from country-by-country reporting

International Tax and Public Finance - A growing body of economics literature shows that multinational corporations (MNCs) shift their profits to tax havens. We contribute to this evidence by...     

Cost of doing business index in Latin America

Quality & Quantity - The World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index (EDBI) has been widely used in analyzes of attracting investments and formulating public policies. Despite its importance...     

Consumer input in standardization: a case study of toy safety

Abstract

Ever since the ‘new approach’ to the achievement of the Internal Market was adopted, the importance of European Standardization has increased. The standardization institutes are now responsible for the technical elaboration of requirements touching upon health and safety of consumers. Therefore, it is of major importance for consumer movements to have an input in the process. In this study, the consumer interest articulation in the ‘new approach’ policy-making process is looked into. The role consumer organizations play in both the pre-standardization and the actual standardization stage are dealt with. Toy safety is taken as a case-study, and the information for the research was mainly gathered from interviews with about 30 representatives of European and national consumer movements, government agencies and industry involved in this field

The study shows that the influence of consumers in the pre-standardization stage, when a directive is drafted and a mandate negotiated between the European Commission and the standardization institutes, is limited

As concerns the standardization stage, consumers have representation in technical committees and working groups of the European standardization institutes. The participation of European and national representatives is compared

The main findings of this research are that consumer input in the actual standardization process is crucial, since their input in the pre-standardization phase is limited. In addition to this, the European and the national consumer representatives are not equally successful in assuring consumer input in this particular policy area. The causes for this difference are considered.     

THE EURO'S TRADE EFFECT: A META‐ANALYSIS

Many studies have estimated the trade effect of the euro, but their results vary greatly. This meta‐analysis collects 3323 estimates of the euro effect along with 28 characteristics of estimation design from almost 60 studies and quantitatively examines the literature. The results show evidence of publication bias, but they also suggest that the bias decreases over time. After correcting for the bias, the meta‐analysis shows that the literature is consistent with an effect ranging between 2% and 6%. The results from Bayesian model averaging, which takes into account model uncertainty, show that the differences among estimates are systematically driven by data sources, data structure, control variables, and estimation techniques. The mean reported estimate of the euro's trade effect conditional on best‐practice approach is 3%, but is not statistically different from zero.     

The costs of tax havens: evidence from industry-level data

ABSTRACT

Multinational enterprises make use of tax havens to avoid paying corporate income taxes and this costs 100 billion USD and more in lost government revenue worldwide according to an increasing number of recent studies. None of those studies assigns these costs to industries. I aim to shed more light on this gap by using some of the best available industry-level US data to determine to what extent the location of the MNEs’ profit is aligned with the location of their economic activities. My first finding is that the most important tax havens for US multinational enterprises are the Netherlands, Ireland and Luxembourg (all EU member states). Second, I systematically identify the specific industries in specific tax havens responsible for the costs, which should be useful information for tax authorities aiming to reduce tax avoidance. Finally, I argue that the current data are not detailed enough to provide a reliable industry breakdown of the costs, but the prospect of combining input-output tables with forthcoming country-by-country data seems more promising.