China's Competitive Threat to Latin America: An Analysis for 1990–2002

This paper explores China's competitive threat to Latin America in trade in manufactured goods. The direct threat to exports to third country markets appears small: Latin America and the Caribbean's (LAC's) trade structure is largely complementary to that of China. In bilateral trade, several LAC countries are increasing primary and resource-based exports to China. However, the pattern of trade, with LAC specializing increasingly in resource-based products and China in manufactured goods, seems worrying. Given cumulative capability building, China's success in increasingly technology-based products with strong learning externalities can place it on a higher growth path than specialization in “simpler” goods, as in LAC. China may thus affect LAC's technological upgrading in exports and industrial production. The issue is not so much current competition as the “spaces” open for LAC in the emerging technology-based world.     

Corporate Bond Valuation and Hedging with Stochastic Interest Rates and Endogenous Bankruptcy

This paper analyzes corporate bond valuation and optimal calland default rules when interest rates and firm value are stochastic.It then uses the results to explain the dynamics of hedging.Bankruptcy rules are important determinants of corporate bondsensitivity to interest rates and firm value. Although endogenousand exogenous bankruptcy models can be calibrated to producethe same prices, they can have very different hedging implications.We show that empirical results on the relation between corporatespreads and Treasury rates provide evidence on duration, andwe find that the endogenous model explains the empirical patternsbetter than do typical exogenous models.     

Securitization without risk transfer

We analyze asset-backed commercial paper conduits, which experienced a shadow-banking run and played a central role in the early phase of the financial crisis of 2007–2009. We document that commercial banks set up conduits to securitize assets worth $1.3 trillion while insuring the newly securitized assets using explicit guarantees. We show that regulatory arbitrage was an important motive behind setting up conduits. In particular, the guarantees were structured so as to reduce regulatory capital requirements, more so by banks with less capital, and while still providing recourse to bank balance sheets for outside investors. Consistent with such recourse, we find that conduits provided little risk transfer during the run, as losses from conduits remained with banks instead of outside investors and banks with more exposure to conduits had lower stock returns.     

Dark Markets,by Darrell Duffie

This paper develops a method for selecting and analysing stress scenarios for financial risk assessment, with particular emphasis on identifying sensible combinations of stresses to multiple factors. We focus primarily on reverse stress testing – finding the most likely scenarios leading to losses exceeding a given threshold. We approach this problem using a nonparametric empirical likelihood estimator of the conditional mean of the underlying market factors given large losses. We then scale confidence regions for the conditional mean by a coefficient that depends on the tails of the market factors to estimate the most likely loss scenarios. We provide rigorous justification for the confidence regions and the scaling procedure when the joint distribution of the market factors and portfolio loss is elliptically contoured. We explicitly characterize the impact of the heaviness of the tails of the distribution, contrasting a broad spectrum of cases including exponential tails and regularly varying tails. The key to this analysis lies in the asymptotics of the conditional variances and covariances in extremes. These results also lead to asymptotics for marginal expected shortfall and the corresponding variance, conditional on a market stress; we combine these results with empirical likelihood significance tests of systemic risk rankings based on marginal expected shortfall in stress scenarios.     

Valuing groundwater recharge through agricultural production in the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands in northern Nigeria

This study applies a production function approach to value the groundwater recharge function of the Hadejia‐Nguru wetlands in northern Nigeria. The groundwater recharge function supports dry season agricultural production which is dependent on groundwater abstraction for irrigation. Using survey data this paper first carries out an economic valuation of agricultural production, per hectare of irrigated land. We then value the recharge function as an environmental input into the dry season agricultural production and derive appropriate welfare change measures. Welfare change is calculated using the estimated production functions and hypothetical changes in groundwater recharge and hence, groundwater levels. By focusing on agricultural production dependent solely on groundwater resources from the shallow aquifer, this study establishes that the groundwater recharge function of the wetlands is of significant importance for the floodplain.     

Labor Supervision and Institutional Conditions: Evidence from Bicol Rice Farms

This article analyzes labor supervision activities reported in a survey of rice farmers in the Bicol region of the Philippines. We present a theoretical model that relates supervision intensity to institutional conditions. We estimate a supervision intensity equation and control for the decision to hire labor, the decision to supervise hired labor, and the type of the labor contract. The empirical estimates use different village-level spatial and demographic indicators as proxies for institutional conditions. The results are consistent with the prediction of the theoretical model that supervision increases with weaker institutional conditions.     

IMPACT OF RISING FUEL COST ON PERISHABLE PRODUCT PROCUREMENT

This paper models the dynamic interactions between product prices at different regional markets and input costs and derives cost‐price thresholds that can be used to evaluate alternative product sourcing and procurement strategies. The model is tested empirically by estimating a vector autoregressive model using data from the U.S. leafy green industry.     

Technological effort and disembodied technology exports: An econometric analysis of inter-industry variations in India

This paper attempts a preliminary test of the determinants of Indian technological capability as measured by disembodied technology exports by a sample of the largest private-sector quoted companies in India. After placing the study in the context of research on the nature of technological activity in developing countries, the authors describe the variables which they have used to explain inter-industry variation in technology exports. The results of a preliminary statistical investigation are presented. Despite acknowledged limitations of data, the authors are able to suggest some interesting tendencies which could be the subject of further investigation: (a) formal R&D is a significant positive influence on the sort of technological development which is embodied in technology exports; (b) skill and scale requirements appear to promote technological development rather than retard it; (c) the presence of foreign ownership does not seem to inhibit technological development or technology exports.     

Conflicts of concepts: Welfare economics and developing countries

Neo-classical welfare economics furnishes the basic structure within which development economics operates. An analysis of its ‘vision’ of society, its basic assumptions and value judgements, is necessary in order to understand why conventional development economics confronts some insuperable problems in analysing the real problems of the poor countries. This paper outlines the underlying scheme of traditional welfare economics and illustrates the problems created, with a few examples.