Phoenix rising: Legal reforms and changes in valuations in Finland during the economic crisis

Finland experienced an extremely severe economic depression in the early 1990s. As a part of the government's crisis management policies, significant new legislation was passed that increased supervisory powers of financial market regulators and reformed bankruptcy procedures significantly decreasing the protection of creditors. We show that the introduction of these new laws resulted in positive abnormal stock returns. The new laws also lead to increases in firms’ Tobin's q, especially for more levered firms. In contrast to previous studies, our results also suggest that public supervision of financial markets fosters rather than hampers financial market development.     

Trade and welfare effects of a potential free trade agreement between Japan and the United States

Review of World Economics - This paper addresses the trade and welfare implications of a bilateral trade agreement between the U.S. and Japan. In 2019, the two countries signed a “stage...     

Formation of firms' production decisions in finnish manufacturing industries

Business survey data have recently been used in several studies to shed light on the formation of firms' plans and expectations. The main tool for analysis has been the multivariate conditional log-linear model. The trichotomous answers in a typical business survey have an ordering. This makes it possible to analyse firms' production decisions with a categorized version of Cox's proportional hazards model. In this paper the production decisions of Finnish firms are investigated using data from the Finnish business survey. The results obtained are largely in accord with the implications of the production smoothing model of Blinder (1982).     

Using composite indicators to evaluate the efficiency of health care system

This article produces a system-level composite indicator on population health in publicly provided primary health care. We first summarize information from various indicators of care by principal component analysis (PCA). We then regress the costs of care against these indicators to evaluate whether they are related. The existing health status indicator provides a point of comparison. Our results suggest that PCA can be used to extract information efficiently and thus to reduce the dimensionality of data. Furthermore, the use of the existing health status indicator to estimate cost-efficiency leads to invalid inference on overall efficiency, while the use of composite indicator significantly reduces the bias.     

The macroeconomic consequences of migration diversion: Evidence for Germany and the UK

This paper examines the macroeconomic consequences of the diversion of migration flows away from Germany towards the UK in the course of the EU's Eastern Enlargement. The EU has agreed transitional periods for the free movement of workers with the new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. The selective application of migration restrictions during the transitional periods has resulted in a reversal of the pre-enlargement allocation of migration flows from the new member states across the EU. Based on a forecast of the migration potential under the conditions of free movement and of the transitional arrangements, we employ a CGE model with imperfect labour markets to analyse the macroeconomic effects of this diversion process. We find that EU Eastern enlargement has increased in the GDP per capita in the UK substantially, but that the diversion of migration flows towards the UK has reduced wage gains and the decline in unemployment there. The effects of the EU Eastern enlargement are less favourable for Germany, but the diversion of migration flows has protected workers there against a detrimental impact on wages and unemployment.     

ADVERSE SELECTION IN DYNAMIC MATCHING MARKETS

We study the Akerlofian adverse selection problem in a dynamic matching model where the competitive situation varies across different meetings. The ‘lemons principle’ is shown to limit the high quality sales within a wider range of quality distributions than in the Walrasian benchmark. High quality goods can nevertheless be traded, albeit less frequently than the low quality goods. For certain quality distributions, there exists a ‘partially pooling’ steady state where high quality sellers are active whenever at least two buyers compete for the good. Otherwise, the model features cycles in a sense that high quality goods are traded only in non‐consecutive periods.