Infant Firm Subsidization in Industries with Dynamic Structure

This paper analyzes time-consistent subsidies in industries with strong learning effects and frequent entry and exit. Structural dynamics create opportunities for strategic behavior: by influencing government policies, infant firms can reduce their tax burden and weaken future competitors. Two balanced-budget subsidy regimes are considered: (1) intra-industry redistribution; and (2) outside funding. We show that the choice of funding method does not affect equilibrium welfare. In both cases, the regulator is able to attain the constrained optimum. This result does not depend on the functional form of payoffs and holds in both price and quantity games. In linear-quadratic examples, we compute the equilibrium strategies. We show that (1) government intervention amplifies transitional price and output fluctuations and (2) the steady-state subsidy rate and infant production are decreasing in the speed of learning.      

Financial innovation and European housing and mortgage markets

In this paper we assess the recent history of house prices andof mortgage lending across Europe. We develop a simple economicframework to estimate the likely contributions of fundamentalfactors, such as changes in real incomes and population growth,to house price appreciation. We also try to quantify how muchof price rises might have been driven by rising expectationsof future capital gains. We estimate that this might have playeda significant role in several countries, including Spain, Sweden,Belgium, and the UK. We then consider what different types ofmortgage arrangement might become attractive in a world of higherhouse prices, analysing types of indexed mortgage that haveadvantages where prices are higher relative to incomes and wherehouse prices may be volatile and cannot be assumed to carryon rising.     

Private sector employment in Russia: Scale, composition and performance

In Russia, as across Central and Eastern Europe, privatization and the establishmemt of new private firms have been viewed as key factors in labour market adjustment during the transition period. This paper considers the overall employment developments in the private sector in Russia and the extent to which the private sector employment performance is differentiated from that of other sectors in five Russian regions. The analysis is based on a fresh look at these issues using official statistics published by Goskomstat and drawing on microdata from the March 1996 Russian Labour Force Survey (LFS). A special questionnaire attached to the LFS in the study regions provides supplementary information.
The paper highlights shifts in the sectoral composition of employment, including growth in private sector employment. Compared to other forms of ownership, the analysis confirms a tendency for private sector ownership in the study regions to be associated with stronger employment performance with respect to hours worked and, in some cases, timely payment of wages. Private sector firms appear to have relatively flexible employment patterns, utilizing more fixed-term or part-time employment than other types of firms and experiencing greater labour turnover. Also, private sector employees tend to be somewhat younger and probably more adaptable people. However, there is significant variation across the study regions and substantial exceptions exist with respect to the above-mentioned tendencies. With respect to employment issues, the differentiation between sectors appears to be less pronounced than one might have expected.     

Quarter-End Effects in Banks: Preferred Habitat or Window Dressing?

Allen and Saunders [Allen, A., and A. Saunders. “Bank Window Dressing: Theory and Evidence.” Journal of Banking and Finance 16 (1992), 583–623.] document abnormal behavior of bank assets and liabilities at the turn-of-the-quarter and attribute it to window dressing by banks. Using different methods we re-visit bank turn-of-the-quarter balance sheet activity. We also examine quarter-end changes in the effective fed funds rates and fed funds rate standard deviations. We confirm the presence of turn-of-the-quarter activity on bank balance sheets and in the fed funds market. However, we conclude that the turn-of-the-quarter effects are more consistent with customer preferred habitats than window dressing.     

The Role of Language in the Communication Process Between Business and Government: Evidence from Russian Firms

Abstract

The paper investigates how language facilitates communication process between government and business. We use Russian context to show barriers and challenges of using language in official communication between governmental authorities and Russian companies. In our work, we demonstrate how language may produce employee’s misunderstanding and discuss typical sources of ineffective usage of language. The results indicate that problematic issues of both linguistic and non-linguistic nature can lead to serious implications for successful communication between government and business in Russia. We found that documentations’ complexity, which is perceived as such due to a complicated subject area they belong to (legal, tax, etc.) and language insufficiency applied are most likely to raise multiple problems related to government’s communication with business.     

Credit market shocks and economic fluctuations: Evidence from corporate bond and stock markets

To identify disruptions in credit markets, research on the role of asset prices in economic fluctuations has focused on the information content of various corporate credit spreads. We re-examine this evidence using a broad array of credit spreads constructed directly from the secondary bond prices on outstanding senior unsecured debt issued by a large panel of nonfinancial firms. An advantage of our “ground-up” approach is that we are able to construct matched portfolios of equity returns, which allows us to examine the information content of bond spreads that is orthogonal to the information contained in stock prices of the same set of firms, as well as in macroeconomic variables measuring economic activity, inflation, interest rates, and other financial indicators. Our portfolio-based bond spreads contain substantial predictive power for economic activity and outperform—especially at longer horizons—standard default-risk indicators. Much of the predictive power of bond spreads for economic activity is embedded in securities issued by intermediate-risk rather than high-risk firms. According to impulse responses from a structural factor-augmented vector autoregression, unexpected increases in bond spreads cause large and persistent contractions in economic activity. Indeed, shocks emanating from the corporate bond market account for more than 30 percent of the forecast error variance in economic activity at the two- to four-year horizon. Overall, our results imply that credit market shocks have contributed significantly to US economic fluctuations during the 1990-2008 period.