Macroeconomic factors of growth of Russian cities and town planning policy objectives

This paper was prepared for the 70th birthday of Oleg Sergeevich Pchelintsev, but he did not live to see it in print. For memorials of O.S. Pchelintsev, see www.demoscope.ru Nos 243–244 of April 17–30, 2006. The paper analyzes the channels and ways by which macroeconomic policy impacts the development of urban settlement and individual groups of cities. Its findings are used to validate new directions and measures of urban policy     

Business Ties and Information Advantage: Evidence from Mutual Fund Trading

This article examines whether ties to portfolio firms’ management via pension business relationships provide mutual funds with an informational advantage. Funds become related to portfolio companies when fund families serve as trustees for firms’ employee pension plans. Selling by related funds is more likely to be motivated by an information advantage than their buying, because the latter is heavily influenced by the desire to secure pension inflows. We find that stocks with larger net sales by related funds experience lower future returns. Information appears related to firm fundamentals, as the return predictability of related funds’ selling concentrates in stocks with negative future earnings surprises. Consistent with an information‐based explanation, the predictive power of related funds’ selling for future returns is more pronounced when information uncertainty about the stock is higher. Our results contribute to a growing literature that shows the sources of informed trading by institutions.     

Corporate Governance and CEO Innovation

A fundamental concern emerging from the corporate literature is the agency problem of innovation. While innovation is considered as a major driver of corporate growth and profitability, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) has an intrinsic reluctance to pursue innovation projects. The thrust of this paper is to identify the mechanisms of corporate governance which help attenuate this problem, thereby encouraging the CEO to have the propensity to innovate. The empirical results suggest that firms with a widespread dispersion of shares among shareholders are less likely to encourage the CEO to innovate. The likelihood of innovation appears to increase, however, in the presence of a large shareholder. Contrary to prevailing beliefs, there appears to be no association between innovation and board independence. The same result holds for board size. Also, a diverse board appears to negate CEO predisposition to innovate. On the other hand, innovation increases when the CEO is not the Board Chair but has equity ownership, although the incentive effect is economically small. The paper uses a sample of domestically-owned, publicly-listed Australian firms over the period 1994–2003.     

Estimating Key Economic Variables: The Policy Implications

The current monetary policy debate has focused on current estimates and the future path of the natural rate of unemployment and the equilibrium interest rate. Estimates of the natural rate of unemployment should vary over time with changes in demographics and improvements in human capital. However, these changes should be gradual. This paper shows that the estimates of the natural rate of unemployment by Federal Reserve officials and private-sector economists seem to move pro-cyclically, potentially showing too much weight given to short-term fluctuations in economic variables. As with the natural rate, there are good reasons to expect the equilibrium interest rate to change over time. In fact, the level may actually be more responsive to current economic data, reflecting changes in aggregate savings and investment. Yet, we see that equilibrium interest rate estimates by both Federal Reserve officials and private-sector economists have declined quite dramatically over the past five years. A potential concern raised in this paper is that estimates of these critical economic variables for policy determination appear to be overly sensitive to high frequency economic data.     

Analysis of the Efficacy of Public Spending on Research and Development in State Programs

This paper presents an approach to assessing the efficacy of public spending on research and development in state programs. At present, there is a need to develop a unified approach to the analysis and evaluation of the efficacy of such spending from the perspective of participants in state programs (federal executive bodies). The proposed approach does not allow evaluating the efficacy of public spending on the development of research areas assigned to the authors.     

Modeling the Interdependence of the Economy and Power Industry Based on Multiplicative Two-Factor Functions

The paper has studied the change in the electric intensity of the Russian economy over the past 25 years. Equations have been constructed that correlate the electricity consumption with GDP (GVA for key economic sectors) and investment volume. The influence of structural changes and power consumption in particular sectors, as well as the modernization of the key economic sectors on the dynamics of the Russian economy electric intensity, has been identified.     

A Classification of Dutch Manufacturing based on a Model of Innovation

Summary The paper studies the degree of homogeneity of innovative behavior in order to determine empirically an industry classification of Dutch manufacturing that can be used for policy purposes. Defining homogeneity in terms of an economic model distinguishes our classification from existing taxonomies such as those of the OECD, Pavitt and the various classifications based on a principal components analysis. We use a two-limit tobit model with sample selection, which explains the decisions by business enterprises to innovate and the impact these decisions have on the share of innovative sales. The model is estimated for eleven industries based on the Dutch Standard Industrial Classification (SBI 1993). A likelihood ratio (LR) test is then performed to test for equality of the parameters across industries. We find that Dutch manufacturing consists of three groups of industries in terms of innovative behavior, a high-tech group, a low-tech group and the industry of wood. The same pattern shows up in the three Dutch Community Innovation Surveys. The empirical part of this study has been carried out at the Centre for Research of Economic Microdata at Statistics Netherlands. The authors wish to thank Statistics Netherlands, and in particular Bert Diederen, for helping us in accessing and using the Micronoom data set. The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors. The authors also wish to thank Fran?ois Laisney, Patrick Waelbroek and participants at presentations in Maastricht, Strasbourg, Leuven and Lille for their helpful comments. The first author acknowledges financial support from METEOR.     

The Poverty of Politics: How Income Redistribution Hurts the Poor

In spite of the significant research literature identifying a tradeoff between income redistribution and economic growth, massive public programs have been implemented to help the poor by transferring income to them. Since Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty began in 1964, over 3.5 trillion dollars have been transferred. However, the possibility that everyone, including the poor, may in fact be made worse off by the transfer has largely been ignored. With a simple algebraic model, the authors demonstrate that, over time, both high and low-income groups are harmed by redistribution. In addition, social mobility, as well as political concerns with relative poverty and international income redistribution increases the damage to all income groups produced by redistribution.