Intraindustry Trade and Relative Factor Endowments

This article investigates the relationship between relative factor endowments and intraindustry trade shares in bilateral trade flows. While Helpman and Krugman's theoretical framework predicts a negative relationship, empirical studies often report contrary results. We, however, argue that previous empirical studies fail to provide an exact link between the theory and the data. New empirical evidence based on the estimating equation derived directly from the theoretical framework demonstrates that the theory finds support in the data once the sums of capital–labor ratios are controlled for.     

Explaining the succession of management fads

A continuing feature of personnel management and human resource management has the constantly changing ideas and approaches, many of which have been labelled ‘management fads’ and ‘flavour-of-the-month’ techniques. While the characteristics of popular applications such as team-building and customer care programmes are well known, little attention has so far been paid to explaining the changing preferences in human resource management ideas.

The paper is based on a historical analysis of management ideas (Huczynski, 1993). The author argues that the phenomenon of management fad succession is the result of the conscious and unconscious collusion between managers as consumers of management ideas and consultants as suppliers of such ideas. He concludes that, given the nature of capitalist economies, the process of management fad succession is unlikely to decline and, indeed, may accelerate as companies seek a competitive advantage.     

Firm heterogeneity,foreign market entry mode and ownership choice

We study the relationship between firm productivity, foreign market entry mode and affiliate ownership choice using Kolmogorov–Smirnov stochastic dominance tests on Japanese firm-level productivity and horizontal FDI data into 20 OECD countries during the period 1985–2001. We devote particular attention to different types of joint ventures to find that affiliate ownership increases with the parent firm's TFP.     

Links between trust in the ECB and its interest rate policy

We analyse determinants of trust in the European Central Bank (ECB). Our main finding is that when households have pessimistic expectations, aggressive cuts in interest rates have an adverse effect on their trust in central bank. This result is in accordance with the ‘lack-of-confidence shock’ hypothesis developed by Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (2012) and in contrast with the ‘fundamental shock’ hypothesis which implies positive effects of aggressive cuts for trust in the ECB. The result is robust to various changes in the modelling approach.     

Land‐use change trajectories up to 2050: insights from a global agro‐economic model comparison

Changes in agricultural land use have important implications for environmental services. Previous studies of agricultural land‐use futures have been published indicating large uncertainty due to different model assumptions and methodologies. In this article we present a first comprehensive comparison of global agro‐economic models that have harmonized drivers of population, GDP, and biophysical yields. The comparison allows us to ask two research questions: (1) How much cropland will be used under different socioeconomic and climate change scenarios? (2) How can differences in model results be explained? The comparison includes four partial and six general equilibrium models that differ in how they model land supply and amount of potentially available land. We analyze results of two different socioeconomic scenarios and three climate scenarios (one with constant climate). Most models (7 out of 10) project an increase of cropland of 10–25% by 2050 compared to 2005 (under constant climate), but one model projects a decrease. Pasture land expands in some models, which increase the treat on natural vegetation further. Across all models most of the cropland expansion takes place in South America and sub‐Saharan Africa. In general, the strongest differences in model results are related to differences in the costs of land expansion, the endogenous productivity responses, and the assumptions about potential cropland.     

Impacts of increased bioenergy demand on global food markets: an AgMIP economic model intercomparison

Integrated Assessment studies have shown that meeting ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation targets will require substantial amounts of bioenergy as part of the future energy mix. In the course of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), five global agro‐economic models were used to analyze a future scenario with global demand for ligno‐cellulosic bioenergy rising to about 100 ExaJoule in 2050. From this exercise a tentative conclusion can be drawn that ambitious climate change mitigation need not drive up global food prices much, if the extra land required for bioenergy production is accessible or if the feedstock, for example, from forests, does not directly compete for agricultural land. Agricultural price effects across models by the year 2050 from high bioenergy demand in an ambitious mitigation scenario appear to be much smaller (+5% average across models) than from direct climate impacts on crop yields in a high‐emission scenario (+25% average across models). However, potential future scarcities of water and nutrients, policy‐induced restrictions on agricultural land expansion, as well as potential welfare losses have not been specifically looked at in this exercise.     

Fiscal tensions and risk premium

Empirica - The main goal of the paper is to analyse one-dimensional, isolated impact of particular variables which are used in the literature as explanatory variables for risk premium following...     

The determinants of multilateral bargaining: a comprehensive analysis of Baron and Ferejohn majoritarian bargaining experiments

Experimental Economics - We analyze the data sets of all majoritarian Baron and Ferejohn (Am Political Sci Rev 83(4):1181–1206, 1989) experiments through 2018. By exploiting the variation of...