Does the recognition of indigenous territories impact household economic situations? Evidence from western Panama

The Government of Panama created a semi-autonomous indigenous area in 1997. The establishment of this region institutionalizes indigenous authorities and prohibits land privatization. This study investigates the effect of the recognition of common property land to indigenous groups on economic performance. By using difference-in-differences approach at household-level data, I find that non-migrant indigenous households living in the semi-autonomous territory declined their consumption relative to their counterparts living outside. Further, indigenous households living in the semi-autonomous territory have lower access to public goods and are less likely to participate in agricultural market activities.     

Fiscal policy and default risk in emerging markets

Emerging market economies typically exhibit a procyclical fiscal policy: public expenditures rise (fall) in economic expansions (recessions), whereas tax rates rise (fall) in bad (good) times. Additionally, the business cycle of these economies is characterized by countercyclical default risk. In this paper we develop a quantitative dynamic stochastic small open economy model with incomplete markets, endogenous fiscal policy and sovereign default where public expenditures and tax rates are optimally procyclical. The model also accounts for the dynamics of other key macroeconomic variables in emerging economies.     

Aggregation, Persistence and Volatility in a Macro Model

We introduce firm heterogeneity into the standard monopolistically competitive real business cycle (RBC) model. The fundamental equilibrium path is derived and the time–series properties of aggregate GDP are studied analytically. Although firms' productivities are subject to temporary shocks, the aggregate process displays a surprising novel form of nonlinearity and long memory which had not been built into the model at the outset. This aggregate GDP turns out to have very different properties from log–linear time–series models such as auto–regressive (AR) models and their extensions. It displays very strong persistence, which ends abruptly with a sudden change of tendency, giving its autocorrelation function (ACF) an S –shape. Although persistent, it is mean–reverting, unlike the everlasting memory of unit–root processes. Its volatility is of a greater order of magnitude than that of any of its components, so small micro–shocks can generate large macro fluctuations. It is also characterized by long, asymmetric cycles of random lengths. Increased monopoly power tends to reduce the amplitude and increase the persistence of business cycles. Strikingly, we find that the empirical ACFs constructed from GDP data for the U.K. and the U.S. display this characteristic S –shape.     

Globalization and labor market outcomes: Wage bargaining, search frictions, and firm heterogeneity

We introduce search unemployment into Melitz's trade model. Firms' monopoly power on product markets leads to strategic wage bargaining. Solving for the symmetric equilibrium we show that the selection effect of trade influences labor market outcomes. Trade liberalization lowers unemployment and raises real wages as long as it improves average productivity. We show that this condition is likely to be met by a reduction in variable trade costs or by entry of new trading countries. Calibrating the model shows that the long-run impact of trade openness on the rate of unemployment is negative and quantitatively significant.     

International Trade and Collective Bargaining Outcomes: Evidence from German Employer–Employee Data

In theoretical trade models with variable mark‐ups and collective wage bargaining, exposure to international markets might reduce the exporter wage premium. We test this prediction using linked German employer–employee data covering the years 1996–2007. To separate the rent‐sharing mechanism from assortative matching, we exploit individual worker information to construct profitability measures that are free of skill composition. Our results show that rent‐sharing is less pronounced in more export‐intensive firms or in more open industries. The exporter wage premium is highest for low‐productivity firms. In line with theory, these findings are unique to the subsample of plants covered by collective bargaining.     

Centralized Resource Allocation Using Data Envelopment Analysis

While conventional DEA models set targets separately for each DMU, in this paper we consider that there is a centralized decision maker (DM) who “owns” or supervises all the operating units. In such intraorganizational scenario the DM has an interest in maximizing the efficiency of individual units at the same time that total input consumption is minimized or total output production is maximized. Two new DEA models are presented for such resource allocation. One type of model seeks radial reductions of the total consumption of every input while the other type seeks separate reductions for each input according to a preference structure. In both cases, total output production is guaranteed not to decrease. The two key features of the proposed models are their simplicity and the fact that both of them project all DMUs onto the efficient frontier. The dual formulation shows that optimizing total input consumption and output production is equivalent to finding weights that maximize the relative efficiency of a virtual DMU with average inputs and outputs. A graphical interpretation as well as numerical results of the proposed models are presented.     

A semi-automated system for interoperability assessment: an ontology-based approach

ABSTRACT

A plethora of approaches to assess the ability of companies to interoperate can be found in the literature. Nevertheless, most of the current assessment approaches are following manual-conducted processes, which can be laborious, time-consuming and costly. Therefore, this paper aims at developing a knowledge-based system for supporting an interoperability assessment process using an ontology as its knowledge model. The resulting system allows identifying potential interoperability problems and related solutions based on the knowledge model including information of the assessed enterprise(s). A real business case is presented for evaluating the proposed approach.     

Resisting Protectionism after the Crisis: Strategic Economic Discourse and the EU–Korea Free Trade Agreement

In 2006 the European Commission announced its Global Europe strategy, which proposed pursuing a series of ambitious Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) premised on exchanging the EU's remaining ‘pockets of protection’ for market access. The first of these agreements was signed with South Korea in October 2010. This article asks how the Commission's Directorate-General (DG) for Trade could successfully conclude this agreement in the aftermath of the Financial Crisis. Given a strong mobilisation of protectionists with access to policy-makers, this liberal policy outcome cannot be explained purely in terms of institutional insulation, as in much of the literature on EU trade policy, nor be simply ‘read off’ from the material interests of societal actors. This article, therefore, develops a constructivist framework which broadens our understanding of the power of strategically invoked economic discourses. By developing a novel analytical strategy to determine the intentional invocation of such discourses, it is able to show how DG Trade constructed an ideational imperative for liberalisation in Global Europe, enabling it to overcome opposition to the EU–Korea FTA. Beyond its contribution to constructivist scholarship, this article draws attention to the neglected dimension of ideas in trade policy and highlights the continued purchase of neoliberalism after the crisis.