Bank Competition,Economic Growth,and Nonlinearity: A Nonparametric Approach

This article asks empirically the question about potential nonlinearities in the link between bank competition and aggregate economic growth in a cross‐section of countries. I employ nonparametric methods, primarily kernel estimation, and several measures of banking competition. The results suggest that while the data show the presence of relevant nonlinearities, the available evidence provides only limited support for nonmonotonicities such as inverted u‐shapes, and so contrasts with previous findings obtained using parametric methods. This study corroborates the traditional view, according to which more bank competition fosters growth, with presumed implications for policy.     

Have food and financial markets integrated?

This article analyses comovements and discusses possibly greater market integration between aggregate food commodity and stock prices in the period 1990 to 2012. Return correlations, price return distributions, cointegration and Granger-causalities are tested in subsamples on monthly FAO Food Price Index and MSCI World Stock Market Index. Empirical results suggest that while there is only weak indication of greater comovements concurrent with structural changes such as changed agricultural policies, new demand due to growth in emerging markets and energy mandates and the financialization of food markets since the early 2000s, they did start to increase substantially in particular during the financial stress of the Lehman crisis and the Great Recession. While structural changes may have amplified price linkages across markets, results do not suggest that they are the key factors for greater price comovements. Instead, the effects of the late-2000s recession as a time of great economic weakness and uncertainty may have changed concurrently the behaviour of both food and financial market participants, such that different market prices exhibit large comovements.     

Universit?tsendowments – Eine Bestandsaufnahme der theoretischen und empirischen Forschung

While university endowments have a long history, their contribution to operating budgets has gained considerable significance in recent years. Further as an important class of institutional investor there is strong interest in behavior and performance from the academic research side. This paper surveys the literature in the emerging field of scientific research studies concerning university endowments. We classify papers into four areas. (1)?Organization, which pertains to governance structure and the investment policy statement; (2)?asset allocation, where we discuss the main theoretical framework and the relevant observations both across time and for type of endowment; (3)?performance, in which (risk-adjusted) performance is discussed and distinguished by type and size of endowment; (4)?spending, which discusses the relation to the classical views and theoretical literature as well as what university endowments do in practice. We find that the modern framework for theoretical and empirical analysis can provide a very useful perspective for understanding the role of endowments. Nonetheless we highlight several challenges that should form the basis for future research agendas.     

Assimilation,labour market experience and earnings profiles of temporary and permanent immigrant workers in Germany

We test the assimilation hypothesis, as initially proposed by Chiswick (1978), by making use of a rich panel-data set for Germany, which permits us to allow for unobserved population heterogeneity and potential selectivity bias arising from an individual's remigration decision and employment behaviour. To take into account the institutional aspects of the German guest-worker system we use information on an immigrant's expected duration of stay in Germany to distinguish between temporary and permanent migrants and to test for differences in earnings/experience profiles with respect to a foreigner's expected duration of stay. We find that years of schooling in Germany have a strong positive effect on earnings, that earnings/experience profiles of guest-workers differ by expected duration of stay, and that the renumeration of labour market experience in Germany is higher for natives than for most foreigners. The assimilation hypothesis is therefore not supported by the evidence for Germany.     

HAZOP-proof ammonia plant: A new way of defining a safe and reliable design

This new technique, which meets interacting design criteria of a 1,800-MTPD ammonia project, offers special safety features and withstands a detailed HAZOP study.