Effects of world market oriented regional integration on developing countries

The inward-oriented wave of regionalisation in the mid-sixties in the so-called developing countries was judged, twenty years later, to have been a failure almost everywhere. Since the beginning of the nineties a new trend towards regionalisation has been emerging, this time more strongly oriented towards world markets. Do the new regional integration agreements complement the economic and development policy effects aimed at by the structural adjustment programmes of the international financial institutions? What effects do they have on the economic development and the industrialisation of the countries involved?     

Structural change and environmental impact

Although structural change in many industrialized countries has increased since the early 1970s, the environmental policy aspects of this change have hardly been investigated. Using a set of four indicators, this study examines the correlation between structural changes and environmental pollution in thirty-one Eastern and Western industrialized countries from 1970 to 1985.     

Integration, trade costs and the export behaviour of firms: Empirical evidence on the venables model

Conclusions Theoretical considerations and empirical evidence presented in this paper clearly indicate that economic integration helps firms in old member countries to augment their exports to the new member states. The increase in the export value is, to a large extent, due to new exporters entering the new markets, and only to a small extent due to an increase in average export value per firm. This effect is stronger for small-scale exporters than for medium- and large-scale exporters. In addition to the other benefits, economic integration appears to be peculiarly beneficial to small firms, as it allows them to access new markets previously closed to them.     

Trade and productivity: an industry perspective

We use a sample of 14 OECD countries and 15 manufacturing industries to test for the effect of trade on productivity. Endogeneity concerns are accounted for using the geographical component of trade as instrument as suggested by Frankel and Romer (Am Econ Rev 89(3):279–399, 1999). We find that trade, measured in terms of the export ratio, increases productivity, even if country-fixed effects such as the quality of institutions are controlled for, though results are less robust for imports. Estimates at the aggregate manufacturing level turn out much larger, emphasizing the role of inter-industry spillovers.

Entrepreneurial Survival

This paper gives an empirical analysis of determinants of new-firm survival in the manufacturing sector of Baden-Wuerttemberg (Germany) from 1981 to 1994. The analysis focuses on firm- and industry-specific determinants of new-firm survival. A possible effect of regional agglomeration and of the business cycle is also tested, albeit in a very general manner. From a methodical point of view parametric and semiparametric duration models are used. Grouped duration models are estimated taking into account the problem of ties. Moreover, the problem of unobserved heterogeneity is considered which has so far been neglected in numerous studies. The empirical analyses show with respect to industry-specific effects that the risk of new-firm failure is the larger the larger an industry’ s minimum efficient scale is, the worse the sectoral demand-conditions are, the more narrow the market is, the higher dynamics of foundation within an industry are. The liability of smallness-hypothesis is confirmed for German manufacturing while with respect to firm age the results favour the liability of adolescence-hypothesis instead of a pure liability of newness.     

Maximum diversification strategies along commodity risk factors

Pursuing risk‐based allocation across a universe of commodity assets, we find diversified risk parity (DRP) strategies to provide convincing results. DRP strives for maximum diversification along uncorrelated risk sources. A straightforward way to derive uncorrelated risk sources relies on principal components analysis (PCA). While the ensuing statistical factors can be associated with commodity sector bets, the corresponding DRP strategy entails excessive turnover because of the instability of the PCA factors. We suggest an alternative design of the DRP strategy relative to common commodity risk factors that implicitly allows for a uniform exposure to commodity risk premia.     

International price and earnings momentum

In this paper, we find that price and earnings momentum are pervasive features of international equity markets even when controlling for data-snooping biases. For Europe, we show price momentum to be subsumed by earnings momentum on an aggregate level. However, this rationale can hardly be sustained on a country level. Also, the above explanation is confined to certain time periods in the USA. Since we cannot establish a decent relation between momentum and macroeconomic risks, we suspect a behavior-based explanation to be at work. In fact, we find momentum profits to be more pronounced for portfolios characterized by higher information uncertainty. Hence, the momentum anomaly may well be rationalized in a model of investors underreacting to fundamental news. Finally, we find that momentum works better when limited to stocks with high idiosyncratic risk or higher illiquidity, suggesting that limits to arbitrage deter rational investors from exploiting the anomaly.     

On the composition of elementary errors

Analysis of statistical distributions.

1. Let m and σ denote the mean and the standard deviation of a statistical variable X, and let W(x) be the probability function of that variable as defined in the first paper ¹ This journal, 1928, p. 13. We shall refer to that paper by the letter I. — The sense in which the words probability function and frequency function are used here must be carefully observed, If the probability that a certain variable lies between x and x+dx is f(x) dx, then f(x) is the frequency function of the variable. The probability function is, in cases where a finite frequency function ex-ists, equal to the integral of the latter, taken over the interval from -∞ to x — The notations of the present paper will, as a rule, correspond to those of I, the most important exception being the symbol n , which will here always denote the number of observations in a statistical series and not, as in I, the number of elementary components. , Art. 1. If we put (cf. I, formula (3)) F(x) is the probability function of the variable , with the mean value 0 and the standard deviation 1. Denoting by µ₂, µ₃, ... the moments of W(x) , taken about the mean (cf. I, Art. 7, where m is supposed to be zero), we put, following Charlier,      

Insurance business described by a mathematical model

At the end of November 1972 the Filip Lundberg Foundation arranged a two days seminar in Saltsjöbaden, Sweden. The purpose of the seminar was to have a discussion about Management Control of Insurance Business. Twenty participants from the four Scandinavian countries took part in the discussions. It was thought that Management Control of Insurance Business must be based on a mathematical model of insurance business where all relevant factors can act together. It was generally agreed that this approach to the problem was useful and important and that this is a problem area where much research work needs to be done in the future. During the seminar the problem area was divided into the following six topics for discussion: