Intra-regional trade and business cycles in Southeast Asia

Conclusion In this note we considered the relationship between trade integration and the cross-country correlation of business cycle activity in southeast Asia. We found a positive and significant relationship between the degree of bilateral trade intensity and the cross-country bilateral correlation of business activity over the period 1986–1996, a period when trade integration was proceeding rapidly. Thus, the Frankel and Rose (1997) finding that more trade integration between industrialized countries tends to result in more highly synchronized business cycles, appears to be robust to a sample of countries which have diverse income levels and economic structures and are likely to have less bilateral intraindustry trade.     

Technology,Trade Sensitivity,and Labor Displacement

This study examines the relationship between international trade, technology, and exposure to job displacement, using data on displaced workers as well as those at risk of job dislocation, for the two-year sample periods 1986-1987 and 1990-1991. Workers employed in manufacturing industries with elevated import penetration or high shares of R&D personnel appear to have increased rates of job loss. However, the risk of job loss is materially reduced when a relatively high proportion of employees report working with computers. The opposing effects on displacement probabilities of R&D employment intensity and computer-use carry over to the nonmanufacturing sector.     

Income Disparity, Inequity Aversion and the Design of the Healthcare System

An ex post social welfare function is used to evaluate alternative healthcare systems. If a society is averse to inequality and there is some income disparity, social welfare under private healthcare insurance is sometimes higher and sometimes lower than social welfare under public healthcare. However, a third system—public healthcare with the option to purchase supplemental healthcare insurance—is always socially preferred to private healthcare insurance. Moreover, it is either socially preferred to public healthcare or equivalent to it.     

Valuing Internet Business

Is there a bubble in internet stock prices, has the new economy changed the rules of stock valuation? In this article, the authors argue that the old rules still apply. The only way to test the reasonableness of new economy stock prices is to model the company's ability to generate cash in the future. This analysis also allows the development of a view about the performance that would be needed to justify current valuations. The analysis suggests that many internet valuations are stretched. Investors are focused on growth prospects for the firms, but realistic analysis about future profitability has been neglected in what will be an increasingly competitive world. Further, investors' assumptions that the new economy businesses will not require assets are unrealistic in many cases. Finally, because some new economy stocks are overvalued, there is a risk of misdirection of productive resources.     

Atypical Work and Pay

Atypical work has long been criticized in popular debate as providing poorly compensated, precarious employment. Yet the empirical evidence is both incomplete and mixed. The main contribution of the present paper is to estimate wage differences for the full set of these alternative work arrangements while simultaneously controlling for observed demographic characteristics and unobserved person-specific fixed effects. The paper also allows for the skewness in atypical worker earnings while retaining the Mincerian human capital earnings function. Our improved estimates are consistent with some of the more optimistic findings reported in the literature, the caveat being that we are examining here only the wage component of the total compensation package.