Location Decisions of Foreign Banks and Competitor Remoteness

This paper examines the role of “competitor remoteness”—the weighted average distance of all competing banks to a host country—on the location decision of a foreign bank. It uses unique, bilateral data on 1,199 foreign banks from 75 home countries present in 110 host countries. It finds that, besides bilateral distance, competitor remoteness importantly drives foreign banks’ location decisions. The impact of distance and competitor remoteness is stronger for non‐OECD home and host countries, when the scale of foreign bank inward and outward investment is limited, and for host countries where foreign banks dominate.     

Rationale for Government Intervention in Canadial Agriculture: A Review of Stabilization Programs

Agricultural commodity stabilization programs are important in Canadian agriculture. In this paper, two forms of commodity stabilization, namely, price/income support programs and supply-restricting marketing boards, are reviewed. The review concludes that there are few economically justifiable reasons for maintaining many stabilization programs and that we should be looking toward alternative means of achieving the relevant social objectives. Les programmes de stabilisation des prix des produits agricoles tiennent une place importante dans ?agriculture canadienne. Dans le présent article, nous examinons deux formes de stabilisation des prix des produits: les programmes de soutien des prix et des revenus et les offices de commercialisation pratiquant la gestion de ?offre. Nous concluons que beaucoup des programmes de stabilisation existants se justifient mal du point de vue économique et que nous devrions chercher ?autres moyens de réaliser nos objectifs sociaux pertinents.     

DYNAMIC INCENTIVE CONTRACTS WITH UNCORRELATED PRIVATE INFORMATION AND HISTORY-DEPENDENT OUTCOMES*

In previous papers on dynamic incentive contracts, the dynamic structure of the principal-agent relationship arises exclusively from the ability of the principal to learn about the hidden information over time. In this paper we deal with a different source of dynamics, which is considered standard in all areas of economics other than the information literature: we study situations where current opportunities depend on past and current actions, notwithstanding any information conveyed by the actions. Standard examples include investment, "Learning by doing", and R&D. In order to focus on this neglected source of dynamics, we restrict our attention to situations involving asymmetric information in each period, but without any intertemporal informational correlation, so that no dynamic effect arises directly from informational asymmetrie. This makes comparisons with static results both easier and more interesting.