News Shocks in the Data: Olympic Games and Their Macroeconomic Effects

We examine the macroeconomic effects of bidding for the Olympic Games using panel data for 188 countries during the period 1950–2009. Our findings confirm that economies react to news shocks: investment, consumption, and output significantly increase 9 to 7 years before the actual event in bidding countries. Hosting countries also experience significant increases in investment, consumption, and output 5 to 2 years before the hosting of the Games. Mapping the Olympics into a macroeconomic model, we show that we can match our empirical findings if we assume that an Olympic bid represents news about increases in government investment.     

Environmental Tax in a Green Market

We examine the impact of an emission tax in a green market characterized by consumers’ environmental awareness and competition between firms for both environmental quality and product prices. The unique aspect of this model comes from the assumption that the cost for an increase in quality is fixed. We show that the emission tax improves welfare, thanks to a decline in pollution and despite an accentuation of product differentiation. The higher the marginal environmental damage is, the higher the optimal tax will be. The optimal tax, however, becomes lower than the marginal damage when the market is not too large. Finally, when marginal environmental damage is not too low, the optimal tax leads to a green product monopoly.     

“出埃及记”与创业

这些创业者与先知摩西有许多相似的性格：对事物的好奇心,发现问题的洞察力,解决问题的创造力,敢于独创的信心和勇气,以及运筹帷幄的领导力。     

Darstellung und Abgrenzung des deutschen Versicherungsvermittlungsmarktes

Insurance intermediation is mostly known as a distribution entity of insurance companies. Therefore only limited research has focused on German insurance intermediaries as an independent market. The business of insurance intermediaries can not only be limited on selling policies, they also offer other services to policyholders. The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we explain the structure as well as the legal and the fiscal characteristics within the insurance intermediation market. Second, we describe the business of German intermediaries. Third, we show that this market can be defined as an independent market.     

The dynamics of economic convergence: The role of alternative investment decisions

In this paper we evaluate how various investment decisions explain the macroeconomic dynamics of European transition countries. We introduce quality investment decisions into a model with other two standard investment margins assumed in the advanced trade literature, i.e., investment in new varieties and in export eligibility. We show that the standard investment margins are not sufficient to simultaneously match the dynamics in the macroeconomic variables, especially the export performance and the real exchange rate. In contrast, the extended model with quality investment provides reconciliation.     

Modelling trigonometric seasonal components for monthly economic time series

The basic structural time series model has been designed for the modelling and forecasting of seasonal economic time series. In this article, we explore a generalization of the basic structural time series model in which the time-varying trigonometric terms associated with different seasonal frequencies have different variances for their disturbances. The contribution of the article is two-fold. The first aim is to investigate the dynamic properties of this frequency-specific Basic Structural Model (BSM). The second aim is to relate the model to a comparable generalized version of the Airline model developed at the US Census Bureau. By adopting a quadratic distance metric based on the restricted reduced form moving-average representation of the models, we conclude that the generalized models have properties that are close to each other compared to their default counterparts. In some settings, the distance between the models is almost zero so that the models can be regarded as observationally equivalent. An extensive empirical study on disaggregated monthly shipment and foreign trade series illustrates the improvements of the frequency-specific extension and investigates the relations between the two classes of models.     

Interregional trade and economic integration: A partial equilibrium analysis

The classical comparative static analysis of economic integration is extended to a spatial world by the theory of partial spatial price equilibrium. It is made operational by gravity-like specifications of the demand functions and is applied to a quantitative study of regional effects of the EEC and EFTA formation in Scandinavia and the FRG. Aggregated effects of integration on regional output are presented, based on a hypothetical pre-integration versus post-integration comparison for 1970. It is shown that, contrary to the common views, European economic integration has not been generally detrimental to geographically peripheral areas.