SAILING THROUGH THIS STORM? CAPITAL FLOWS IN ASIA DURING THE CRISIS

The 2007–2009 crisis has led to an unprecedented collapse in international capital flows. Asian economies were, however, relatively unaffected: the contraction in their capital flows was limited to the most acute phase of the crisis in late 2008, followed by a rapid rebound. We show that this reflects both Asia's structural characteristics, such as limited reliance on international banking, and Asian specificities in the form of a limited impact of international bank exposure on capital flows. We also find evidence of a connection between the use of reserves and variations in net private capital inflows.     

Good News and Bad News: Search from Unknown Wage Offer Distributions

The largest market in national economies is the labor market. Labor market contracting is characterized by job search, often from unknown wage offer distributions. This paper reports experimental tests of finite horizon models of job search in which the wage offer distribution is unknown. Theoretically-optimal search from an unknown wage offer distribution can have the seemingly paradoxical property that some offers will be accepted that are lower than other offers that will be rejected in the same period of the search horizon. Thus the reservation wage property (or lowest acceptable wage path) may not exist. This can occur because an offer that is a priori relatively high (good news) can imply that it is highly probable that search is from a favorable distribution, and such an offer can look unattractive when it is an a posteriori relatively low offer from a favorable distribution (bad news). This paper reports results from experimental treatments for search from unknown distributions in which the reservation wage property does exist and treatments in which it does not exist. We find that the consistency of search behavior with search theory reported in earlier papers is robust to the presence or absence of the reservation wage property and to whether the draws come from known or unknown distributions.     

Induced innovation and marginal cost of new technology

Lacking data on development and implementation costs for input-saving technologies, we develop a nonparametric procedure to estimate relative differences in marginal technology costs for technical change to be consistent with the induced innovation hypothesis. We apply it to U.S. agriculture.     

学会用钱说话

·质量专业人员在讨论到他们的活动所产生的财务影响时，往往会感到很困难。 ·要想引起管理者的关注，质量专业人员必须学习重要的财务术语，诸如像净收益、资产回报率等，并能够理解资产负债表和收支表。     

Transitive measurable utility

This paper continues a study of theories of preferences under risk that do not use the independence axiom of the von Neumann-Morgenstern theory. Unlike its predecessor, it assumes that preferences are transitive. The effects of transitivity are noted in two representations of preferences. The first, which also uses continuity and dominance axioms, involves a function u on a set P of probability measures for which u(p) > u(q) if and only if p is preferred to q. Although u might be nonlinear, it has other features of a von Neumann-Morgenstern linear utility function. The second representation has linear functions u and w on P, with w strictly positive except perhaps at preference-extreme measures—where it might vanish, such that u(p) w(q) > u(q) w(p) if and only if p is preferred to q. A symmetry axiom along with the axioms for the first representation are necessary and sufficient for the second representation.     

Structural changes,market growth and productivity gains of the US real estate investment trusts in the 1990s

The 1990s were tumultuous times for the US Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) industry. Significant structural changes occurred during the decade, especially after the 1993 Revenue Reconciliation Act, which tremendously boosted the flow of funds into the system by allowing the participation of institutional investors in REITs. As a result, the industry experienced remarkable asset growth during the decade, with a large number of initial public offerings and substantial increases in market capitalization. Employing the Data Envelopment Analysis-type Malmquist index approach, this paper explores the impact of such environmental changes on productivity growth, efficiency change, and technological progress of REITs. Our results indicate that while efficiency of the REITs significantly increased, their average productivity declined and technology regressed during this decade. It appears that the typical REIT has failed to improve technically, but exerted substantial effort to catch up with the best practice ones relying mainly on aggressive growth strategies. However, our empirical results indicate that they might have overextended themselves as most began to suffer from diseconomies of scale.

Your new product development (NPD) is only as good as your process: an exploratory analysis of new NPD process design and implementation

Given industry competitiveness, how do firms' new product development (NPD) process designs differ when responding to an innovation mandate? How do NPD design elements differ across firms when implementing NPD processes? These design elements are strategic business unit (SBU) senior management involvement, business case content, customer interactions, and cross‐functional integration. What are the consequences of different combinations of NPD process design elements for innovation productivity? We explore these questions via a collective case study of newly implemented NPD process designs at three different SBUs of a major US‐based international conglomerate, 1 year after receiving the mandate to grow through innovation. Our analysis suggests that industry competitiveness and firm characteristics influence the NPD process design as SBUs employ distinct combinations of NPD design elements. The differential emphasis on design elements leads to variation in process design and divergence in innovation productivity.     

Ross risk vulnerability for introductions and changes in background risk

We present two theorems that provide necessary and sufficient conditions for an expected utility maximizer to become more risk averse in the sense of Ross with respect to bearing a foreground risk after the introduction of any independent fair or unfair additive background risk. We call these decision makers Ross risk vulnerable, and show that Ross decreasing absolute risk aversion and Ross decreasing absolute prudence are jointly sufficient for Ross risk vulnerability. Restrictions on utility necessary and sufficient for Ross risk vulnerability with respect to stochastic dominance deteriorations of an existing background risk are also presented. Our analysis concludes with applications of Ross risk vulnerability.     

A new approach to the identification of regional clusters: hierarchical clustering on principal components

This study focuses on the identification of regional business clusters as a primary step in the design and implementation of cluster-based development strategies. A methodology that has not been used previously to identify clusters is applied to data on inter-industry linkages from the input–output table of a region in northern Spain. The first advantage of this approach, hierarchical clustering on principal components (HCPC), over the use of factorial analysis alone, is that it involves the application of objective clustering techniques to the principal components analysis results, which leads to a better cluster solution. A second advantage is derived from using a mixed algorithm for the clustering process – a combination of the Ward’s classification method with the K-means algorithm – which improves the robustness of the final results.