International Capital Markets and Non-Scale Growth

New growth models exhibit "scale effects," meaning that variations in the levels of key variables exert permanent influences on growth rates. Such predictions run counter to recent empirical evidence. This paper extends a general non-scale model to the open economy. With complete capital markets, only output and capital, but not consumption, retain their non-scale structure. Introducing capital market imperfections, the model is again fully non-scale. Debt subsidies are analyzed and shown to provide capital flow reversals consistent with the recent experience in East Asia.     

A note on equivalence of consistency and bilateral consistency through converse consistency

In the framework of (set-valued or single-valued) solutions for coalitional games with transferable utility, the three notions of consistency, bilateral consistency, and converse consistency are frequently used to provide axiomatic characterizations of a particular solution (like the core, prekernel, prenucleolus, Shapley value). Our main equivalence theorem claims that a solution satisfies consistency (with respect to an arbitrary reduced game) if and only if the solution satisfies both bilateral consistency and converse consistency (with respect to the same reduced game). The equivalence theorem presumes transitivity of the reduced game technique as well as difference independence on payoff vectors for two-person reduced games.     

Country v sector effects in equity returns and the roles of geographical and firm-size coverage

Since Roll (The Journal of Finance 47(1):3–41, 1992) and Heston and Rouwenhorst (Journal of Financial Economics 36:3–27, 1994), there has been a debate whether country factors in international stock returns are typically more variable than sector factors. The addition of emerging markets (EMs) does boost the ratio of country-factor variance relative to industry-factor variance: these markets have a higher variability, but are also less related to global factors. Investigating to what extent this phenomenon can be tracked down to the impact of adding more small firms, we find the following. (1) Small firms do have higher volatility, but only after controlling for country and sector affiliation. (2) Small firms do have weaker sector affinity, as expected. (3) Small firms unexpectedly have weaker local-market sensitivities than large firms. Facts (2) and (3) mean that adding more small firms to the data base has a diversifying effect on both the sector- and country-factor variance; while the impact on sector variance is larger, the net effect turns out to be tiny. (4) Adding emerging markets has a very marked impact on the variance ratio. In fact, the addition of small stocks to the sample hardly dents the effect of adding EMs. Thus, the role of EMs cannot be reduced to just a small-firm phenomenon.     

Large Shareholdings and Corporate Control: An Analysis of Stake Purchases by French Holding Companies

The paper analyses the value creation benefits of the holding form of organisation in France by empirically examining the effects of non-controlling stake purchases on target shareholder wealth, operational performance and bidder shareholder returns for a sample of 122 stake purchases in French listed companies. The evidence puts into question the ability of holding companies to create value for the firms they purchase stakes in or their own shareholders, adding to the current debate on the relative role played by large shareholders and the external market for corporate control as ultimate disciplining devices.