“Following” or “attracting” the customer? Japanese Banking FDI in Europe

Using firm-level Japanese FDI data on investment into 18 European countries between 1970–2000 in all industries (banking, manufacturing, wholesale/retail distribution, and business services), this study examines if the “follow the customer” (FTC) hypothesis holds for firm-level data. The results suggest that banks do follow their customers into a foreign market, as part of a larger strategy that goes beyond the FTC theory. The firm level data show that the majority of FDI into a host country occurs after the foreign bank has established operations. Policy implications of this finding include the suggestion that host economies liberalize their financial sector early in an effort to attract banking FDI which then will attract non-banking FDI rather than the reverse.     

Water on Fire: Gains from Electricity Trade

In light of the ongoing liberalization of electricity trade in the Nordic countries, and perhaps in Northern Europe, we argue that gains from electricity trade may be different from those traditionally associated with comparative advantages and economies of scale. In particular, we consider gains arising from the exploitation of technological complementarities between hydro and thermal systems. Our theoretical framework highlights essential features of the two systems and allows for an analysis of effects of trade. We study three trading regimes, which may arise either endogenously or because of trade regulations: day–night power exchange, seasonal energy banking and unbalanced trade. The analysis suggests that gradual trade liberalization may be costly.     

German dominance in the EMS

The paper assesses the merit of the view according to which the Bundesbank dominates monetary policy-making in the European Monetary System. Our tests give a strong rejection of German dominance and suggest, instead, that monetary policymaking in the EMS is interactive. There is evidence that the Bundesbank pursues her own policy goals in the longer run. But German independence does not imply German dominance.     

Mitkunden als wertschöpfer — creating community value

Dienstleistungen werden h?ufig in und für Gruppen erbracht. Insbesondere Kunden von Erlebnisdienstleistungen sind auch vor oder nach dem Konsum eine relativ enge und oft homogene Interaktionsgemeinschaft bzw. Community. Communities bieten je nach Dienstleistungs- und Kundenart eine wichtige Quelle von Wertsch?pfung im Sinne eines wahrgenommenen Wertes für den Kunden. Durch Kooperation von Kunden untereinander und mit dem Dienstleistungsunternehmen generieren sie nachfrageseitige Netzeffekte. Dieser Beitrag untersucht auf der Basis einer empirischen Analyse wie, d. h. über welche Mechanismen und Funktionen, Communities Wert für den Kunden generieren k?nnen. Es zeigt sich unter anderem, dass Koh?renz, Sozialit?t und Koh?sion positiv auf die Entstehung von wahrgenommenem Kundenwert von Communities wirken.     

Spousal Complementarity in Home Production

A bstract .   Economists have increasingly recognized the growing role of married women in the labor market by treating the labor supply decisions of married couples as joint decisions. However, they have yet to apply the same reasoning to home production. We build a more complete model of household time allocation that consists of a system of simultaneous equations estimating hours of labor supply and home production. Using data on white couples from Wave XXV of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that working wives act as if their husbands are substitutes for home production while other wives do not. Husbands' responses to their wives' behavior depends upon whether children are present.     

Serial Nonparticipation in Repeated Discrete Choice Models

We consider alternative econometric strategies for addressing serial nonparticipation, that is, repeated choice of the same alternative or same type of alternative across a series of choice occasions, in data typically analyzed within the repeated discrete choice framework. Single and double hurdle variants of the repeated discrete choice model are developed and applied to choice experiment and multisite seasonal recreation demand data. Our results suggest that hurdle models can generate significant improvements in statistical fit and qualitatively different policy implications, particularly in choice experiment applications where the proper treatment of serial nonparticipation is relatively more ambiguous.     

Competition,cooperation, and corporate culture

Cooperation between workers can be of substantial value to a firm, yet its level often varies substantially between firms. We show that these differences can unfold in a competitive labor market if workers have heterogeneous social preferences and preferences are private information. In our model, workers differ in their willingness to cooperate voluntarily. We show that there always exists a separating equilibrium in which workers self‐select into firms that differ in their monetary incentives as well as their level of worker cooperation. Our model highlights the role of sorting and worker heterogeneity in the emergence of heterogeneous corporate cultures. It also provides a new explanation for the coexistence of nonprofit and for‐profit firms.

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Fitting dynamic factor models to non-stationary time series

Factor modelling of a large time series panel has widely proven useful to reduce its cross-sectional dimensionality. This is done by explaining common co-movements in the panel through the existence of a small number of common components, up to some idiosyncratic behaviour of each individual series. To capture serial correlation in the common components, a dynamic structure is used as in traditional (uni- or multivariate) time series analysis of second order structure, i.e. allowing for infinite-length filtering of the factors via dynamic loadings. In this paper, motivated from economic data observed over long time periods which show smooth transitions over time in their covariance structure, we allow the dynamic structure of the factor model to be non-stationary over time by proposing a deterministic time variation of its loadings. In this respect we generalize the existing recent work on static factor models with time-varying loadings as well as the classical, i.e. stationary, dynamic approximate factor model. Motivated from the stationary case, we estimate the common components of our dynamic factor model by the eigenvectors of a consistent estimator of the now time-varying spectral density matrix of the underlying data-generating process. This can be seen as a time-varying principal components approach in the frequency domain. We derive consistency of this estimator in a “double-asymptotic” framework of both cross-section and time dimension tending to infinity. The performance of the estimators is illustrated by a simulation study and an application to a macroeconomic data set.