Foreign Investors in The Netherlands: Heterogeneous Employment and Productivity Effects

Recent academic research suggests that the effects of inward foreign direct investment for productivity and employment may vary across foreign investors with different characteristics. Using a newly created dataset that integrates micro-level information from The Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency and Statistics Netherlands, this paper explores the role of several of these characteristics, including e.g. the country of origin, activities and tasks, age and strategic role of foreign affiliates in The Netherlands in the 2000–2007 period. Our analysis shows that important employment and productivity differences exist for nearly all these dimensions.     

Financial Reform after the Crisis: An Early Assessment

Financial reform has been a core dimension of the initial global policy response to the financial turmoil of 2007-08.At the first G-20 summit of heads of state and government in November 2008,more than four-fifths of the action points in the final declaration were about financial regulation.Obviously,the crisis is not over at the time of writing,and the cycle of financial reform it triggered is very far from complete.But it can be said confidently that the crisis has been transformational for financial regulatory policy,at least in the United States and Europe.     

On Ponzi schemes in infinite horizon collateralized economies with default penalties

We show, by means of an example, that in models where default is subject to both collateral repossession and utility punishments, opportunities for doing Ponzi schemes are not always ruled out and (refined) equilibria may fail to exist. This is true even if default penalties are moderate as defined in Páscoa and Seghir (Game Econ Behav 65:270–286, 2009). In our example, asset promises and default penalties are chosen such that, if an equilibrium does exist, agents never default on their promises. At the same time collateral bundles and utility functions are such that the full repayment of debts implies that the asset price should be strictly larger than the cost of collateral requirements. This is sufficient to induce agents to run Ponzi schemes and destroy equilibrium existence.     

“Should I stay or should I go?”—Why the future of global work may be less binary: Lessons on approaches to global crises from the experiences of expatriates during the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 has significantly impacted expatriates, affecting their ability to work effectively and their personal and family lives. This study explores their experiences in different phases of the pandemic, and their perspectives on the future of international living in light of such global disruption. Involving over 600 expatriates in 48 countries, the research shows shifts in motivation and priorities as a result of the crisis and reveals how family (extended and immediate) topped expatriates' concerns. The study examines if and how support systems worked and looks at coping mechanisms, skills, traits, previous experience, and attitudes which participants found useful. A common theme was “falling between two stools”—where expatriates were ineligible for support in either their home country or in their host country. Others described being “pulled in different directions” or “torn by a dilemma” with pros and cons in either choice. The study contributes to the questions about the future of global work with results of the survey revealing changing norms for expatriation and global mobility raising the possibility of more nuanced approaches to global projects and less binary options for global professionals and their families.     

Life beyond the Washington Consensus: An Introduction to Pro-poor Macroeconomic Policies

Abstract

This paper develops a rationale for the recession-induced inflation hypothesis. Within a conflicting claims framework we present a model in which both price leaders and organized workers set their nominal prices on the basis of a desired profit rate and a real wage target respectively. We argue that an absolute cost advantage in concentrated industries (for instance in fixed costs) may provide oligopolistic leaders sufficient margin to raise prices and restore a desired level of profitability during a recession. The resultizng unstable income distribution will set off an inflationary spiral if the firm's advantage in selling its output imparts an upward bias to the flexibility of input prices (specifically wages). Taking into consideration different scenarios for workers' bargaining power we present a simple simulation experiment to analyze the inflation and real wage paths of the economy after a negative output shock. When we endogenize output, we show that for a high degree of the bargaining power, output is likely to converge to a higher steady-state value.     

Do people gamble more in good times? Evidence from 27 European countries

We provide evidence of a positive relationship between the intensity of gambling and economic growth in 27 European countries for 2005–2013. Our proxy for gambling is represented by government revenues from taxes on lotteries, betting and gambling. This variable is linked to GDP growth in a panel regression framework and pooled OLS. However, when we split our sample to account for the heterogeneity among European countries, we found that the positive ‘gambling – GDP growth’ relationship is driven extensively by the Central and Eastern European countries. It appears that people in these countries tend to gamble more when the economy is expanding.     

A necessary and sufficient condition for the dominance of an improved family of estimators in linear regression models

This article presents a necessary and sufficient condition for the dominance, with respect to the risk under a general quadratic loss function, of the double k-class estimators (characterized by non-stochastic scalars) over the least squares estimator of coefficients in linear regression models.