Insider trading: Regulation, securities markets, and welfare under risk aversion

I analyze in this article the impact of insider trading regulation (ITR) on a securities market and on social welfare, and argue that the imposition of ITR forces a reallocation of wealth and risk that decreases social welfare. Three reasons explain this result: First, ITR increases the volatility of securities prices; second, it worsens the risk sharing among investors; and, third, it diverts resources from the productive sector of the economy. Further, although I formally establish conditions under which ITR makes society better off, I argue that those conditions are not useful to justify the imposition of this regulation.     

Business Creation and the Stock Market

We claim that the stock market encourages business creation, innovation, and growth by allowing the recycling of "informed capital". Due to incentive and information problems, start-ups face larger costs of going public than mature firms. Sustaining a tight relationship with a monitor (bank, venture capitalist) allows them to finance their operations without going public until profitability prospects are clearer or incentive problems are less severe. However, the earlier young firms go public, the quicker monitors' informed capital is redirected towards new start-ups. Hence, when informed capital is in limited supply, factors that lower the costs for start-ups to go public encourage business creation. Technological spill-overs associated with business creation and thick market externalities in the young firms segment of the stock market provide prima facie cases for encouraging young firms to go public.     

Estimation of the structure and elasticities of Mexican imports in the period 1961–1979

This paper examines the changing structure of Mexican imports over the period 1961–1979 and its relationship to the acceleration of imports in 1978–1979. It is found that the more lenient policies adopted by the government in that period seem to be associated with the higher import levels. A review of Mexican policy with respect to foreign trade in 1980 seems to be consistent with the results reported in this paper.     

Mergers and acquisitions in the european union frame

In the first step, the research analyzes the different European waves of mergers and acquisitions and the restructuring market characteristics. It is followed by a study of such corporate restructuring methods as divestitures, spin-offs, split-ups, split-offs, employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), and equity carveouts, paying special attention to corporate mergers and acquisitions, the different types and their diversity of targets. The European situation regarding mergers and acquisitions, their different characteristics, and the way to do them are studied in the tables.     

A study of determinant factors of stakeholder environmental pressure perceived by industrial companies

Although several articles have studied the effect that stakeholder pressure has on the environmental behavior of firms, little research has attempted to identify the contingencies that explain such pressure. This article investigates the effects of six relevant variables on stakeholder environmental pressure perceived by industrial companies: size, internationalization, location of manufacturing activities, position in the supply chain, industrial sector, and managerial values and attitudes. The effect is theoretically determined by distinguishing between pressure intensity and perception capacity and empirically tested with a sample of 186 Spanish manufacturers. The analyses reveal two dimensions of stakeholder pressure, governmental and nongovernmental, and show that variables such as environmental awareness among managers, internationalization, industrial sector and company size play important roles in determining both dimensions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Understanding the Relationship between Financial Development and Monetary Policy

In this paper we summarize the results of a broad exploratory empirical analysis where we relate the level of financial development with the effectiveness of monetary policy. The analysis is based on a panel of countries for which we calculate measures both of financial development and of monetary policy effectiveness. We look for statistically significant relationships between the indicators of financial development, the effectiveness coefficients, and other macroeconomic characteristics by estimating dynamic panels and performing a cluster analysis. We present our results in the form of a list of stylized facts that we consider deserve further attention.     

Transit ridership forecasting at station level: an approach based on distance-decay weighted regression

This article develops a rapid response ridership forecast model, based on the combined use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), distance-decay functions and multiple regression models. The number of passengers boarding at each station in the Madrid Metro network is estimated as a function of the characteristics of the stations (type, number of lines, accessibility within the network, etc.) and of the areas they serve (population and employment characteristics, land-use mix, street density, presence of feeder modes, etc.). The paper considers the need to evaluate the distance threshold used (not the choice of a fixed distance threshold by assimilation from other studies), the distance calculation procedure (network distance versus straight-line distance) and, above all, the use of distance-decay weighted regression (so that the data from the bands nearer the stations have a greater weighting in the model than those farther away). Analyses carried out show that weighting the variables according to the distance-decay functions provides systematically better results. The choice of distance threshold also significantly improves outcomes. When an all-or-nothing function is used, the way the service area is calculated (straight-line or network distances) does not seem to have a decisive influence on the results. However, it seems to be more influential when distance-decay weighting is used.     

Location, economic potential and daily accessibility: an analysis of the accessibility impact of the high-speed line Madrid–Barcelona–French border

This paper evaluates the accessibility impact of the future Madrid–Barcelona–French border high-speed line. Accessibility impact of the new infrastructure is measured by means of three indicators: weighted average travel times, economic potential and daily accessibility. These indicators respond to different conceptualizations and offer complementary information about the issue accessibility. The results are quite different: very concentrated effects in the daily accessibility indicator, less concentrated in the economic potential one and more dispersal in the location indicator. The sign (polarizing/balancing) of these effects depend on the geographic scale: polarizing effects at the national level and balancing effects at both corridor and European levels are identified. A geographic information system (GIS) was used to carry out this study.     

Corporatism, Trade Liberalization and Sectoral Responses: The Case of Venezuela, 1989–99

The Venezuelan manufacturing sector, unlike agriculture, cooperated with state’s efforts to liberalize trade in the 1990s, despite the economic costs it absorbed and the political opportunities to sabotage the reforms. This paper offers two explanations for this, which modify and conciliate traditional interest-based and corporatist theories of state-society relations. High levels of sectoral autonomy from the bureaucracy and political parties (and hence Congress), together with low levels of involvement in profit-making on the part of the associations representing the sector, encourage sectoral cooperation with costly and risky state policies. In addition, traditional corporatist instruments used by states—inducements and constraints—hurt rather than enhance state-sector cooperation.