The perils of debt deflation in the Euro area: a multi regime model

Academic research and policy makers in the Euro area are currently concerned with the threat of debt deflation and secular stagnation in Europe. Empirical evidence seems to suggest that secular stagnation and debt deflation in the Euro area may be rather slowly developing. Yet what appears as major peril is that debt deflation with a lack of economic growth, rising real interest rates and further rising debt may trigger household defaults, defaults of firms and banks, rise of risk premia, and default risk of certain sectors of the economy or sovereign defaults. It is this rising default and financial risk that may lead to a regime change to a slowly moving debt crisis with high financial risk and high financial stress. In order to explore those issues, a macro policy model of Svensson type is introduced, exhibiting a regime of low and high financial stress. Then, a four dimensional multi-regime VAR is employed to an Euro area data set to support the theoretical model and the claim that in particular Southern Euro area countries are affected by debt deflation and financial market stress.     

The Value of Adjusting the Bias in Recommendations: International Evidence

The financial literature has shown that both earnings forecasts and investment recommendations are optimistically biased. However, while the bias in earnings forecasts has decreased over time and even some recent studies show that they are no longer optimistic, in the case of investment recommendations this bias still remains relatively constant over time. Therefore, it seems that recommendations are less credible to investors than earnings forecasts. The vast majority of recommendation studies have been carried out at the country level. In this paper, we use an international context to study whether profitable investment strategies exist when adjusting the recommendation bias of each analysed country. The adjustment we propose to correct this bias takes into account the differences across countries, and also varies in time to correct for the changes in bias over time within countries. Our empirical results show that there are in fact significant differences in the level of bias among countries, with the US and the UK being the countries with the highest bias. Second, the adjusted consensus portfolios are more orthogonal to typical investment styles (size, book‐to‐market and attention) and we find that investors could implement a higher number of profitable investment strategies using this adjusted measure. In this line, the results show that the countries with the lowest bias obtain the highest risk adjusted abnormal returns. Third, our work entails a practical implication, as it shows the value embedded in a simple necessary adjustment in the global asset management context. This is an important result showing that profitable investment strategies exist when considering a global portfolio based on adjusted recommendations.     

Do Repeated Wildfires Change Homebuyers’ Demand for Homes in High-Risk Areas? A Hedonic Analysis of the Short and Long-Term Effects of Repeated Wildfires on House Prices in Southern California

Unlike most hedonic studies that analyze the effects of a one-time event, this paper analyzes the effects of forest fires that are several years apart in a small geographical area. We find that repeated forest fires cause house prices to decrease for houses located near the fires. We test and reject the hypothesis that the house price reduction from one fire is equal to the house price reduction from a second fire. The first fire reduces house prices by about 10%, while the second fire reduces house prices by nearly 23%, a statistically significant difference. The pattern of these results are robust to several alternative econometric specifications.

Price elasticity of demand for broadband: Evidence from Latin America and the Caribbean

In this study the authors analyze fixed broadband retail prices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and provide estimates about the effect of price changes on broadband adoption. The analysis is based on a survey of plans and tariffs conducted by the authors during Q2 2010. Their results suggest that fixed broadband services in LAC are generally expensive and of poor quality when benchmarked against Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, although there is significant variance between markets in the region. In order to isolate the effect of prices on broadband adoption they use an instrumental-variable approach. Their findings show that broadband demand is relatively elastic to price in LAC but not in the OECD. They estimate that an average price reduction of 10% would result in an increase of almost 22% in the penetration rate in LAC, equivalent to almost 8.5 million additional broadband connections. Several policy implications result from these findings. First, national broadband policies in LAC should pay a closer attention to a deficit of competition in fixed broadband services, as households and firms face high prices for poor quality services, thus deterring adoption. Second, while their findings generally suggest that price reductions could significantly increase penetration, they elasticity estimates reveal that price effects might not be sufficient to achieve the penetration goals set in national broadband plans. This validates the need for complementary policy strategies that affect other determinants of broadband demand. The example of Brazil is used to illustrate this finding.     

Propuesta de un índice para evaluar la gestión del control interno

Derived from its humanitarian mission, to pay quality health care to the population, in hospitals and health facilities is needed reduce the occurrence of events that may threaten the physical and psychological integrity of the patients they serve. One of the strategies to consider to overcome this challenge is the proper implementation of the internal control system, to ensure the sustainability of insurers, by increasing efficiency in the care of people, feasible only within a care model that quantifies and management on population identified and addressed. The objective of this paper was to propose a coefficient to evaluate the internal control management for a hospital entity. This was conceived under the guidelines of the multi-criteria modeling in conjunction with the detection of critical points through Petri nets. For this, the order of importance and fulfillment of the components of Internal Control and in unison the unreliability of critical processes in the entity being identified practical application was determined.     

La medición del capital intelectual y su impacto en el rendimiento financiero en empresas del sector industrial en México

Currently knowledge is considered an essential resource to contribute to the creation and generation of competitive advantage in organizations. The human factor as an intangible resource of a company has become a main value generator, and even though both knowledge management and intellectual capital are intangibles that can be measured in the financial reports of companies, their position as main value generators is not reflected in financial information. In Mexico, industrial sector companies need to promote the creation of intellectual added value based on its own abilities, which reside on their intellectual capital. The value added intellectual coefficient (VAIC?), with its components, is a tool that contributes to achieving this goal, and helps to identify the positive impact on key factors such as financial profitability, market capitalization and level of share value.     

Assessing implicit hypotheses in life table construction

Mortality figures are of capital importance for policy-making and public planning, as in forecasting financial provisions in public pension systems. General population life tables are constructed from aggregated statistics, an issue that usually entails adopting some (implicit) assumptions in their construction, such as the hypothesis of closed demographic system or the hypotheses of uniform distributions of death counts (and migration events) by age and calendar year. As microdata have become more abundant and reliable, these hypotheses could be assessed and more assumption-free estimators employed. Using a real database from Spain, we show that the above hypotheses are not appropriate in general and that the more efficient estimators proposed in this paper should be promoted, as differences persist depending on the estimator computed.     

Mortgages Denominated in Domestic and Foreign Currencies: Simple Models

We design a family of simple models of foreign currency-denominated (FXD) loans to compare the cash flows of installments and the paths of outstanding debts denominated in domestic and foreign currencies, respectively. Using them, we draw several conclusions relevant to the recent debates about the FXD loans. We demonstrate the key role played by the uncovered interest rate parity in the comparisons. Moreover, we give a closed-form solution for the trade-off between the currency depreciation and the unilateral FX interest rate increases by the banks. We determine the optimal size of domestic and FXD loans, respectively.     

Bridging and bonding forms of social capital in a regional strategic network

Research on networks emphasizes the importance of bonds between actors. Social reciprocity strengthens network bonds, which is assumed to have positive effects on business relationships between firms. However, the importance of weak ties is also stressed in network research. An important policy issue is therefore if more attention should be devoted to the creation of bridges to other social groups and loosening bonds between network actors. The difficulty in doing so is described and analyzed in this article focusing on a regional strategic network, which is viewed in three network perspectives. Interview data were collected from all participating managers in a regional strategic network in 2004 and 2010. The findings shed light upon the paradox of using a regional strategic network to counteract over-embeddedness and freeing the involved actors from existing network lock-ins instead of further strengthening such social institutions.