Family attachment and the decision to move by race

Blacks in the United States move less than Whites despite having many characteristics that are commonly associated with high geographical mobility such as high unemployment, low rate of home ownership, low marriage rate and settlement in areas where unemployment is high. We find that this puzzle can be explained by the effects of family ties—both nuclear and extended families—which we proxy using data from the University of Michigan's PSID. The results are robust to different specifications and estimation techniques.     

Technology Newness and Impact of Go/No-Go Criteria on New Product Success

This study shows that the relative effect of five dimensions of go/no-go criteria on new product success is contingent on the stage of the development process and newness of the technology. Specifically, strategic fit criteria are critical to new product success at the initial screening. Technical criteria are significantly correlated with product success only at the go-to-development decision gate. Market opportunity criteria relate positively with project success at the initial screening, the market launch gate and the post-launch review. Financial criteria correlate positively with success from the go-to-development decision to the first post-launch review. Customer-acceptance criteria stand out as equally important to success throughout the entire development process. In relation to the moderating effect of technology newness, it was found that customer acceptance and market opportunity criteria at the initial screening are more important for the success of low technologically innovative projects than for the success of high technologically innovative projects. At the initial screening, financial criteria exert a negative effect on the success of projects incorporating highly innovative technologies.     

The relationship between investment and large exchange rate depreciations in dollarized economies

We use a simple financial friction in an economy with high degree of liability dollarization - and currency mismatch - to show that the negative balance-sheet effect of an exchange rate depreciation may be observable only if the magnitude of the depreciation is large enough. This result justifies the difficulty to find strong empirical evidence for balance-sheet effects and suggests the convenience of including a “large depreciation” term in empirical analyses. We review some of the related empirical literature and provide some new evidence of this large depreciation effect.     

Gibrat's law test on Brazilian commercial banks

In recent years, Brazil has been one of the countries with the biggest changes in the banking sector. The process of deregulation that began in 2002 has entailed the increase of the presence of foreign banking and the increase of competition, among other aspects. In this context, the objective of this study consists in contrasting Gibrat's Law in the Brazilian commercial banking during the period of 2002–2013 with the objective of contributing with evidence for the construction of a growth model for banking that will guide the financial policy of the country. For this, the quartile regression methodology is utilized, since we consider that it analyzes the relation between growth and the size of the entities more thoroughly than the empirical contrasts given by previous empirical evidence. The results obtained indicate that there is a non-linear relation in an inverted U form between growth and size in the Brazilian commercial banking. These results allow us to affirm that the relative dispersion of the sizes of the financial entities will tend to decrease in time and with this, the concentration of the sector.     

Durable goods,financial frictions,and business cycles in emerging economies

Business cycles in emerging economies display very volatile consumption and strongly countercyclical trade balance. We show that aggregate consumption in these economies is not more volatile than output once durables are accounted for. Then, we present and estimate a real business cycles model for a small open economy that accounts for this empirical observation. Our results show that the role of permanent shocks to aggregate productivity in explaining cyclical fluctuations in emerging economies is considerably lower than previously documented. Moreover, we find that financial frictions are crucial to explain some key business cycle properties of these economies.