Tobin tax and trading volume tightening: a reassessment

This article extends the previous literature on the Tobin tax. We find that very roughly, a doubling in transaction costs would reduce trading volume by 25% to 40% in the Forex. Most importantly, this article is the first contribution to specify the trading volume of the Forex through different (low and high volatility) regimes. Our results show evidence of nonlinear patterns for trading volumes and transaction costs on the Forex. Thus, the Tobin tax would not have a monotonic impact on trading activity across market conditions. The change in elasticity between low and high volatility regimes would be slight but significantly different. We may suggest that the high-variance regime might be the fundamentalist regime and the low-variance regime might be the chartist regime. It is a first step towards understanding which categories of agents would react to the introduction of a tax. Our results seem consistent with Tobin’s underlying thinking; since a tax would penalize chartists more than fundamentalists, it could reduce exchange rate volatility.     

ON SURRENDER AND DEFAULT RISKS

This paper examines certain types of saving institutions or insurance companies that are subject to surrender and default risks, in a stochastic interest rate context. In the setting under study, investors are endowed with an option to surrender. The goal of the paper is to study how this option impacts the default risk of the issuing company and the value of the contracts it issues. Surrender risk has been extensively studied in arbitrated markets, using trees or least‐squares Monte Carlo methods for valuations, although practitioners often rely on econometric methods. We deal with surrender risk in a third way, assuming policyholders have sets of information and preferences that differ from those of financial market agents, but without relying on econometric methods. In particular, policyholders are supposed to be only partially rational (at least in the financial sense). This is done by modeling surrender risk through a Cox process correlated to the assets and interest rate dynamics. The paper provides formulas for the dynamics of the assets of the issuing firm (these dynamics drive the default time of the company), and for the valuation of liabilities and equity. A numerical illustration is provided.     

Employment and Skills in Financial Services: A Comparison Of Banks and Insurance Companies in Five OECD Countries

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, financial services remained among the fastest growing sectors in most OECD countries. Since the early 1980s however, the pace of employment growth in financial services has slowed in several countries. In a few of them, such as France, there even have been warnings by industry executives of subsranrial employment losses in the years ahead as result of both market saturation and large productivity increases due to the widespread diffusion of computerised technologies [Le Monde, 1986]. A study recently completed by the authors for the OECD's Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (19871 arrives a conclusions that are at once more optimistic and more complex.     

Unanticipated vs. Anticipated Tax Reforms in a Two-Sector Open Economy

We use a two-sector neoclassical open economy model with traded and non-traded goods to investigate the effects of unanticipated and anticipated tax reforms. First, an unanticipated tax reform produces an expansion of GDP, labor, and investment, while an anticipated tax reform has opposite effects before the implementation of the labor tax cut. Quantitatively, if the traded sector is more capital intensive, GDP increases by 1.6 percentage points or declines by 2.7 percentage points after three years, depending on whether the tax cut is unanticipated or anticipated. Second, we find that GDP change masks a wide dispersion in sectoral output responses. As long as investment is both traded and non traded, a tax reform substantially raises the relative size of the non-traded sector after three years while traded output always drops. Third, a tax reform improves welfare in all scenarios, more so if the markup is endogenous, but less so if the shock is anticipated. Importantly, we find that welfare gains in a two-sector economy with capital accumulation and perfect access to external borrowing are between 39 % and 89 % higher than those in an economy without physical capital.     

Rational Choice in Strategic Environments: Further Observations

This note clarifies some aspects of Bernheim's (1986) characterization of Nash and correlated equilibria.     

Auctions and information acquisition: sealed bid or dynamic formats?

The value of an asset is generally not known a priori, and it requires costly investments to be discovered. In such contexts with endogenous information acquisition, which selling procedure generates more revenues? We show that dynamic formats, such as ascending‐price or multistage auctions, perform better than their static counterpart. This is because dynamic formats allow bidders to observe the number of competitors left throughout the selling procedure. Thus, even if competition appears strong ex ante, it may turn out to be weak along the dynamic format, thereby making the option to acquire information valuable. This very possibility also induces the bidders to stay longer in the auction, just to learn about the state of competition. Both effects boost revenues, and our analysis provides a rationale for using dynamic formats rather than sealed‐bid ones.     

NGOs and the creation of value in supply chains

Research Summary: Firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) often collaborate to establish new supply chains. With a formal model, we analyze how NGOs can alleviate market failures and improve supplier economic inclusion while strategically interacting with firms. We account for the specific goals of the NGO and the need to induce collaboration between firms and their suppliers. The analysis reveals a “valley of frustration,” when NGO efforts benefit all actors but only marginally the firm. We also show that more powerful firms might prefer to internalize NGO functions, while firms with lower bargaining power and higher investment requirements are better off collaborating with NGOs. Finally, we study NGOs-firms matching patterns and find that firms with higher bargaining power match with NGOs holding stronger capabilities. Managerial Summary: This article analyzes interactions between firms and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) aiming to improve the economic inclusion of suppliers or to promote the adoption of specific (e.g., sustainable) practices. For firm executives, this study shows the constraints and benefits associated with working with NGOs, the conditions under which integration of NGO functions is preferable as well as the types of NGOs that offer better prospects for a successful collaboration. For NGO executives, it highlights the need to provide enough economic incentives to firms and suppliers alike to ensure their collaboration and the trade-offs associated with this constraint, in particular, if NGO capabilities are limited. Overall, the study provides a comprehensive understanding of how NGO activities can influence value creation in a vertical value chain.     

Size matters for OTC market makers: General results and dimensionality reduction techniques

In most over‐the‐counter (OTC) markets, a small number of market makers provide liquidity to other market participants. More precisely, for a list of assets, they set prices at which they agree to buy and sell. Market makers face therefore an interesting optimization problem: they need to choose bid and ask prices for making money while mitigating the risk associated with holding inventory in a volatile market. Many market‐making models have been proposed in the academic literature, most of them dealing with single‐asset market making whereas market makers are usually in charge of a long list of assets. The rare models tackling multiasset market making suffer however from the curse of dimensionality when it comes to the numerical approximation of the optimal quotes. The goal of this paper is to propose a dimensionality reduction technique to address multiasset market making by using a factor model. Moreover, we generalize existing market‐making models by the addition of an important feature: the existence of different transaction sizes and the possibility for the market makers in OTC markets to answer different prices to requests with different sizes.     

Succession in family versus nonfamily SMEs: What influence does it have on performance?

The literature on family SMEs usually shows a negative influence of succession on performance. Based on a behavioural approach, we identify several advantages of intrafamily succession that enhance value creation. In order to confirm the positive impact of intrafamily succession on performance, a matched pair research design is used to compare the effect of succession between 102 family and nonfamily SMEs. Our results indicate that intrafamily succession contributes to value creation in family SMEs. Moreover, intrafamily succession leads to higher levels of performance in comparison with nonfamily SMEs experiencing succession and ownership transfer. Copyright © 2014 ASAC. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.