Does Aid for Roads Attract Foreign or Domestic Firms? Evidence from Cambodia

Less developed countries have received substantial foreign aid for transport infrastructure, making its quantitative assessment important. To investigate the effect of aid for road infrastructure on the location of foreign and domestic firms, this study employs the first comprehensive census on all business establishments in Cambodia for 2011 and measures the geographical distribution of aid disbursements in roads. Estimating a negative binomial model, we find that aid disbursements in roads have little influence on the entry of foreign and domestic firms across communes. Compared with the aid effect, the location of firms is more strongly influenced by other determinants such as population size, electricity access, and labor supply.     

Global liquidity trap

How should monetary policy respond to a “global liquidity trap,” where the two countries may fall into a liquidity trap simultaneously? Using a two-country New Open Economy Macroeconomics model, we first characterize optimal monetary policy, and show that the optimal rate of inflation in one country is affected by whether or not the other country is in a liquidity trap. We next examine how well the optimal monetary policy is approximated by relatively simple monetary policy rules. The interest-rate rule targeting the producer price index performs well in this respect.     

On the role of job assignment in a comparison of education systems

Abstract This paper re‐examines how differences in systems for financing education influence GDP by highlighting a neglected function of education policy: it affects the magnitude of gains from job assignment. When more productive jobs demand more skill, privately financed education can increase productivity gains from matching between jobs and skill by increasing the availability of highly educated people. This differs from the standard argument that publicly financed education increases the total amount of human capital by equalizing educational opportunities. It is shown that if job opportunities have large variations in productivity, education policy may face a serious efficiency–equity trade‐off.     

The Effects of Uncertain Divestiture as Regulatory Threat

It has been argued that the threat of regulatory intervention affects firm behavior. We investigate the pricing decision of the dominant firm under regulatory threat, considering the probability of intervention as a function of the price. Our focus is on the case where the potential divestiture of the firm serves as a threat of regulatory intervention. It is shown that under certain conditions associated with the marginal expected penalty, the mere threat of divesting a certain portion of the firm’s manufacturing plants leads to a lower price than the actual divestiture of that same portion. Numerical examples illustrate that with relatively small-scale divestiture, the firm’s price under the threat may be lower than that under the actual divestiture, within a relatively broad range of regulator’s attitudes toward intervention.     

日本的农民组织与农村金融

本报告是根据2006年3月18日中国农业科学院农业经济与发展研究所联合研究生院共同举办的“日本的农民组织与农村金融”专题报告会资料整理而成。报告的内容包括日本农民组织发展的背景、现状,以及农村金融在农民组织发展过程中的作用,同时也揭示了农民组织和农村金融体系之间存在的深层次问题。本报告既是高木总裁多年从事农业工作的思考总结,也是对农业发展和农村金融体系问题的一次深刻剖析,既为关注和研究日本农民组织的科研人员提供了新的素材,也为我国农民组织的发展提供了具有参考价值的意见与建议。希望通过解读本文,能够让关注和研究中日农民合作组织的有识之士获得一些启示。     

The trickle-down effect of trust in business-to-business relationships: How can a supplier ensure cooperation from multiple customers?

Abstract

Although several interfirm cooperation studies have expanded the unit of analysis from dyads to triads (networks), there is scant literature focusing on whether and how a supplier’s relationship with a customer influences its relationships with other customers. Individual relationship dyads are not isolated but interact with one another. Particularly, mutual trust in a supplier–customer relationship dyad may influence other customers’ cooperative behavior. This cross-dyadic influence is called the “trickle-down effect of trust.” A hypothesis for the mechanism by which this effect occurs was generated, focusing on the customers’ demand information offerings as a cooperative behavior. The results of an empirical analysis indicate that (1) a supplier’s mutual trust with its primary customer encourages nonprimary customers to offer their demand information to the supplier and (2) the quality of information from customers helps the supplier to make their new product more meaningful.