Luft zum Atmen

Mehr Sicherheit im Umgang mit Trachealkanülen - Pflegende, die Patienten mit einer Trachealkanüle betreuen, müssen den Kanülenwechsel sicher beherrschen. Denn bei Komplikationen kann das Warten auf den Arzt katastrophale Folgen haben. Daher muss der Umgang mit den Kanülen zur Routine werden.     

Not all trade restrictions are created equally

There has been great focus in the recent trade theory literature on the introduction of firm heterogeneity into trade models. This introduction has highlighted the importance of the entry/exit decision of firms in response to changes in trade barriers. However, it is typical in many of these models to use iceberg transport costs as a general form of trade barriers that can be interchangeable with ad valorem tariffs. I show that this is not always an appropriate conclusion. Specifically, I illustrate that profit for an exporter is more elastic in response to tariffs than iceberg transport costs, which affects the entry/exit decision of firms. This has implications for welfare analysis and empirical specifications.     

Should multivariate early warning systems for banking crises pool across regions?

Most extant work on prediction of banking crises has utilised global samples, which are in turn dominated by observations from middle-income countries, and rely on a single estimator. However, economic and financial structures as well as the pattern of shocks may differ substantially across regions, while a range of specifications is desirable to check robustness. Accordingly, in this paper we test the implicit pooling assumption in earlier multivariate work on Early Warning Systems using both logit and binary recursive tree specifications separately for crises in Asia and Latin America, as well as the pooled sample. Results suggest markedly different crisis determinants across regions, implying global samples are inappropriate.     

A disaggregated analysis of the export performance of some industrial and emerging countries

The paper describes the evolution of export shares and quantifies the contribution of geographical and sectoral specialization as well as that of “competitiveness” of some industrial and emerging market economies between 1985 and 2003. While the strong growth of emerging countries as world competitors has lowered the market shares of all industrial countries, the results of a constant-market-share analysis indicate that the latter have benefited from positive specialization effects. Specifically, industrial countries gained from being specialized in fast-growing sectors (high-tech) or destinations (Asia). The magnitude of these effects, however, has been quite diversified across the main countries. Among the emerging economies, the striking export growth of China was determined by a strong rise in competitiveness that allowed the country to gain market shares across all sectors and destinations.