The impact of demand management policies on black vs. white employment

This article uses vector autoregression analysis to examine the relative impacts on black and white employment growth of monetary and fiscal actions. It was found that the employment responses to anticipated policy actions, while significant, were generally short-lived, with the exception of the effects of anticipated money growth on white employment. The influences of unanticipated policy changes are of a longer duration. The predominant finding in which black employment growth responded differently from white employment growth was in response to a monetary shock. The black employment response was sharply negative while the white employment response was a gradual increase over nine quarters. The results indicate that this difference occurred only during the 1980s and not in the 1970s and suggests that the effects of bank failures and credit rationing during this period may have significantly hurt minority employment opportunities.     

UK Industrial Policy: Old Tunes on New Instruments?

This paper discusses the current Labour government's industrialpolicy—as most recently reflected in its document on manufacturingstrategy—in the context of industrial policy in the UKover the last 50 years and the form that it has taken elsewherein Europe. It concludes that the thematic priorities for UKindustrial policy in the 1960s—international competitiveness,innovation, competition, and skills—continue to be thekey themes of UK policy today. The paper presents data thatillustrate the gaps that exist in key indicators of performancebetween the UK and its main economic competitors. The differencebetween the 1960s and the 2000s is that there are new instrumentsof policy. Two areas in particular are focused on—competitionpolicy and technology policy—and an attempt is made toassess the likely effectiveness of these new instruments. Thepaper concludes that the international evidence base for thesenew approaches is reasonably robust but that it is still toosoon to tell if they are having the hoped-for impact on theperformance of the UK economy.     

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.