Trade,competitiveness and investment: an empirical assessment

ABSTRACT

The Eurozone crisis has exposed several weaknesses of the European Monetary Union economies. This paper aims to assess the impact on external competitiveness of an expansionary capital stock policy that could contribute to reduce the trade balance asymmetries within the EU and help European exporters to recover their competitive role in international markets. A policy action to increase capital stock accumulation through investment in selected European countries could generate a double dividend: increasing both price and nonprice competitiveness, so stimulating their competitive position as exporters, and consolidating the growth path of EU economy. The analysis employs a bilateral trade model built at INFORUM with several distinguishing characteristics: a comprehensive bilateral data set, econometric estimation of key parameters, and emphasis on sectoral details. Our findings show that a capital stock increase is effective in narrowing trade imbalances within EU. Heterogeneous effects are estimated for commodities in China and the US.     

Settlement delays in the money market

We track 38,000 money market trades from execution to delivery and return, and provide a first empirical analysis of settlement delays in financial markets. In accord with the predictions of recent models of strategic settlement of financial claims, we document a tendency by lenders to delay delivery of loaned funds until the afternoon hours. We find banks to follow a simple strategy to manage the risk of account overdrafts, by delaying settlement of large payments relative to that of small payments. More sophisticated strategies such as increasing delays when own liquid balances are low and when dealing with small trading partners play a marginal role. We find evidence of strategic delay also when returning borrowed funds, although we can explain a smaller fraction of the dispersion in delays in the return than in delivery leg of money market lending.     

Evaluación del efecto de la psicología del inversionista en un mercado bursátil artificial mediante su grado de eficiencia

The main objective in this paper is developing a cellular automaton model where interact more than one kind of broker, where the use and exchange of information between the investors explain the complexity through the Hurst coefficient estimation, this, represents an efficient or random market when the value is equal to 0.5. Due to the variants proposed in this research it can be determined that should exist a rational component in the simulator in order to generate an efficient behavior.     

Branding destinations versus branding hotels in a gaming destination—Examining the nature and significance of co-branding effects in the case study of Macao

This paper considers destinations and hotels operating within a gaming destination as co-branded experiential choice products. Specifically, it examines the overall and individual effects of visitors’ perceived brand equity of a gaming destination and their perceived brand equity of various hotels, including ‘flagship’ or branded hotels, in terms of influencing their reaction to a hypothetical brand loyalty scenario in which their intended and preferred hotel was unable to provide accommodation thus forcing them to either: (1) choose an alternate hotel in the destination and continue with the visit, (2) cancel the trip and choose another destination to visit, or (3) insist on staying at the preferred hotel but postpone the trip at another period. The study's expectation is that visitors’ response to such a hypothetical scenario is moderated by the relative influence of their perceived brand equity for the destination and for hotels. The emergent gaming destination of Macao is used as a case study for this purpose. The study's findings indicate that visitors’ overall destination brand equity perceptions—rather than hotel brand equity perceptions—is robustly significant when it comes to influencing visitors’ response to the brand loyalty scenario. Results of the study indicate several relevant implications for destination management organizations (DMOs) seeking to enhance their destination-branding efforts and for hotel operators, especially internationally branded hotel chains.     

Productivity, wages and intrinsic motivations

There is a long-standing debate in labour economics on the impact of workers’ intrinsic motivations on equilibrium wages. One direction in economic theory suggests that intrinsically motivated workers are willing to accept lower wages and “donate” work, for example, in terms of unpaid overtime (the donative-labour hypothesis). In the other direction, intrinsic motivations are expected to increase worker productivity and, in turn, wages (the intrinsic motivation-productivity hypothesis). Using a new database of a sample of workers in the cooperative non-profit sector, we find that, consistently with the motivation-productivity hypothesis, more motivated workers earn significantly higher wages, which signals higher productivity. Evidence supporting the donative-labour hypothesis is weaker, even though a generally positive connection between motivations and work-donation is confirmed. We interpret these findings by arguing that the impact of the donative-labour effect is dominated by the intrinsic motivation-productivity effect.     

Crypto-assets portfolio optimization under the omega measure

Abstract

Crypto-currencies, or crypto-assets, represent a new class of investment assets. The traditional portfolio analysis approach of Markowitz is not appropriate for use with portfolios containing crypto-assets, as the model requires that the investor have a quadratic utility function or that the returns be normally distributed, which isn’t the case for crypto-assets. We develop a portfolio optimization model based on the Omega measure which is more comprehensive than the Markowitz model, and apply this to four crypto-asset investment portfolios by means of a numerical application. The results indicate that these portfolios should favor traditional market assets over crypto-assets. In the case of portfolios formed only by crypto-assets, there is no clear preference in favor of any crypto-asset in particular.     

Option‐Adjusted Delta Credit Spreads: a Cross‐Country Analysis

This study analyses the determinants of the variation in option‐adjusted credit spreads (OASs) using a unique database and enlarges the traditional analysis to include disaggregated indexes, new variables, and a complete set of markets (USA, UK, and the Eurozone). An extended set of regressors explains almost half the variability of OASs in the three markets. We find that institutional trading activity significantly affects corporate bond spreads, signalling either variation in perceptions of risk or the existence of an indirect measure of liquidity. We also find that US business cycle indicators significantly affect the variability of OASs in the UK and the Eurozone. Finally, we find evidence that stock returns have more influence on high‐yield bonds in the Eurozone than in the USA.     

Relevance of barriers and facilitators in the use of health technology assessment in Colombia

Objectives: Several studies, mostly from developed countries, have identified barriers and facilitators with regard to the uptake of health technology assessment (HTA). This study elicited, using best-worst scaling (BWS), what HTA experts in Colombia consider to be the most important barriers and facilitators in the use of HTA, and makes a comparison to results from the Netherlands.

Methods: Two object case surveys (one for barriers, one for facilitators) were conducted among 18 experts (policymakers, health professionals, PhD students, senior HTA-researchers) from Colombia. Seven respondents were employees of the national HTA agency Instituto de Evaluación Tecnológica de Salud (IETS). In total, 22 barriers and 19 facilitators were included. In each choice task, participants were asked to choose the most and least important barrier/facilitator from a set of five. Hierarchical Bayes modeling was used to compute the mean relative importance scores (RIS) for each factor, and a subgroup analysis was conducted to assess differences between IETS and non-IETS respondents. The final ranking was further compared to the results from a similar study conducted in the Netherlands.

Results: The three most important barriers (RIS >6.00) were “Inadequate presentation format”, “Absence of policy networks”, and “Insufficient legal support”. The six most important facilitators (RIS >6.00) were “Appropriate timing”, “Clear presentation format”, “Improving longstanding relation”, “Appropriate incentives”, “Sufficient qualified human resources”, and “Availability to relevant HTA research”. The perceived relevance of the barriers and facilitators differed slightly between IETS and non-IETS employees, while the differences between the rankings in Colombia and the Netherlands were substantial.

Conclusion: The study suggests that barriers and facilitators related to technical aspects of processing HTA reports and to the contact and interaction between researchers and policymakers had the greatest importance in Colombia.     

Corporate social responsibility and firm efficiency: a latent class stochastic frontier analysis

The nexus between corporate social responsibility and corporate performance is of fundamental importance to understand if the former can be a sustainable strategy in the competitive race. In this paper we test this relationship on a sample of firms observed in a 13-year interval by focusing on a performance indicator (productive efficiency) seldom explored in this literature with a novel approach (latent class stochastic frontiers). Our empirical findings show that firms included in the Domini 400 index (a CSR stock market index) do not appear to be more distant from the production frontier than firms in the control sample after controlling for the heterogeneity of production structure.