Lessons of the crisis for emerging markets

This paper analyzes the impact of the global financial crisis on emerging markets. It argues that the crisis will have enduring implications for policy toward the development and liberalization of financial markets. In particular, emerging markets will rely (even) less on external finance and adopt a less permissive approach to foreign bank presence. In contrast, the crisis will have a much more limited impact on other aspects of globalization. More controversially, the paper argues that the crisis is unlikely to have a major impact on the structure of the international monetary system.     

Mehrwertsteuererhöhung: Keine nachhaltige Konsolidierung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

The Effect of Health and Poverty on Early Childhood Cognitive Development

Although evidence of a link between socioeconomic status and child health has been researched extensively, much less attention has been devoted to studying the link between child health and cognitive development. This paper seeks to determine whether early childhood illnesses and poverty significantly impede cognitive development. The empirical model attempts to control for observed and unobserved heterogeneity through the use of panel data models. Results indicate that a child’s cognitive development is not directly related to health problems acquired after birth or socioeconomic standing. Rather, cognitive development is primarily influenced by unobserved child- and family-specific factors that happen to be correlated with health and socioeconomic status. On the other hand, birth weight appears to affect cognitive performance later in childhood, even after taking unobserved heterogeneity into account.     

On Multinational Corporations and the Provision of Positive Rights

Insights from contemporary psychology can illuminate the common psychological processes that facilitate unethical decision making. I will illustrate several of these processes and describe steps that may be taken to reduce or eliminate the undesirable consequences of these processes. A generic problem with these processes is that they are totally invisible to decision makers – i.e., decision makers are convinced that their decisions are ethically and managerially sound.     

Perceived marketing–sales relationship effectiveness: a matter of justice

There is a compelling need to improve the relationship between managers in marketing and sales departments. This paper argues that one critical way of enhancing individual managers’ perceptions of relationship effectiveness between these departments is to view the issue as a matter of justice and suggests that perceived marketing–sales relationship effectiveness is positively influenced by managers’ perceptions of organizational justice. Furthermore, it proposes that interfunctional communication has the potential to enhance the proposed positive effects of justice and hence needs to be considered and effectively managed when looking at marketing–sales relationship effectiveness. Data drawn from a survey of 203 marketing and sales managers in 38 consumer packaged goods companies are used to empirically test these predictions. The authors find that perceived sales–marketing relationship effectiveness is influenced by perceptions of distributive, procedural and interactional justice. Greater interfunctional communication is found to further enhance the positive effects of distributive and procedural justice on perceived relationship effectiveness, but it does not contribute to the already strong positive effects of interactional justice. Furthermore, results reveal important differences in the effects of justice on perceived relationship effectiveness across the marketing and sales departments.     

Are Occupations Paid What They are Worth? An Econometric Study of Occupational Wage Inequality and Productivity

Labour economists typically assume that pay differences between occupations can be explained with variations in productivity. The empirical evidence on the validity of this assumption is surprisingly thin and subject to various potential biases. The authors use matched employer-employee panel data from Belgium for the years 1999–2006 to examine occupational productivity-wage gaps. They find that occupations play distinct roles for remuneration and productivity: while the estimations indicate a significant upward-sloping occupational wage-profile, the hypothesis of a flat productivity-profile cannot be rejected. The corresponding pattern of over- and underpayment stands up to a series of robustness tests.     

Entrepreneurship and the theory of taxation

A review of the literature on firm taxation reveals that the economics of entrepreneurship has not sufficiently been taken into consideration. We discuss how this affects conclusions derived from standard models of capital taxation when applied to entrepreneurial income. Some defining features of entrepreneurship important for analyzing the effects of taxation of owner-managed firms are identified. These include the lack of a well-functioning external market for entrepreneurial effort, limited access to external capital and complementarities between entrepreneurial innovation, effort and capital. Due to these constraints, the entrepreneurial project is tied to the individual owner–manager. The entrepreneur is unable to decouple saving decisions from investment decisions, and makes joint decisions on the supply of effort and capital. The return from successful entrepreneurial ventures can therefore not be readily divided into labor and capital income, in deep contrast to what is typically assumed in taxation theory. It is argued that when distinct attributes of entrepreneurship are taken into account, certain conclusions of capital taxation models may no longer hold, including the neutrality of capital taxation in owner-managed firms. Cost of capital formulas derived from the behavior of public firms could underestimate distortions when applied to the investment behavior of entrepreneurial firms. For tax purposes and otherwise, it becomes useful to analyze return to entrepreneurial activity as income of a distinct factor of production. In this context, conceptual issues and the difficulties of measuring entrepreneurial income are discussed.