‘Communities of resistance’ and the use of newspaper discussion boards: Polish workers in Japanese foreign investments

This article examines the content of 200 posts on newspaper discussion boards by workers in a cluster of Japanese foreign investments in Poland. The conclusions are first, that the material experiences of workers generate a set of themes in relation to the labour process with regard to wages and working conditions, bullying and monitoring that exhibit similarities across countries. Second, we argue that an analysis of the discourse used is shaped by political and institutional conditions, which reveal national differences in how workers perceive and locate their exploitation. Finally, in relation to debates about workers’ resistance and the use of the Internet we argue that the interaction of themes related to the material experience of work are intertwined with institutionally embedded understandings of exploitation, which not only enable a shared framework for venting, but also provide the basis for a community of resistance.     

Bond finance,bank credit,and aggregate fluctuations in an open economy

Corporate sectors in emerging markets have noticeably increased their reliance on foreign financing, presumably reflecting low global interest rates. The evidence also shows a rebalancing from bank loans towards bonds. To study these developments, we develop a dynamic open economy model where these modes of finance are determined endogenously. The model replicates the stylized facts following a drop in world interest rates; in particular, rebalancing towards bonds occurs because bank credit becomes relatively more expensive, reflecting the scarcity of bank equity. More generally, the model is suitable for studying interactions between modes of finance and the macroeconomy.     

外资进入、竞争与性别就业差异

在中国性别就业差异持续扩大的背景下，文章基于2004-2007年的中国工业企业数据库检验了外资进入是如何通过竞争效应对企业性别就业差异产生影响的。结果显示，外资进入程度越高的地区与行业具有越低的性别就业差异，外资进入程度每增加1%，我国内资企业女性就业份额将会增加0.0407%，且这一结果在考虑了抽样偏倚、不同外资范围的界定、使用不同外资进入程度衡量标准和控制内生性后依然十分稳健。进一步的研究显示，外资进入通过提高企业面临的竞争程度来促使以利润最大化为目标的企业雇佣更多成本较低的女性劳动力，进而降低性别就业差异。更为重要的是，外资进入产生的竞争效应对于性别差异的影响在不同受教育群体之间存在差异，其对受过高等教育，特别是受过研究生以上教育的群体影响最大。文章结论表明，在经济全球化背景下完善市场竞争机制和提高女性受教育程度将有利于减少性别就业差异。此外，文章也为研究外资进入的社会经济影响提供了不一样的思路。     

Does higher government debt link to higher social expenditure? New method,new evidence

Scholars believe that higher social expenditures are usually linked with higher government debts, whereas higher debts reduce social expenditures. However, it is reasonable to speculate that higher government debt may contribute to higher social spending, while fiscal deficits occur during a recession, which commonly creates greater demand for social expenditure. For a deeper investigation, this paper revisits the dynamic relationship between social spending and public debts in the time-frequency domain, using the novel wavelet-coherency analysis as well as the phase-difference technique to derive the co-moved and causal relationships between social spending and public debts in 13 OECD countries. The evidence identifies a dynamic relationship between variables. While higher social expenditures increase government debts, the shocks from government debts to social expenditures are conversely uncertain. We discover that higher government debt does reduce social expenditures, but it may be linked to higher social spending. The robustness of partial coherency and phase-difference discovers the role of a political party in the decision over social welfare programmes in the sample countries.     

Corruption: what are the effects on government effectiveness? Empirical evidence considering developed and developing countries

This study analyses the impact of corruption on government effectiveness for a sample of 130 countries. The findings suggest that less-corrupt countries have better quality of public service, better quality in the formulation and adoption of policies and greater credibility and government's commitment to such policies. The findings also suggest that the effect of corruption on government effectiveness is higher in developed countries. Moreover, the estimates also reveal that countries with the most indebted governments and with higher inflation rates have less-efficient governments, and an increase in rule of law represents a good strategy to improve government effectiveness. In turn, regarding developing countries, the findings show that countries with more democratic regimes have a higher degree of government effectiveness.     

Stock Price Index and Exchange Rate Nexus in African Markets

This paper examines the relationship between stock price index and exchange rate in six African markets using monthly data for the period January 2007 to October 2015. A quantile regression approach is used. This methodology is shown to perform better than the ordinary least squares estimators, particularly when the conditional distribution is heterogeneous. Our empirical evidence reveals an interesting pattern in the association of these two financial markets in Africa, which shows that the negative relationship between stock and foreign exchange markets is more apparent when exchange rates are extremely low or high. The negative relationship between the two variables is in line with the portfolio balance effect.     

Sovereign debt markets in turbulent times: Creditor discrimination and crowding-out effects

In 2007, countries in the euro zone periphery were enjoying stable growth, low deficits, and low spreads. Then the financial crisis erupted and pushed them into deep recessions, raising their deficits and debt levels. By 2010, they were facing severe debt problems. Spreads increased and, surprisingly, so did the share of the debt held by domestic creditors. Credit was reallocated from the private sector to the public sector, reducing investment and deepening the recessions even further. To account for these facts, we propose a simple model of sovereign risk in which debt can be traded in secondary markets. The model has two key ingredients: creditor discrimination and crowding-out effects. Creditor discrimination arises because, in turbulent times, sovereign debt offers a higher expected return to domestic creditors than to foreign ones. This provides incentives for domestic purchases of debt. Crowding-out effects arise because private borrowing is limited by financial frictions. This implies that domestic debt purchases displace productive investment. The model shows that these purchases reduce growth and welfare, and may lead to self-fulfilling crises. It also shows how crowding-out effects can be transmitted to other countries in the euro zone, and how they may be addressed by policies at the European level.     

Household Debt Overhang and Transmission of Monetary Policy

We investigate how the level of household indebtedness affects the monetary transmission mechanism in the U.S. economy. Using state‐dependent local projection methods, we find that the effects of monetary policy are less powerful during periods of high household debt. In particular, the impact of monetary policy shocks is smaller on GDP, consumption, residential investment, house prices, and household debt during a high‐debt state. We then build a partial equilibrium model of borrower households with financial constraints to rationalize these facts. The model points to the weakening of the home equity loan channel as a possible reason for the decline in monetary policy effectiveness when initial debt levels are high.     

Political uncertainty,risk of Frexit and European sovereign spreads

Using data from a prediction market (crowd-based forecasts), we build a daily measure capturing the risk of Frexit related to the 2017 French presidential elections. We study how unexpected changes in this new measure of political uncertainty in France affect European sovereign spreads vis-à-vis Germany. We show that our uncertainty proxy drives not only the French sovereign spread but also the spreads of those EU countries deemed the most vulnerable to the risk of desegregation of the Euro Zone. These results suggest that specific political uncertainty affects short-term investor’s expectations and may outweigh other economic determinants of sovereign spreads shortly prior to high stake elections     

REDISTRIBUTIVE POLITICS AND GOVERNMENT DEBT IN A BORROWING‐CONSTRAINED ECONOMY

We develop a two‐period, three‐class of income model where low‐income agents are borrowing constrained because of capital market imperfections, and where redistributive expenditure is financed by tax and government debt. When the degree of capital market imperfection is high, there is an ends‐against‐the‐middle equilibrium where the constrained low‐income and the unconstrained high‐income agents favour low levels of government debt and redistributive expenditure; these agents form a coalition against the middle. In this equilibrium, the levels of government debt and expenditure might be below the efficient levels, and the spread of income distribution results in a lower debt‐to‐GDP ratio.