Internal labour markets in the Australian banking industry: their nature prior to the Second World War and their recent decline

This paper uses evidence from late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century personnel records of two Australian banks to examine the nature of internal labour markets prior to the Second World War. It is argued that the industry possessed all the classic features of internal labour markets: limited ports of entry, internal promotion, long careers, and assignment of wages by well-defined rules. The paper then examines the reasons why banks adopted internal labour markets. Finally, the paper examines the recent decline of internal labour markets and examines the role of technological and social changes in this decline.     

The Small Business Capital Market Behavior in Athens Stock Exchange

Financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially business investments and growth, is a composite and particular complicated affair in the Greek entrepreneurial reality. This paper examines the significance of secondary capital markets, as an alternative source of financing small-medium enterprises’ new entrepreneurial plans. Cointegration technique is applied to test the relationship between the secondary capital market and the dominant sectors in Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). Causality tests are also used to provide evidence on the existence of interdependence between the cointegrated series. The results indicate that there is significant uni-directional causality between primary and secondary capital market in Greece, enhancing us to suggest valuable policy implications.      

Rent, risk, and replication: Preference adaptation in winner-take-all markets

We study the evolution of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent-seeking contest. We assume that agents behave rationally given their preferences, but that the population distribution of preferences evolves over time in response to material payoffs. We show that, in particular, initial distributions with full support converge to stationary states where all types are still present. Although rents are perfectly dissipated in material terms at a steady state, efficiency is greater than if everybody had been risk neutral, since risk lovers specialize in rent seeking.     

On optimality in intergenerational risk sharing

Summary. This paper defines and studies optimality in a dynamic stochastic economy with finitely lived agents, and investigates the optimality properties of an equilibrium with or without sequentially complete markets. Various Pareto optimality concepts are considered, including interim and ex ante optimality. We show that, at an equilibrium with a productive asset (land) and sequentially complete markets, the intervention of a government may be justified, but only to improve risk sharing between generations. If markets are incomplete, constrained interim optimality is investigated in two-period lived OLG economies. We extend the optimality properties of an equilibrium with land and give conditions under which introducing a pay-as-you-go system at an equilibrium would not lead to any Pareto improvement. Received: October 5, 1998; revised version: April 3, 2001     

Computing equilibria of GEI by relocalization on a Grassmann manifold

An algorithm is described to compute equilibria of the general economic model with incomplete asset markets, that is, of GEI. The algorithm is based on the existence of a route of zeros of a homotopy whose domain includes the price simplex and a Grassmann Manifold. This route is followed, in effect, by localizing and following diffeomorphic pieces in Euclidean space, and by relocalizing as is necessary.     

Research notes and communications first-mover effects in multiple dynamic markets

A study of first-mover effects in semi-submersible oil-drilling suggests that first-entrants in international markets maintain higher market share after controlling for market localization and life cycle. Examining only surviving entrants at a point in time inflates this pioneering-market share relationship. Pioneering has an inter-market effect on market share, greater than the intra-market effect. Multinational firms may use market pioneering to resist localization pressures and enhance survival in foreign markets. The study suggests the importance of careful first-mover identification and market definition, a wider examination of first-mover effects over multiple markets, and control for measurement timing.     

Designing Optimal Crop Revenue Insurance

When the indemnity schedule is contingent on the farmer's price and individual yield, an optimal crop revenue insurance contract depends only on the farmer's gross revenue. However, this design is not efficient if, as is the case with available contracts, the coverage function is based on imperfect estimators of individual yield and/or price. The producer's degree of prudence and the extent of basis risks have important influences on the optimal indemnity schedule. In this broader context, optimal protection is not provided by available U.S. crop insurance contracts and may include combinations of revenue insurance, yield insurance, futures, and options contracts.     

Consumption and stock markets in Asian economies

This paper investigates the causal links between stock market performance and consumption for five Asian economies by applying the bound tests of Pesaran et al. and lag augmented VAR of Toda and Yamamoto . We find two‐way causal relationships between stock market performance and consumption in the cases of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the long run. The existence of such two‐way causal links indicates that stock market performance and consumption mutually affect each other, implying that the previous studies may have overestimated the wealth effect of the stock markets without taking account of the reverse causation from consumption to the stock markets. The short‐run effect of the stock market on consumption is more visible than the long‐run effect in most of the sample economies, suggesting that changes in consumption directly reflect stock market fluctuations.     

利用上市公司资源,加快重庆资本市场发展

通过对重庆市上市公司最新基本情况、统计数据、市场表现等资料的整理,及与兄弟省市市场的对比,剖析了重庆资本市场落后的根源,探索了加快重庆资本市场发展的途径.     

OPTIONS AND EFFICIENCY IN MULTIDATE SECURITY MARKETS

This paper extends the work of Ross (1976; Q. J. Econ. (90)1, 75–89) to multidate security markets. First, we show that if a primitive security separates states at the terminal date, then there exist multiperiod European options on that security generating dynamically complete markets. Second, we show that if a primitive security conditionally separates states at the terminal date, then there exist multiperiod European options on that security generating generically dynamically complete markets provided that certain conditions hold. Third, we show that there are economies for which the minimum number of multiperiod European options on a primitive security generating generically dynamically complete markets is relatively large. Finally, we show that in these economies, a relatively small number of multiperiod European options on possibly different portfolio strategies of primitive securities generates generically dynamically complete markets.