Competition, cooperation, and the neighboring farmer effect

In this paper we propose a model that explains how cooperation can emerge spontaneously between firms in a highly competitive market environment. The basic idea is that the more competitive is the market, the less costly it is for firms to help each other like good neighbors. Cooperation takes the form of sharing technical know-how, which speeds up the adoption of new technologies (normally developed elsewhere) that spur industrial development. The model comports with the development history of Japan's first example of successful industrial development – its cotton spinning industry – whose conditions match those of firms in small open economies today.     

Fundamentals, the exchange rate and prospects for the current and future EU enlargements: evidence from Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey

We analyze the link between macroeconomic fundamentals and exchange rate dynamics in two new and two potential EU member states: Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and Turkey. Given the different institutional settings of the exchange rate market in the countries of interest, we follow two different modelling strategies. For Romania and Turkey, we evaluate possible exchange rate misalignments based on a monetary model of exchange rate determination. In the case of Bulgaria and Croatia, with currency board and narrow-band peg arrangements against the euro, we discuss possible exit strategies and quantitatively assess the effects of the peg arrangements by means of simulation.

Rural-to-urban migration, human capital, and agglomeration

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban dwellers in equilibrium. Various measures aimed at curtailing rural-to-urban migration by unskilled workers can lead to a Pareto improvement for both the urban and rural dwellers. In addition, the government can raise social welfare by reducing the migration of skilled workers to the city. Moreover, without a restriction on rural-to-urban migration, a government's efforts to increase educational expenditure and thereby the number of skilled workers may not increase wage rates in the rural or urban areas.     

Decentralized trade, random utility and the evolution of social welfare

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. The processes are affected by persistent random shocks stemming from agents’ maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term—logit distribution—one is able to calculate exactly the stationary distribution of the perturbed Markov process for any level of noise. We show that the stationary distribution places the largest probability on the maximizers of weighted sums of the agents’ (intrinsic) utilities, and this probability tends to 1 as noise vanishes.     

中小民营企业融资创新研究：融资路径依赖与内生性契约构建

中小民营企业融资难问题的实质是中小民营企业不能在较高层次的货币市场和资本市场上如愿地获得资金支持。目前解决中小民营企业融资难问题的关键在于,创新金融制度安排,构建一种能够使外部投资者与中小民营企业建立起横向信用联系的内生性融资契约。在我国既有的金融契约框架下,通过适当的融资结构设计和制度安排,信托私募融资能够最小化中小民营企业融资的代理成本和信息成本,从而使中小民营企业能够沿着既有的融资路径有效地获得所需的资金。     

Economies of scale in the Australian tourism industry

The measurement of economies of scale in the tourism industry has not been done to this point, as tourism is not a specific industry according to international statistical standards. Among many industries related to tourism, four sectors (accommodation, transport, retail trade and recreational services) across six states and two territories from 1997 to 2007 are studied as they contribute nearly 70% of tourism output in Australia. By comparing regression results from the Cobb–Douglas (C–D) production function and the translog production function, we find that there is evidence of increasing returns in transport, retail trade and recreational services at the industry level. However, accommodation is characterized by constant returns to scale at the industry level. As accommodation is responsible for the biggest share of tourism output, this suggests that overall the tourism sector is not characterized by increasing returns. We also find that the degrees of returns to scale from the C–D and translog production functions are different and that the imposition of input share also influences the empirical results. Both of these factors stress the importance of model specification to the measurement of economies of scale.     

Oil windfall,public spending and price stability: modelling inflation in Chad

This article examines the determinants of inflation in Chad using quarterly data from 1983:Q1 to 2009:Q3. The analysis is based on a single-equation model, completed by a Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model to capture inflation persistence. The results show that the main determinants of inflation in Chad are rainfall, foreign prices, exchange rate movements and particularly public spending, which soared following the onset of oil production in 2003. The effects of rainfall shocks and changes in foreign prices on inflation persist during six quarters. Changes in public spending and the nominal exchange rate affect inflation during three and four quarters, respectively.     

Economic uncertainty and corruption: evidence from a large cross-country data set

A vast amount of research has considered numerous causes and correlates of corruption. Also, there have been many studies of the consequences of various forms of uncertainty. However, exploration of the nexus between economic uncertainty and corruption appears scarce. After providing an intuitive and heuristic linkage between general economic uncertainty and corruption, this article uses a large cross-country data set to augment a fairly standard model with simple proxies for uncertainty and to investigate how economic uncertainty might affect the prevalence of corruption. In addition, a quantile-regression framework is used to judge how the strength of various covariates may differ with the level of corruption. Seven main points emerge from the estimates. First, economic uncertainty is associated positively with corruption, and the relation seems to be robust across measures of uncertainty and corruption. Second, quantile-regression estimates indicate considerable parametric heterogeneity across the distribution of corruption. Third, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita has the expected corruption-mitigating role. Fourth, increased political rights and civil liberties also appear to lower corruption. Fifth, greater government consumption is associated with lower corruption. Sixth, while the hyperinflation dummy lacks significance in most OLS regressions, its significance varies across the distribution of corruption. Seventh, neither police force nor government subsidies shows significance, but transition economies have more corruption.     

A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis of International Reserves

Using data from more than 100 economies for the period of 1975 to 2005, we conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the determinants of international reserve holdings. Four groups of determinants, namely, traditional macro variables, financial variables, institutional variables, and dummy variables that control for individual economies’ characteristics are considered. We find that the relationship between international reserves and their determinants is significantly different between developed and developing economies and is not stable over time. The estimation results indicate that, especially during the recent period, a developed economy tends to hold a lower level of international reserves than a developing one. Furthermore, there is only limited evidence that East Asian economies including China and Japan are accumulating an excessive amount of international reserves.     

External Constraint and Financial Crises with Balance Sheet Effects

This article investigates the dynamic implications of Krugman's (1999 Krugman, P. 1999. Balance sheets, the transfer problem, and financial crises. International Tax and Public Finance, 6(4): 459–472. (doi:10.1023/A:1008741113074)[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) model of financial crises with balance-sheet effects, which has a considerable impact on the literature of international financial crisis. Considering explicitly the wealth-accumulation constraint and the external equilibrium condition, I describe an emerging-market financial crisis as a jump from an unstable dynamic trajectory to a stable one, instead of a jump from a ‘good’ to a ‘bad’ equilibrium with zero investment and zero foreign debt. By discriminating the financial crises according to the severity of the negative impacts of some internal and external factors, this article also adds some insights into the anti-crisis policy.