Outsourcing and structural change. Application to a set of OECD countries

The examination in this paper aims to bridge outsourcing and structural change analyses in order to obtain more accurate insights into the extent of outsourcing and to extract more reliable policy recommendations for dealing with its effects. We do this by applying a ‘battery’ of outsourcing measurements to a group of OECD countries from 1980 to the mid 1990s. Expected results (e.g. the idiosyncratic outsourcing patterns of the UK) are confirmed on a more systematic and comparable basis, while original results (e.g. the low integration of business services in manufacturing in the former socialist economies) are based on the exploitation of new data.     

Sources of business fluctuations: Financial or technology shocks?

Despite the widespread belief that technology shocks are the main source of business fluctuations, recent empirical studies indicate that in the absence of financial frictions, a shock to the marginal efficiency of investment is the main source and is closely related to financial conditions for investment. We incorporate a financial accelerator mechanism and two types of financial shocks to the external finance premium and net worth in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with shocks to the marginal efficiency of investment, the investment-good price markup, and the rates of neutral and investment-specific technological changes. This model is estimated using eleven US time series that include data on loan, net worth, the loan rate, and the relative price of investment. Our estimation results show that the (non-stationary) neutral and investment-specific technology shocks primarily drive output and investment fluctuations, while the external finance premium shock plays an important role for investment fluctuations. This financial shock induced substantial falls and subsequent sharp hikes in the external finance premium and caused boom–bust cycles over the past two decades.     

Truthful germs are contagious: A local-to-global characterization of truthfulness

We study the question of which social choice functions from an abstract type space to a set of outcomes are truthful, i.e., implementable by truthful mechanisms, when utilities are quasi-linear. For convex domains, our main theorem characterizes truthful social choice functions as those satisfying two properties: local weak monotonicity and vortex-freeness. The first of these constrains the function values at any two sufficiently proximal points, while the second asserts that its line integrals around sufficiently small triangular loops must vanish.The characterization implies a local-to-global principle that allows one to deduce truthfulness of a function from its behavior on arbitrarily small neighborhoods of each point. Other consequences include a simple alternate derivation of the Saks–Yu Theorem that weak monotonicity characterizes truthfulness of functions having a convex domain and finite range, and a sufficient condition for constructing truthful functions by “stitching together” truthful subfunctions on different subsets of the domain.     

Wealth effects and agency costs

We analyze how the agent's initial wealth affects the principal's expected profits in the standard principal–agent model with moral hazard.We show that if the principal prefers a poorer agent for all specifications of action sets, probability distributions, and disutility of effort, then the agent's utility of income must exhibit a coefficient of absolute prudence less than three times the coefficient of absolute risk aversion for all levels of income, thus strengthening the sufficiency result of Thiele and Wambach (1999). Also, we prove that there is no condition on the agent's utility of income alone that will make the principal prefer richer agents. Moreover, we show that, for an interesting class of problems, the principal prefers a relatively poorer agent if agent's wealth is sufficiently large. Finally, we discuss how alternative ways of modeling the agent's outside option affects the principal's preferences for agent's wealth.     

Premium auctions and risk preferences: An experimental study

In premium auctions, the highest losing bidder receives a reward from the seller. This paper studies the private value English premium auction (EPA) for different risk attitudes of bidders. We explicitly derive the symmetric equilibrium for bidders with CARA utilities and conduct an experimental study to test the theoretical predictions. In our experiment, subjects are sorted into risk-averse and risk-loving groups. We find that revenues in the EPA are significantly higher when bidders are risk loving rather than risk averse. These results are partly consistent with theory and confirm the general view that bidders' risk preferences constitute an important factor that affects bidding behavior and consequently also the seller's expected revenue. However, individual subjects rarely follow the equilibrium strategy and revenue in our experiment is lower than in the symmetric equilibrium.     

China–US trade: implications on conflicts

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine various aspects of China’s trade, the U.S.’ trade, and the bilateral trade between the two countries. The analysis of each aspect has direct and indirect implications on trade conflicts between the two countries. We focus on important factors, such as the growth of trade, import penetration, increased competitiveness of Chinese firms, comparative advantages of Chinese goods, China’s WTO entry and its compliance, and bilateral trade imbalance. While each of the factors can lead to trade frictions, individual factors will not have led to a large-scale trade war. These factors converge within a brief period and thus can be considered the China shock, thereby making other countries’ adjustments to their economic structures difficult. Therefore, trade frictions are inevitable.     

On the asymmetric impact of macro–variables on volatility

We extend the GARCH–MIDAS model to take into account possible different impacts from positive and negative macroeconomic variations on financial market volatility: a Monte Carlo simulation which shows good properties of the estimator with realistic sample sizes. The empirical application is performed on the daily S&P500 volatility dynamics with the U.S. monthly industrial production and national activity index as additional (signed) determinants. We estimate the Relative Marginal Effect of macro variable movements on volatility at different lags. In the out-of-sample analysis, our proposed GARCH–MIDAS model not only statistically outperforms the competing specifications (GARCH, GJR-GARCH and GARCH–MIDAS models), but shows significant utility gains for a mean-variance investor under different risk aversion parameters. Attention to robustness is given by choosing different samples and estimating the model in an international context (six different stock markets).     

Are high–frequency traders informed?

Are high–frequency traders (HFTs) informed? To address this question, we examine HFTs' activity in the call auction environment, where speed-related trading is limited and signal processing capacity becomes more relevant. To model the call market, we consider the Kyle (1989) rational expectations framework for strategic trading. The test we propose for detecting informed HFTs in this market assesses potential deviations of the informativeness of HFTs' aggregate (net) demand, from the informativeness of the aggregate demand submitted by the rest of the traders. Data from the Euronext Paris preopening phase indicate that informed HFTs are present in the market just before the opening. Our results provide useful guidance for the assessment of the influence of HFTs’ quotes on price quality, an important issue for market regulators and policy makers.     

The shared environmental responsibility principle: new developments applied to the case of marine ecosystems

Estuaries provide advantageous sites for both harbors and fish habitats. In many countries, harbor expansion in estuaries contributed to the decline of fish populations with impacts at the global scale. Restoring these habitats is important to prevent a global biodiversity crisis but is costly and potentially unaffordable for polluters under the Polluter Pays Principle. Such affordability issues prompt decision-makers to reduce environmental targets of restoration programs. Harbor infrastructures destroy fish habitats but generate benefits for society and contribute to the public interest, raising some questions on who is responsible for environmental degradations and who can afford environmental restoration costs? One way to allocate restoration costs is to analyze the amount of harbor services consumed by economic sectors. This paper addresses these questions by computing burden sharing scenarios with an input–output matrix. These scenarios are simulated under the shared responsibility principle to distribute restoration costs among stakeholders in the Seine estuary, France.     

Energy and CO2 emission relationships in the NAFTA trading bloc: a multi-regional multi-factor energy input–output approach

The North-America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has brought together the economies of Canada, Mexico, and the US into forming one of the largest trading blocs worldwide (within the top CO₂ emitters). However, the current global protectionist discourse threatens the agreement. This paper analyzes the energy and energy-related CO₂ emission relationships between NAFTA countries in 2014 to gain insights into the climate change implications of current integration and the possible cancelation of the agreement. The analysis is performed with a multi-regional version of the multi-factor energy input–output model. The results show that NAFTA has not built a single integrated energy system, though it has helped reduce energy-related CO₂ emissions. Moreover, if NAFTA is not revoked, further integration would depend on the capacity of the Mexican energy sector to converge to the performance of its trade partners’ energy sectors. Conversely, a broken deal would induce negative environmental externalities.