A simple search model of money with heterogeneous agents and partial acceptability

Summary. Simple search models have equilibria where some agents accept money and others do not. We argue such equilibria should not be taken seriously. This is unfortunate if one wants a model with partial acceptability. We introduce heterogeneous agents and show partial acceptability arises naturally and robustly. There can be multiple equilibria with different degrees of acceptability. Given the type of heterogeneity we allow, the model is simple: equilibria reduce to fixed points in [0,1]. We show that with other forms of heterogeneity equilibria are fixed points in set space, and there is no method to reduce this to a problem in R¹.Received: 4 September 2002, Revised: 23 September 2002JEL Classification Numbers: C78, E40.A. Shevchenko, R. Wright: We thank seminar participants at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Indiana University, Purdue University, University of Toronto, the 2002 Midwest Macroeconomics Conference at Vanderbilt University, and the 2001 Conference on Economic Dynamics at the University of Essex. The National Science Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland provided financial support. Braz Ministerio de Camargo and Gabriel Camera provided some helpful suggestions. Correspondence to: R. Wright     

Family Firms

We present a model of succession in a firm owned and managed by its founder. The founder decides between hiring a professional manager or leaving management to his heir, as well as on what fraction of the company to float on the stock exchange. We assume that a professional is a better manager than the heir, and describe how the founder's decision is shaped by the legal environment. This theory of separation of ownership from management includes the Anglo‐Saxon and the Continental European patterns of corporate governance as special cases, and generates additional empirical predictions consistent with cross‐country evidence.     

Liability of Foreignness of Emerging Market Firms: The Country of Origin Effect on Russian IT Companies

Foreign subsidiaries are considered to be at a disadvantage compared to domestic firms in foreign markets. The liability of foreignness (LOF) concept was first attempted in order to address the issue of these disadvantages. Although internationalization of emerging market firms (EMFs) is a very hot topic, there is very little research of LOF of EMFs. In this article, we investigate the sources of LOF and determine the extent of the country-of-origin (COO) effect on Russian IT firms. We also discuss how Russian firms may overcome the LOF, and we propose the mitigation strategies that will help them to decrease negative COO effect.     

Private credit in 129 countries

We investigate cross-country determinants of private credit, using new data on legal creditor rights and private and public credit registries in 129 countries. Both creditor protection through the legal system and information-sharing institutions are associated with higher ratios of private credit to gross domestic product, but the former is relatively more important in the richer countries. An analysis of legal reforms shows that credit rises after improvements in creditor rights and in information sharing. Creditor rights are remarkably stable over time, contrary to the hypothesis that legal rules are converging. Finally, legal origins are an important determinant of both creditor rights and information-sharing institutions. The analysis suggests that public credit registries, which are primarily a feature of French civil law countries, benefit private credit markets in developing countries.     

Corporate Ownership Around the World

We use data on ownership structures of large corporations in 27 wealthy economies to identify the ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms. We find that, except in economies with very good shareholder protection, relatively few of these firms are widely held, in contrast to Berle and Means's image of ownership of the modern corporation. Rather, these firms are typically controlled by families or the State. Equity control by financial institutions is far less common. The controlling shareholders typically have power over firms significantly in excess of their cash flow rights, primarily through the use of pyramids and participation in management.     

Macroeconomic Announcements and the Distribution of Price-Endings in the U.S. Treasury Market

We investigate how new information impacts quote clustering in the bond market. We find that clustering, along with quote activity, price volatility and bid-ask spreads, increases sharply in the minutes following releases of macroeconomic news. Each returns to near-normal levels within the hour. Effects are strongest for more liquid on-the-run notes and for the announcements typically associated with substantial information flow. The strong positive comovement of clustering, quote activity, price volatility, and bid-ask spreads supports the conclusion that innovations of these variables are endogenous to the arrival and incorporation of information into prices.     

Examining the Patterns of Goodwill Impairments in Europe and the US

We examine the patterns of goodwill impairments in Europe and in the US over the period from 2006 to 2015, for a sample of more than 35,000 firm-year observations. We define the timeliness of goodwill impairments as the frequency of accounting impairments conditional to indications of economic impairments. We measure indications of economic impairment with three metrics: equity market value minus equity book value less than goodwill, market-to-book smaller than one and negative earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA). Our research strategy leads us to draw very different conclusions than those in the recent EFRAG (2016) study. While median levels of goodwill on the books between US and European firms are relatively similar, we find several indications that US firms recognise timelier impairments, at least during 2008 and 2009, that is, the early years of the financial crisis. We further document that US impairers write down a much greater percentage of their beginning balance of goodwill than European impairers. During the financial crisis, the median level of impairment by US firms was 63% of opening goodwill in 2008 and 40% in 2009, whereas median European write-downs were only 6% and 7% of opening goodwill, respectively. Even though European firms are more likely to impair over multiple years, the cumulative impairments never come close to the level of US firms, be it in a single year or cumulative over multiple years. We also find that the frequency of accounting impairment is small compared to the number of firms presenting evidence of economic impairment: only 20–25% of firms recognise impairments depending on the measure of economic impairment. This has often been interpreted by academics as a sign of untimely write-offs. Accounting differences between US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and International Financial Reporting Standards are unlikely to explain our results. One caveat of our analysis is that it does not allow us to draw conclusions on whether the observed differences between US and European firms are driven by differences in conditional conservatism and/or big bath accounting practices.     

Do Institutions Cause Growth?

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that (a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, (b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and (c) subsequently improve their political institutions.     

Exclusivity and Control

We model competition between content distributors (platforms) for content providers, and show that whether or not content is exclusive or “multihomes” depends crucially on whether or not content providers maintain control over their own pricing to consumers: if content providers sell their content outright and relinquish control, they will tend to be exclusive; on the other hand, if content providers maintain control and only “affiliate” with platforms, then multihoming is sustainable in equilibrium. We show that the outcome under affiliation depends on the tradeoff between platform rent extraction (which increases in exclusivity) and content rent extraction (which increases in multihoming), and demonstrate that the propensity for exclusivity can be increasing, decreasing, or even nonmonotonic in content quality. Finally, if a content provider internalizes the effect of its own price on platform demand, we prove that a platform that already has exclusive access to content may prefer to relinquish control over content pricing to the content provider in order to reduce price competition at the platform level.     

Finding a Civilisational Idea: “West,” Eurasia,” and “Euro-East” in Russia's Foreign Policy

Civilisations are imagined, ratherm than real, and nations undergoing identity crises typically represent themselves through multiple civilisational visions. Scholars of geopolitics can hardly understand foreign policy without analysing those visions and social contexts, in which they rise and fall. This article selects for analysis three distinct civilisational ideas of Russia – “West,” “Eurasia” and “Euro-East” – associated with Boris Yeltsin, Yevgeni Primakov and Vladimir Putin, respectively. Russia's foreign policy is best understood as reflecting those civilisational ideas rather than merely material power conditions.