The convertibility of the rouble

Conclusion After a relatively long period of discussion, characterised by an uncertain approach towards transition, the Soviet authorities are now moving with decision towards the market. This statement applies to the reform as a whole and in particular to convertibility.The convertibility process in the Soviet Union started from a relatively unfavourable position: not only because of the complete (internal and external) inconvertibility of the Rouble, but also because the country's past displays a sort of structural propensity towards inconvertibility.It took the Soviet authorities some years to dismiss the doctrine of a parallel currency and the idea that convertibility is the final step of the transition. Recent legislative production in the Soviet Union (in particular the Banking law and the Currency law) are a good sign that they are proceeding in the right direction and practical experience seems to confirm this statement.In 1991 the process has accelerated and more important progress was made towards unification of the exchange rates and the creation of a currency market: these are two steps which are fundamental for achieving partial external convertibility (current account operations made by non-residents), which in its turn is the first step towards broader convertibility. Probably within the end of the year external partial convertibility will be reached. This at last will increase the foreign contribution to the Soviet economy, thus improving domestic conditions. The events of August 1991 will most likely further accelerate the pace of the process, which is now without doubt irreversible.Even if qualitatively positive results are achieved in the reform process however, great effort must still be made not only to complete and consolidate these results, but also to proceed further towards internal and financial convertibility.     

Shareholders’ agreements and voting power: evidence from Italian listed firms

This work provides an empirical investigation of shareholders’ agreements signed in Italy over the past decade. The evidence shows that agreements produce a remarkable reshuffling of voting power (Shapley value) among participants. In particular, the first owner gains much voting power at low levels of ownership concentration, and his gain is decreasing in his ownership stake; the opposite happens for the other participants. In addition, the likelihood that a supermajority rule is included in an agreement contract is increasing in the first owner's share of equity. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that agreements are used to correct situations where the first owner's power is at one of the two extremes: either too low (leading to insufficient monitoring over managers and gridlocks in decision-making) or too high (enabling him to extract large private benefits of control).     

Export price adjustments under financial constraints

Exploiting data on the product‐destination‐level transactions of a large panel of Italian firms, we provide evidence that financial constraints affect price variation across exporters. Constrained exporters charge higher prices than do unconstrained firms that export to the same product‐destination market. This pattern is the result of a two‐fold effect. Distressed firms pass on their higher production costs through prices. However, they also charge higher mark‐ups. We explain this evidence referring to models in which rival firms produce different brands of the same product for customers with significant switching costs and producers face capital market imperfections when they need external financing. Our empirical investigations corroborate this explanation: price gaps are higher when switching costs or other forms of demand rigidity are expected to be more relevant.     

A Meta-Analytic Examination of Realistic Job Preview Effectiveness: A Test of Three Counterintuitive Propositions

We present a model of realistic job previews (RJPs) and, using separate meta-analyses, examine three counterintuitive hypotheses about their operation. We found modest support for two of the three hypotheses. Findings indicate that RJPs reduce the rate of job acceptance among persons with prior exposure to the job and increase the rate of job acceptance among persons with no prior exposure to the job. Results also indicate that RJPs can be more effective in reducing turnover if the organization is able to restrict the exit of new employees for a period of time after the RJP. Finally, RJPs show a pattern of being more effective in reducing turnover after longer periods of time following administration of the RJP; however, this pattern failed to reach conventional significance levels.     

A re-examination of the “zero is enough” hypothesis in the emergence of financial stylized facts

In recent years, a growing literature has claimed that the market microstructure is sufficient to generate the so-called stylized facts without any reference to the behaviour of market players. Indeed, qualitative stylized-facts can be generated with zero-intelligence traders (ZITs) but we stress that they are without any quantitative predictive power. In this paper we show that in most of the cases, such qualitative stylized facts hide unrealistic price motions at the intraday level and ill-calibrated return processes as well. To generate realistic price motions and return series with adequate quantitative values is out-of-reach using pure ZIT populations. To do so, one must increasingly constrain agents?? choices to a point where it is hard to claim that their behaviour is completely random. In addition we show that even with highly constrained ZIT agents, one cannot reproduce real time series from these. Except in a few cases, first order moments of ZITs never equal real data ones. We therefore claim that stylized facts produced by means of ZIT agents are useless for financial engineering.     

Environmental degradation,self-protection choices and coordination failures in a North–South evolutionary model

Environmental degradation may lead agents to increase their work effort to replace the consumption of depleted free access environmental goods with that of private substitute goods. The rise in the activity level that follows may further deplete the environment, which in turn increases the production and consumption of substitute goods. Using a North–South evolutionary model, we show that the existence of a coordination failure among interacting heterogeneous agents may lead the economy towards Pareto-dominated attracting stationary states where individuals work and produce “too much” (i.e. more than socially optimal). Finally, we analyse possible welfare effects of transferring the environmental impact of Northern production to the South and show that such a policy may decrease welfare in both hemispheres.