The Falsification of Four Popular Hypotheses About the Asian Crisis

Various claims have been made about the causes of the Asian crisis and its spread. Here, we use data on the behaviour of capital flows during the crisis to test the strong forms of four such hypotheses, that portfolio investors and hedge funds played a dominant role in initiating and/or spreading the crisis; that moral hazard kept efficient markets from predicting the crisis; and, finally, the common lender hypothesis of Kaminsky and Reinhart. In the process we also test implications of the Calvo-Mendoza model of rational investor ignorance. All are falsified as monocausal explanations. For example, portfolio investments that could not have been subject to substantial moral hazard continued to flow into Asia until very shortly before the crisis. Likewise, banks were a much larger source of capital outflows during the crisis than were portfolio investors. While falsified in their strongest forms, several of these hypotheses in less strong forms should play a role in a more nuanced analysis. It is necessary to move past simple single-factor approaches in order to produce a more complete, synthetic explanation of this episode.     

Immigrant earnings: age at immigration matters

A correlation between age at immigration and earnings is observed in Canadian census data. The evidence supports three underlying sources of the effect; first, work experience in the source country yields virtually no return in the host country; second, the return to education varies with age at immigration, and, finally, an 'acculturation' effect is observed for immigrants who are visible minorities or whose mother tongue is not English. Further, it is found that educational attainment, and relatedly earnings, vary systematically across age at immigration with those arriving around age 15 to 18 obtaining fewer years of education. JEL Classification: J61, J31     

Investment allocation and urbanization in socialist economic development: The case of Czechoslovakia of

This paper tests two hypotheses about economic ;fficiency of development strategies of socialist countries. The first is that they overinvest in industry and that increased investment in agriculture would increase the output growth rate. The second is that efforts to limit urbanization have enabled these countries to grow more rapidly by minimizing the need for urban-infrastructure investments. The hypotheses are tested by means of counterfactual simulations performed with an econometric model of Czechoslovakia. We find that growth would have been faster only in the long run, had more investment been directed to agriculture. Urbanization policies appeared only to control inflationary pressures.     

Consumer inertia, firm growth and industry dynamics

We develop a model of firm size, based on the hypothesis that consumers are “locked in,” because of search costs, with firms they have patronized in the past. As a consequence, older firms have a larger clientele and are able to extract higher profits. The equilibrium of this model yields: (i) A downward sloping density of firm sizes. (ii) Older firms are less likely to exit than younger firms. (iii) Larger firms spend more on R&D.