Are UK technology-based small firms still finance constrained?

This paper examines funding issues for UK Technology-based Small Firms (TBSFs). TBSFs are the cry of today and UK government like other countries is trying to increase the mass of TBSFs by various means. However, it is reported that TBSFs face many impediments to their successful development. Finance is believed as the main barrier at the early stages of TBSFs development. This paper is attempting to follow up and report if the funding situation for UK TBSFs has improved. The findings reported in this paper suggest that nearly 80% sample firms were finance constrained at the early stages of business development.     

Can innovation shocks determine CO2 emissions (CO2e) in the OECD economies? A new perspective

ABSTRACT

This study has attempted to address prior knowledge gaps in the environmental economics literature by integrating the innovation shocks into the Environment Kuznets Curve (EKC) equation for twenty-six OECD economies using data from 1990 to 2014. Foreign direct investment (FDI), exports (EXP), renewable energy consumption (REC), and GDP per capita were included as control variables. The results from multiple empirical analyses indicated that positive shocks to innovation improve, but the negative shocks disrupt environmental quality. Data analyses also showed that a positive correlation exists between income per capita of OECD economies. From the negative coefficient of income per capita (squared) and the existence of a negative nexus between FDI and CO2e, both the EKC and the Pollution Halo Hypothesis (PHH) were confirmed in sampled economies, respectively. The paper offers empirical support for the favourable impacts of REC on the quality of the environment and calls for the adoption of innovation shocks as a policy instrument to formulate better environmental policies for a sustainable future.     

Environmental Implications of Agricultural Externality: Policy for Socially Optimal Output

Journal of Quantitative Economics - Agriculture externality is caused not only by the presence of a hydrological contamination (a state variable) but also by the method of application of...     

Family networks and school enrolment: Evidence from a randomized social experiment

We present evidence on whether and how a household's behavior is influenced by the presence and characteristics of its extended family. Using data from the PROGRESA program in Mexico, we exploit information on the paternal and maternal surnames of heads and spouses in conjunction with the Spanish naming convention to identify the inter- and intra-generational family links of each household to others in the same village. We then exploit the randomized research design of the PROGRESA evaluation data to identify whether the treatment effects of PROGRESA transfers on secondary school enrolment vary according to the characteristics of extended family. We find PROGRESA only raises secondary enrolment among households that are embedded in a family network. Eligible but isolated households do not respond. The mechanism through which the extended family influences household schooling choices is the redistribution of resources within the family network from eligibles that receive de facto unconditional cash transfers from PROGRESA, towards eligibles on the margin of enrolling children into secondary school.     

Technical efficiency relative to a stochastic cost frontier for the England and Wales dairy sector

It has been acknowledged in the literature that productive efficiency in grain production in China has substantially improved in the post-reform period, particularly in the early 1980s. Since then, there have been several policy changes in China, which have affected the growth of the sector. Specifically, the spectacular growth of rural industries has attracted significant physical and human capital from agriculture. It is in this context that Brown's warning of China soon becoming the world's number one importer of grain has raised an important question of whether China has reached its grain production potential. Analysis of the 1994 farm household survey data indicates that the majority of the sample farmers is reasonably technically efficient in grain production but that productivity can be increased further even with the existing technology.     

An analysis of India's reform dynamics

One important area of development that needs urgent attention in developing countries is poverty alleviation. Urban poverty in India, as in some other countries, is a spillover of rural poverty and about 65% of the labour force is still working in the agricultural sector. To that extent, this paper, though it does not provide a numerical magnitude of poverty per se, advocates policies directly targeting the agricultural sector to reduce poverty. The policy conclusion is that promoting investment and technological progress, along with efficient use of technology in agriculture, are central to reducing poverty.     

Herding behaviour and the declining value relevance of accounting information: evidence from an emerging stock market

This article sheds light on the underlying mechanisms behind the changes in the value relevance of accounting information in the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) during the 1999–2010 period. We find that neither changes in earnings quality nor the earnings lack of timeliness hypothesis can explain the decline in the value relevance of accounting information in the KSE. Based on the stylized facts associated with the growth of the KSE and the broader economics literature, we argue that the reduction in the explanatory power of accounting information vis-à-vis stock returns was caused by herding behaviour. Empirical estimates from state-space model of herding behaviour confirm the existence of herding, and we find that the value relevance of accounting information is significantly lower in periods characterized by herding behaviour. This article is also amongst the first attempts to empirically demonstrate that an expansionary monetary policy and increases in foreign portfolio investment lead to increased levels of herding.     

Finite sample properties of maximum likelihood estimator in spatial models

We investigate the finite sample properties of the maximum likelihood estimator for the spatial autoregressive model. A stochastic expansion of the score function is used to develop the second-order bias and mean squared error of the maximum likelihood estimator. We show that the results can be expressed in terms of the expectations of cross products of quadratic forms, or ratios of quadratic forms in a normal vector which can be evaluated using the top order invariant polynomial. Our numerical calculations demonstrate that the second-order behaviors of the maximum likelihood estimator depend on the degree of sparseness of the weights matrix.     

DID Japanese main banks improve the technical efficiencies of their non-financial client firms in the 1980s?

This paper tests the hypothesis that the Japanese main bank system was not effective in enhancing technical efficiency in the non-financial corporate sector in the 1980s. Technical efficiency is defined as the ratio of a firm's actual to its potential output for given input levels and technology. During the eighties, it did not improve consistently and significantly in Japanese manufacturing firms which have close ties to a main bank.     

The Impact of Fraudulent False Information on Equity Values

There are two types of stock price manipulation examined in the theoretical literature: (1) insider trading, which involves private information that is true and (2) the public spreading of fraudulent false information. While there is a large empirical literature on insider trading, this is the first empirical article to examine the impact of false, fraudulent public information on stock prices and trading volume. We find that such false information, even after being denied by a credible source such as the SEC, generates both abnormal returns and abnormal trading volume. We also find that the effects of the false information on security returns and volume can be persistent for at least 2 weeks. In addition, we show that perpetrators of false news attacks can make potentially large profits from such market manipulations.