Capital Flows to Latin America (2003–17): A Critical Survey from Prebisch’s Business Cycle Theory

ABSTRACT

The economic literature on capital flows to developing countries has shared two important commonalities since the 1990s. Published works (whether they focus on the external situation or stress the domestic determinants of capital flows) tend to assume a beneficial effect of capital inflows, which leads to an improvement of peripheral institutions, whose deficiencies are ostensibly the main cause of economic turmoil and/or failure in attracting capital flows, in continuity with New Institutional Economics. In doing so, mainstream economists deliberately overlook the asymmetric characteristics of the international monetary system and the persisting hegemony of dollar. Raul Prebisch’s pioneering work on business cycles in Latin America provide an alternative view, one capable of amending the existing mainstream literature. On the one hand, Prebisch stressed the destabilizing role of capital inflows on Latin American economies, particularly short-term speculative capital. On the other hand, Prebisch designed a set of counter cyclical monetary policies in order to contrast capital volatility, particularly during downturns. An analysis of stylized facts shows that, when correctly updated, Prebisch’s theory has remarkable explanatory potential when applied to Latin America’s current economic and financial situation.     

Foreign inflows and economic growth: An emiprical study of the SAARC region

The study examines and highlights the impact of selected foreign inflows (aid, trade, FDI, debt and remittances) on the economic growth of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries. The existent literature lacks a comprehensive analysis of the SAARC countries as countries like Afghanistan, Bhutan and the Maldives have largely been ignored due to the shorter time periods of available data. The study is empirical in nature and utilizes panel data techniques on macroeconomic data for the period 2008–2015. Foreign aid and foreign direct investment are found to impact economic growth positively. Foreign debt and trade flows are found to adversely affect economic growth. No relationship is established between the flow of remittances and the economic growth of these countries. The obtained results are robust to different proxy variables and the addition of macroeconomic variables. For the first time, the study provides policy implications based on the data of all SAARC countries. The study recommends focusing on increasing the inflows of resources in the form of aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) from the developed world to achieve higher economic growth.     

Ownership discrimination and private firms financing in China

This study examines the financing/funding of private firms in China. Our results show that private firms are significantly less funded through formal financing channels such as bank loans than state-owned firms, and hence have to resort to alternative financing such as trade credit. Consistent with the theoretical expectation and literature, there is a substitution effect between trade credit and bank loans for private firms, but this effect is much weaker compared to that of state-owned firms. Moreover, while the univariate comparisons indicate that private firms obtain more notes payable than state-owned firms, the multivariate regression analyses show that the relation between bank loan and notes payable is positive and indifferent between private and state-owned firms.     

Magic mirror in my hand … How trade mirror statistics can help us detect illegal financial flows

Misreporting tricks of different sorts applied to the transfer of goods between different countries are typically exploited by criminals worldwide for money laundering ends. The main international anti‐money laundering organisations started paying attention to this phenomenon, dubbed “trade‐based money laundering” (TBML), a long time ago, but the failure to develop appropriate analytical tools has reportedly dogged preventive actions. Nonetheless, literature has widely advocated the possibility that the analysis of inconsistencies in mirrored bilateral trade data could provide some help. By building on previous contributions in the field, this work sets up a model factoring in the main structural determinants of discrepancies between mirrored data concerning Italy's 2010 to 2013 external trade at a highly detailed (6‐digit) level of goods classification for each partner country. Point estimates of freight costs are used to net each observation of the corresponding cif/fob discrepancy. The regression estimates are then deployed in order to compute TBML risk indicators at a country/4‐digit product level. Based on the indicators, rankings of countries and product lines can be compiled, which may be used for a risk‐driven search of potential illegal commercial transactions.     

It is not a flat world after all: Tax repatriation costs and cash value

US corporations have accumulated record‐high amounts of cash, and most of it is trapped in foreign accounts. This study tests the hypothesis that the marginal value of cash decreases in the presence of tax repatriation costs, as these costs are a strong indication that part of the cash is trapped abroad. Cash abroad is not readily available to the company because it is subject to an additional layer of tax before it can be used or distributed. Moreover, uncertainty surrounds the potential use of foreign cash, and research documents that firms holding high amounts of cash abroad are likely to invest in negative net present value activities. Finally, possible changes in tax regulation are an additional source of uncertainty. Consequently, foreign cash should be worth less than domestic cash. Using a large sample of US firms drawn from COMPUSTAT during the 1991–2012 period, the analysis suggests that shareholders value an extra dollar of cash at $1.086. However, this result changes dramatically when the change in cash is interacted with the tax cost of repatriating the earnings. That is, the marginal value of cash decreases significantly in the presence of tax repatriation costs, and shareholders discount cash when it is likely to be held abroad. This study contributes to the literature on cash holding by investigating whether tax repatriation costs affect the value of corporate cash. Moreover, the findings show that there are important economic consequences linked to the phenomenon of cash accumulation in foreign countries and therefore provide regulators with a sound foundation on which to take additional actions to require more disclosure of and transparency in the actual location of firms’ cash holdings.     

Free cash flow, debt-monitoring and managers' LIFO/FIFO policy choice

This paper explores the explanatory power of Jensen's free cash flow hypothesis in managers' choice of LIFO versus FIFO. The association between FCF, and choice of inventory methods is based on the assumption that there is a potential conflict of interest between managers and shareholders when LIFO is the tax minimization method and that non-value-maximizing managers of firms with the FCF problem have incentives to choose FIFO, an income increasing method, in order to increase their compensation. However, since debt can act as a monitoring device and mitigate the agency problems of FCF, managers of firms with high FCF and high debt are less likely to choose FIFO than managers of firms with high FCF and low debt. The evidence is consistent with this expectation.     

The Wealth Effect of Domestic Joint Ventures: Evidence from Taiwan

This study presents important international evidence by examining the wealth effect of domestic joint ventures by Taiwanese firms. In opposite to United States evidence, we find that announcements of domestic joint ventures by Taiwanese firms are, on average, associated with significantly negative abnormal stock returns. We also find that the stock market response to announced domestic joint ventures is significantly positively related to the announcing firms' investment opportunities, size of investment and debt ratio, and is significantly negatively related to the business relatedness variable. In contrast, free cash flow, firm size, relative firm size and managerial ownership are found to have no significant power in explaining the market response. Our results support the investment opportunities, synergy and complementarity hypotheses as well as a broad interpretation of the free cash flow hypothesis, but reject the absolute size, relative size and alignment-of-interests hypotheses. This study makes valuable contributions to the literature by providing the first direct evidence on the role of investment opportunities, synergy and alignment-of-interests in explaining the wealth effect of domestic joint ventures     

Value of Multinationality: Internalization, Managerial Self-interest, and Managerial Compensation

In this paper, we examine the impact of managerial self-interest on the value of multinationality. Since agency theory also suggests that a divergence between the interests of managers and shareholders can be aligned by effective managerial incentive, we also examine the effect of managerial compensation on the value of multinationality. Our results show that for high- Q (Tobin's Q > 1 ) firms, investors do not associate the spending of free cash flow on multinationality with the problem of overinvestments. For high- Q firms, it is also found that the value of multinationality can be enhanced by effective managerial incentives. For low- Q firms (Tobin's Q < 1 ), it is found that the concern of managerial self-interest overwhelms the benefits of internalization, making multinationality a value-decreasing event. For low- Q firms, managerial compensation is also ineffective in promoting value-enhancing foreign direct investments.     

资金合理流动:理财目标的现实考察

本文通过对企业目标的考察,认为以企业的社会使命为企业的目标才能使企业有所发展,而要做到这一点,必须以资金合理流动作为企业财务目标,才能使企业的长久目标有可能实现。资金合理流动作为理想企业目标与现实存在的结合就成为了必然。     

Optimal investment with fixed financing costs

Models with a premium on external finance produce counterfactual predictions about liquidity management. We address this shortcoming by introducing a fixed cost of increasing external finance into an otherwise standard investment/financing problem. This additional financial friction is well-motivated by case studies and our analysis shows that it generates more realistic predictions about liquidity management: firms hold external finance and idle cash simultaneously, and may invest an additional dollar of cash flow in liquidity rather than repaying external funds or investing in productive capital. In addition to better fitting the stylized facts about the time-series and cross-sectional pattern of liquidity holding, these results may help shed light on the fragility of estimates of investment–cash flow sensitivities.