The costs of non-tariff barriers to trade: Evidence from New Zealand

The Costs of Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade: Evidence from New Zealand. — Recent work on trade policy with imperfect competition indicates that the adverse effects of non-tariff barriers to trade exceed those suggested by traditional theory. With market power in foreign supply, setting a restrictive non-tariff barrier will induce foreign exporters to raise their supply prices. The authors use the experiment provided by the comprehensive New Zealand economic reforms of the mid-1980s. Using panel data on export unit values from Germany and the United States to several destinations including New Zealand, they find some evidence for decreased export prices to New Zealand as a result of the dismantling of non-tariff barriers to trade.     

Income and substitution effects of fiscal policy on work effort

The focus of this paper is twofold. First, it examines the impact on work effort of changes in government purchases financed with lump‐sum taxes, in a neoclassical framework, with respect to four industrialised countries. Second, it reconsiders the expenditure–work effort relationship in a broader conceptual context that allows for distortionary taxation and a disaggregation of the income and substitution effects. Our findings are shown to cast doubt on the empirical plausibility of the prevailing (neoclassical and New Keynesian) models which seem to rely heavily on the lump‐sum tax notion, thus ignoring the substitution effects of distortionary taxation.     

Unit roots and infrequent large shocks: new international evidence on output

The nature and magnitude of the economic shocks that have affected the per capita GDP of 16 OECD countries are analyzed over a long period using the outlier method. Strong proof of infrequent large permanent and transitory shocks were found, essentially resulting from the two major wars in the twentieth century, the recession in the 1920s, the Great Depression, among others. We also examine the nature of the output trend by combining different tests of non-stationarity on different GDP series corrected by the outliers detected. It is shown that the per capita GDP series cannot reject the unit root hypothesis in 13 of the 16 countries examined. No conclusion could be drawn for the other countries because the test results were contradictory.     

Forms of Foreign Investment Liberalization and Risk in Emerging Stock Markets

I examine the effect of different forms of foreign investment liberalization on risk in emerging equity markets, including international cross-listings and closed-end country funds, and in the domestic equity market as foreign investment restrictions are eliminated. I find that in Latin American markets volatility declines significantly with different forms of foreign investment liberalization, and in Asian markets volatility does not increase significantly. Volatility is driven by domestic factors in South America, but the transmission of volatility from the United States to Mexico increases after liberalization. The market risk exposure increases in Argentina after liberalization, in Chile with an index of American Depositary Receipts, and in Thailand with greater foreign ownership, reducing the diversification benefits of these markets.     

Demographic and Economic Pressure on Emigration out of Africa*

Two of the main forces driving European emigration in the late nineteenth century were real wage gaps between sending and receiving regions and demographic booms in the low‐wage sending regions. Our new estimates of net migration for the countries of sub‐Saharan Africa show that exactly the same forces driving African across‐border migration are at work today. The results suggest that rapid growth in the cohort of potential young emigrants, population pressure on the resource base, and slow economic growth are likely to intensify the pressure for migration out of Africa and into high‐wage OECD countries over the next two decades.     

Markets and pro-poor agricultural growth: insights from livelihood and informal rural economy models in Malawi

This article presents the development of a set of programming models describing the major features of different rural livelihoods and of the informal rural economy they together make up in Malawi. The models allow for differentiated responses by different household types to change and for the partial equilibrium effects of consequent supply, demand, and price adjustments in labor and grain markets. The models provide insights into the relations between own‐farm and nonown‐farm activities in different households' livelihoods and in the informal rural economy as a whole, and are used to investigate possible impacts of increasing cash crop prices and of a more open rural economy. Impacts of these changes on the poor are found to be critically dependent upon supply and demand elasticities in labor and grain markets, but the poor could potentially suffer significant losses from increased openness of the local economy leading to increased expenditure by less poor households on imported goods and services.     

Finding Pareto Optimal Insurance Contracts

This paper deals with on-line computation—or step-wise learning—of Pareto optimal insurance contracts. Our approach tolerates that the loss distribution might be unknown, intractable, or not well specified. Thus we accommodate fairly inexperienced parties. Losses are here simulated or observed, one at a time, and they cause iterated revisions of the premium. The mechanical and global nature of probability calculus thereby yields to more tentative, myopic procedures, possibly closer to how humans operate or reason in face of risk. Sequential revisions may also reduce the expense of insurers' time and money in seeking sufficient statistics. Emphasized below is the remarkable simplicity and stability of the resulting adaptive procedures. Special attention goes to catastrophic risks, and to subsidized or competitive insurance.     

科技英语中数量增减的译法

本文系统地归纳了在科技文献中常见的涉及到倍数增减的结构及其表达方式     

A MULTINOMIAL APPROXIMATION FOR AMERICAN OPTION PRICES IN LÉVY PROCESS MODELS

This paper gives a tree-based method for pricing American options in models where the stock price follows a general exponential Lévy process. A multinomial model for approximating the stock price process, which can be viewed as generalizing the binomial model of Cox, Ross, and Rubinstein (1979) for geometric Brownian motion, is developed. Under mild conditions, it is proved that the stock price process and the prices of American-type options on the stock, calculated from the multinomial model, converge to the corresponding prices under the continuous time Lévy process model. Explicit illustrations are given for the variance gamma model and the normal inverse Gaussian process when the option is an American put, but the procedure is applicable to a much wider class of derivatives including some path-dependent options. Our approach overcomes some practical difficulties that have previously been encountered when the Lévy process has infinite activity.     

The impact of regulation on market risk

While it is crucial to understand the impact of regulatory changes on market risk, the literature does not show how risk responds to expected regulatory changes that are specifically designed to change risk. Our paper fills this gap by providing a detailed study of one such case. Using both a sample of privatized U.K. companies, and U.K. and U.S. control portfolios, between 1993 and 2000, we show (both for the single-factor market model and the three-factor Fama-French model) that the observed changes in market risk are significant and consistent with theory.