The Cold War Tucker, Spencer C
2020, 2020-01-01
eBook
"This sweeping reference work covers every aspect of the Cold War, from its ignition in the ashes of World War II, through the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the collapse of the Soviet ...Union in 1991."--.
The Global 1989 Lawson, George; Armbruster, Chris; Cox, Michael
09/2010
eBook
1989 signifies the collapse of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War, a moment generally recognized as a triumph for liberal democracy and when capitalism became global. The Global 1989 ...challenges these ideas. An international group of prominent scholars investigate the mixed, paradoxical and even contradictory outcomes engendered by these events, unravelling the intricacies of this important moment in world history. Although the political, economic and cultural orders generated have, for the most part, been an improvement on what was in place before, this has not always been clear cut: 1989 has many meanings, many effects and multiple trajectories. This volume leads the way in defining how 1989 can be assessed both in terms of its world historical impact and in terms of its contribution to the shape of contemporary world politics.
Trade and Productivity Alcalá, Francisco; Ciccone, Antonio
The Quarterly journal of economics,
05/2004, Letnik:
119, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
We find that international trade has an economically significant and statistically robust positive effect on productivity. Our trade measure is imports plus exports relative to purchasing power ...parity GDP (real openness), which we argue is preferable on theoretical grounds to the nominal measure conventionally used. We also find a significantly positive aggregate scale effect. Our estimates control for proxies of institutional quality as well as geography and take into account the endogeneity of trade and institutional quality. Our analysis of the channels through which trade and scale affect productivity yields that they work through total factor productivity.
In this paper, we provide an empirical analysis of evolving networks of successful R&D collaborations in the IT industry (consisting of firms that obtained patents in the technological category of ...computers and communication) in the U.S. between 1985 and 1995. We first show that the R&D network has become more extensive, more clustered, and more unequal in the sense that ‘stars’ have emerged in the network. We then analyze the effect of the existing network structure in the process of new R&D collaboration formation. We control for unobserved similarities among firms based on the community structures within the network that the algorithm developed by
Girvan and Newman (2004) identifies and find a significant cyclic closure and preferential-attachment effect.
How Investors Interpret Past Fund Returns Lynch, Anthony W.; Musto, David K.
The Journal of finance (New York),
October 2003, Letnik:
58, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
The literature documents a convex relation between past returns and fund flows of mutual funds. We show this to be consistent with fund incentives, because funds discard exactly those strategies ...which underperform. Past returns tell less about the future performance of funds which discard, so flows are less sensitive to them when they are poor. Our model predicts that strategy changes only occur after bad performance, and that bad performers who change strategy have dollar flow and future performance that are less sensitive to current performance than those that do not. Empirical tests support both predictions.
In this article we compare three models of the stochastic behavior of commodity prices that take into account mean reversion, in terms of their ability to price existing futures contracts, and their ...implication with respect to the valuation of other financial and real assets. The first model is a simple one-factor model in which the logarithm of the spot price of the commodity is assumed to follow a mean reverting process. The second model takes into account a second stochastic factor, the convenience yield of the commodity, which is assumed to follow a mean reverting process. Finally, the third model also includes stochastic interest rates. The Kalman filter methodology is used to estimate the parameters of the three models for two commercial commodities, copper and oil, and one precious metal, gold. The analysis reveals strong mean reversion in the commercial commodity prices. Using the estimated parameters, we analyze the implications of the models for the term structure of futures prices and volatilities beyond the observed contracts, and for hedging contracts for future delivery. Finally, we analyze the implications of the models for capital budgeting decisions.
The decade from 1985 to 1995 will go down in history as an unprecedented period in which global trade barriers were reduced. Some trade agreements (the North American Free Trade Agreement, the ...European Single Market, the Uruguay Round) were prominent late in this period, but the reform wave was led by developing countries in Latin America and Asia and formerly communist countries in Eastern Europe undertaking unilateral reforms. What accounts for this remarkable shift in policy? This paper highlights the declining use of trade restrictions for balance of payments purposes and the rise in exchange rate flexibility as important factors driving the policy change.
Direct Line Insurance was born out of the diversification strategies of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Within ten years of its foundation it had become the first retail financial institution to ...establish a clear competitive advantage based on applications of information technology. Direct Line is best understood as a series of technological and competitive innovations that call into question the extent to which banks’ competencies must change to master alternative delivery channels to the traditional «brick and mortar» retail branch. The success of Direct Line also highlights issues in the incursion of banks into bank assurance and the development of a business model based on fee-income (as opposed to the traditional interest-income)
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