We advance quantitative-theoretic models of sovereign debt by proving the existence of a downward sloping equilibrium price function for long-term debt and implementing a novel method to accurately ...compute it. We show that incorporating long-term debt allows the model to match Argentina's average external debt-to-output ratio, average spread on external debt, the standard deviation of spreads, and simultaneously improve upon the model's ability to account for Argentina's other cyclical facts. We also investigated the welfare properties of maturity length and showed that if the possibility of self-fulfilling rollover crises is taken into account, long-term debt is superior to short-term debt.
This paper estimates the productivity gains from reducing tariffs on final goods and from reducing tariffs on intermediate inputs. Lower output tariffs can increase productivity by inducing tougher ...import competition, whereas cheaper imported inputs can raise productivity via learning, variety, and quality effects. We use Indonesian manufacturing census data from 1991 to 2001, which include plant-level information on imported inputs. The results show that a 10 percentage point fall in input tariffs leads to a productivity gain of 12 percent for firms that import their inputs, at least twice as high as any gains from reducing output tariffs.
We test for asymmetry in a model of the dependence between the Deutsche mark and the yen, in the sense that a different degree of correlation is exhibited during joint appreciations against the U.S. ...dollar versus during joint depreciations. We consider an extension of the theory of copulas to allow for conditioning variables, and employ it to construct flexible models of the conditional dependence structure of these exchange rates. We find evidence that the mark-dollar and yen-dollar exchange rates are more correlated when they are depreciating against the dollar than when they are appreciating.
This narrative celebrates the career of Janet Crayne, the bulk of whose service was at the University of Michigan (U-M). Written by Janet's successor as U-M's Librarian for Slavic, East European, and ...Eurasian Studies, it offers a unique perspective on Janet's many achievements and her legacy at U-M and beyond. Through conversations with Janet and her colleagues, the author finds that, even more than her love of books, her intimate knowledge of the SEEE region, and her belief in the many vital roles that libraries play, what made this great collector truly great was her passion for people and for service.
We investigate whether mutual fund families strategically transfer performance across member funds to favor those more likely to increase overall family profits. We find that "high family value" ...funds (i.e., high fees or high past performers) overperform at the expense of "low value" funds. Such a performance gap is above the one existing between similar funds not affiliated with the same family. Better allocations of underpriced initial public offering deals and opposite trades across member funds partly explain why high value funds overperform. Our findings highlight how the family organization prevalent in the mutual fund industry generates distortions in delegated asset management.
Productivity and Performance: A GMM approach Tsionas, Mike G.; Kumbhakar, Subal C.
Oxford bulletin of economics and statistics,
April 2023, Volume:
85, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this paper we propose a single‐step generalized method of moments (GMM) approach to estimate a production function with multiple quasi‐fixed and variable inputs as well as productivity and ...inefficiency. Our approach relies on the system consisting of the production function, the first‐order conditions of expected profit maximization with respect to the variable inputs, as well as general formulations for dynamic productivity and inefficiency. The estimation procedure takes care of correlations of both productivity and inefficiency with the variable inputs without using any distributional assumptions on the error terms (including inefficiency) in the system. We use Indonesian manufacturing census data to illustrate workings of our procedure.
This paper explores the contribution of the institutional perspective in understanding firm innovation returns from international alliances. It argues that formal and informal national institutions ...are of different nature, and give rise to explicit and tacit differences respectively between alliance partners. Partners exhibit different attitudes and abilities to negotiate and address such differences in leveraging the innovation potential of international alliances. As a result, we expect such differences to have distinct effects on partners' innovation performance: a) the effect of informal institutional differences is approximating sigmoid (S-shaped), with innovation performance slightly increasing first, then improving further and finally reaching a flattening plateau as informal institutional difference between partners increase; and b) the effect of formal institutional differences resembles an inverted U. Support is provided for both our contentions in a longitudinal sample of 110 UK biopharmaceutical firms. The paper contributes to existing understanding of firm innovation performance from international alliances, and broadly, to the management of internationalization in alliance portfolios.
One of the most prominent political and economic events of recent decades was the falling of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, which was quickly followed by the reunification of the formerly ...separate entities of East and West Germany. This paper aims to contribute to the growing economics literature on the determinants of life satisfaction (or happiness) by investigating how life satisfaction in East Germany changed over the decade following reunification. The paper is particularly interested in identifying the contribution that the substantial increase in real household income in East Germany in the post-reunification years made to reported levels of life satisfaction. In order to achieve this aim, a new conditional fixed-effect ordinal estimator is applied to a measure of life satisfaction using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The estimates from this new model are then decomposed, using a new causal technique, kin order to identify the factors that drove average changes in life satisfaction in East Germany following reunification.
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