This article provides comparative international evidence on the effect of market timing on corporate capital structures using panel data for US, UK and continental European firms. We document that ...the empirical regularity found for US firms, that historical market-to-book ratios and corporate leverage correlate negatively does not extend to UK and continental European firms. The latter tend to raise debt rather than equity when stock prices are high, thus sticking more closely to a pecking order in which debt is preferred over external equity.
Hunger Inequality: Ethics and Aid Watson, Derrill D.
The Journal of development studies,
06/2014, Volume:
50, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article considers the inequality in the cross-country distribution of hunger using multiple ethical underpinnings. Under sovereign equality, each nation-state receives equal weighting, leading ...to the conclusion that hunger should be concentrated in a few large countries. Under the democratic ethic, individuals receive equal weighting and the global distribution of hungry people is irrelevant. Inequality aversion deliberately prefers equal levels of hunger across countries. These ideals are presented in a general social welfare function and compared to the actual changes in hunger during 1991-2001. The distribution of food aid to reduce both hunger and hunger inequality are considered.
The mechanisms by which the poor benefit from economic growth remain a topic of debate in development literature. We address this issue in the context of rural Bangladesh, using a pooled dataset of ...three household panels between 1991-2001. Expansion of irrigation, paved roads, electricity, and access to formal and informal credit have (through different veins) led to higher rural farm and non-farm incomes, accounting for exogenous local agroclimatic endowments that explain a large part of the variation in the growth of infrastructure and credit programmes. However, this has not translated into substantial reductions in poverty for the poorest households.
Local development can assume many forms, depending on the environmental characteristics of places and the way they evolve historically. Tourist resorts are concentrated on space, forming a ...well-defined geography of local productive systems which show very different growth rates. The aim of this paper is to establish a geography of local tourist production systems in Italy, and to explore their sources of growth and competitiveness. Results suggest that higher levels of growth are not based on natural endowments but on localization economies, especially on the presence of all the phases of a “tourist filière”, a chain of economic activities directly related to tourism production, in the local production system.
We analyze differences in welfare transitions between natives and immigrants in Sweden using a large representative panel data set. The data contain administrative information on welfare use and ...detailed demographic information. The empirical results suggest that the main reason for the large immigrant–native welfare gap observed is the differences in welfare entry rates. Thus, policies aimed to reduce these transitions may be particularly successful in reducing welfare use in general and particularly the immigrant–native welfare gap.
This paper evaluates the labour market effects of the introduction of the polytechnic education system in Finland. The polytechnic reform gradually transformed former vocational colleges into ...polytechnics. Since the timing of the reform differed across schools, we can compare the performance of polytechnic graduates to the performance of vocational college graduates controlling for both the year and the school effects. The results are somewhat sensitive to how the selectivity issues are treated but generally suggest that both the earnings and the employment levels of post-reform graduates are higher in the field of business and administration. The effects are much smaller and usually insignificant in other fields.
Using a nonlinear structural VAR approach, we estimate the effects of exogenous monetary policy shocks in the presence of a zero lower bound constraint on nominal interest rates and examine the ...impact of such a constraint on the effectiveness of counter-cyclical monetary policies based on the data from Japan. We find that when interest rates are at zero, the output effect of exogenous shocks to monetary policy is cut in half if the central bank continues to target the interest rate. The conditional impulse response functions allow us to isolate the effect of monetary policy shocks operating through the interest rate channel when other possible channels of monetary transmission are present.
Using a rich data set of Chilean exporters, we analyse several issues regarding the relationship between entry into export markets and product quality. We find that every year, a large number of new ...exporting relationships are initiated, but the survival rate of these entries is very low and declines over time. Using unit values as a proxy for product quality, our estimations show that entry is generally associated with higher product quality. This higher quality, however, tends to reduce over time and eventually disappears three years after entry. In addition, our evidence suggests that the positive relationship between entry and quality is more prevalent in new exporters. To better identify this effect, we explore whether there are systematic differences across sectors. As expected, for sectors in which quality differentiation may be important, our findings reveal that reference‐price and differentiated products show a higher price in the year of entry and a longer convergence to incumbent prices. These results hold after controlling for potential sample selection bias.
Using data from the first 11 waves of the BHPS, this paper measures the extent of the selection bias induced by standard coresidence conditions-bias that is expected to be severe in short panels-on ...measures of intergenerational mobility in occupational prestige. We try to limit the impact of other selection biases, such as those induced by labour market restrictions that are typically imposed in intergenerational mobility studies, by using different measures of socio-economic status that account for missing labour market information. We stress four main results. First, there is evidence of an underestimation of the true intergenerational elasticity, the extent of which ranges between 12% and 39%. Second, the proposed methods used to correct for the selection bias seem to be unable to attenuate it, except for the propensity score weighting procedure, which performs well in most circumstances. This result is confirmed both under the assumption of missing-at-random data as well as under the assumption of not-missing-at-random data. Third, the two previous sets of results (direction and extent of the bias, and differential abilities to correct for it) are also robust when we account for measurement error. Fourth, restricting the sample to a period shorter than the 11 waves under analysis leads to a severe sample selection bias. In the cases when the analysis is limited to eight waves, this bias ranges from about 40% to 65%.
This article analyses the relationship between state policies and economy in Argentina 1991-2001. In 1991 the currency board regime named 'convertibility' was implemented, within the framework of ...important neoliberal reforms introduced by the State. These neoliberal reforms facilitated capitalist restructuring, characterized by a leap in productivity, investment and profits. Likewise, these reforms generated imbalances which, along with the changes in the world market conditions from 1998, led to the deepest crisis in Argentina's history. The inefficiency of state neoliberal policies in managing the crisis, based on fiscal adjustment to guarantee the continuity of external financing, led to an economic depression and a financial crash, sparking a mass rebellion and the end of convertibility.
Este artigo analisa a relação entre as políticas de estado e a economia na Argentina entre 1991-2001. Em 1991, foi implementado o regime de currency board chamado 'convertibilidade", no âmbito das importantes reformas neoliberais introduzidas pelo Estado. Estas reformas neoliberais facilitaram a reestruturação capitalista, caracterizada por um salto na produtividade, nos investimentos e nos lucros. Da mesma forma, essas reformas geraram desequilíbrios que, juntamente com as mudanças das condições do mercado mundial de 1998, levaram à crise mais profunda na história da Argentina. A ineficiência das políticas neoliberais do Estado na gestão da crise, com base no ajuste fiscal para garantir a continuidade do financiamento externo, levou a uma depressão econômica e a um crash financeiro, o que provocou uma rebelião em massa e o fim da conversibilidade.
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