The 1992-1995 battle for Sarajevo was the longest siege in modern history. It was also the most internationalized, attracting a vast contingent of aid workers, UN soldiers, journalists, smugglers, ...and embargo-busters. The city took center stage under an intense global media spotlight, becoming the most visible face of post-Cold War conflict and humanitarian intervention. However, some critical activities took place backstage, away from the cameras, including extensive clandestine trading across the siege lines, theft and diversion of aid, and complicity in the black market by peacekeeping forces.
InBlue Helmets and Black Markets, Peter Andreas traces the interaction between these formal front-stage and informal backstage activities, arguing that this created and sustained a criminalized war economy and prolonged the conflict in a manner that served various interests on all sides. Although the vast majority of Sarajevans struggled for daily survival and lived in a state of terror, the siege was highly rewarding for some key local and international players. This situation also left a powerful legacy for postwar reconstruction: new elites emerged via war profiteering and an illicit economy flourished partly based on the smuggling networks built up during wartime. Andreas shows how and why the internationalization of the siege changed the repertoires of siege-craft and siege defenses and altered the strategic calculations of both the besiegers and the besieged. The Sarajevo experience dramatically illustrates that just as changes in weapons technologies transformed siege warfare through the ages, so too has the arrival of CNN, NGOs, satellite phones, UN peacekeepers, and aid convoys.
Drawing on interviews, reportage, diaries, memoirs, and other sources, Andreas documents the business of survival in wartime Sarajevo and the limits, contradictions, and unintended consequences of international intervention. Concluding with a comparison of the battle for Sarajevo with the sieges of Leningrad, Grozny, and Srebrenica, and, more recently, Falluja,Blue Helmets and Black Marketsis a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary urban warfare, war economies, and the political repercussions of humanitarian action.
This paper studies the impact of a regional free trade agreement, MERCOSUR, on technology upgrading by Argentinean firms. To guide empirical work, I introduce technology choice in a model of trade ...with heterogeneous firms. The joint treatment of the technology and exporting choices shows that the increase in revenues produced by trade integration can induce exporters to upgrade technology. An empirical test of the model reveals that firms in industries facing higher reductions in Brazil's tariffs increase investment in technology faster. The effect of tariffs is highest in the upper-middle range of the firm-size distribution, as predicted by the model.
Empirical pricing kernels Rosenberg, Joshua V.; Engle, Robert F.
Journal of financial economics,
06/2002, Letnik:
64, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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This paper investigates the empirical characteristics of investor risk aversion over equity return states by estimating a time-varying pricing kernel, which we call the empirical pricing kernel ...(EPK). We estimate the EPK on a monthly basis from 1991 to 1995, using S&P 500 index option data and a stochastic volatility model for the S&P 500 return process. We find that the EPK exhibits counter cyclical risk aversion over S&P 500 return states. We also find that hedging performance is significantly improved when we use hedge ratios based the EPK rather than a time-invariant pricing kernel.
Theoretical models predict asymmetric information in health insurance markets may generate inefficient outcomes due to adverse selection and moral hazard. However, previous empirical research has ...found it difficult to disentangle adverse selection from moral hazard in health care consumption. We propose a two-step semiparametric estimation strategy to identify and estimate a canonical model of asymmetric information in health care markets. With this method, we can estimate a structural model of demand for health care. We illustrate this method using a claimslevel data set with confidential information from a large self-insured employer. We find significant evidence of moral hazard and adverse selection.
Attracting inward investment is a major preoccupation of policymakers worldwide, and a wide range of instruments, including direct subventions, are deployed to attract multinational enterprises ...(MNEs). Intervention is predicated on the assumption that there are direct productivity spillovers associated with the presence of MNEs and the policy of attracting them is targeted at capturing these externalities. Yet robust evidence on direct spillovers is hard to find. An underexplored indirect channel for productivity spillovers is via exports. Exporting firms are more productive than nonexporting firms. Thus, if the presence of MNEs results in more indigenous firms exporting, an indirect productivity spillover will result. In this paper, we identify possible transmission mechanisms for export spillovers and test for their existence on a large panel of firms in the UK. Our results confirm positive spillover effects from MNEs on the decision to export of UK-owned firms as well as on their export propensity.
We investigate whether CEOs manage the timing of their voluntary disclosures around stock option awards. We conjecture that CEOs manage investors’ expectations around award dates by delaying good ...news and rushing forward bad news. For a sample of 2,039 CEO option awards by 572 firms with fixed award schedules, we document changes in share prices and analyst earnings forecasts around option awards that are consistent with our conjecture. We also provide more direct evidence based on management earnings forecasts issued prior to award dates. Our findings suggest that CEOs make opportunistic voluntary disclosure decisions that maximize their stock option compensation.
A dynamic structural model of labor supply, welfare participation, and food stamp participation is estimated using the 1992, 1993, and 1996 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation. ...Details of various policies including welfare time limits, work requirements, and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are incorporated formally in the budget constraint. Policy simulations reveal that the economy accounts for half of the increase in the labor supply of female heads of family between 1992 and 1999. A time limit results in a larger efficiency gain than a work requirement or a direct reduction in welfare benefits. A reform package can lead to both a reduction in the government expenditure and an improvement in utility. The EITC expansion results in a substantial efficiency gain among individuals with the lowest expected wage. These individuals are almost unaffected by the economic expansion, but their income and utility increase significantly under the reform package.
This paper analyzes the process of private negotiations between financial institutions and the companies they attempt to influence. It relies on a private database consisting of the correspondence ...between TIAA-CREF and 45 firms it contacted about governance issues between 1992 and 1996. This correspondence indicates that TIAA-CREF is able to reach agreements with targeted companies more than 95 percent of the time. In more than 70 percent of the cases, this agreement is reached without shareholders voting on the proposal. We verify independently that at least 87 percent of the targets subsequently took actions to comply with these agreements.
Using input-output analysis, we examine whether India can be regarded as a pollution haven. We calculate the extra CO₂, SO₂ and NO x emissions induced by 1 billion rupees of additional exports. This ...is compared with the reduction of Indian pollution caused by an import increase of equal size. In contrast to what the pollution haven hypothesis states for developing countries, we find that India considerably gains from extra trade. Comparing 1996/1997 with 1991/1992, the gains have only increased, indicating that India has moved further away from being a pollution haven. The outcome is robust to changes in the underlying assumptions.
This article uses firm-level data for the Czech Republic to show that during 1992–96 foreign investment had the predicted positive impact on total factor productivity growth of recipient firms. This ...result is robust to corrections for the sample bias that arises because foreign companies tend to invest in firms whose initial productivity is above average. Together, joint ventures and foreign direct investment appear to have a negative spillover effect on firms that do not have foreign partnerships. However, with foreign direct investment alone, the magnitude of the spillover becomes much smaller and loses significance. This result, in conjunction with the fact that joint ventures and foreign direct investment account for a significant share of total output in many industries, suggests that further research is required to determine the extent of knowledge diffusion from firms that have foreign links to those that do not.
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