Knowledge that Transforms

Recently developed methods in the analysis and measurement of latent factor models for time series are utilised to study international business cycles and their relationship to international stockmarket price behaviour. An advantage of these methods is that the duality properties between time domain and frequency domain approaches for investigating the properties of time series can be exploited to identify and model business cycles. The empirical results show that the six countries studied, which include the United States, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, exhibit coherent national business cycles, although these cycles are not all alike. It is also found that international coherence in economic activity has increased in the flexible exchange rate period, although it is not as strong as it is for the national business cycles. The coherence between stockmarket prices and business cycles is not strong, both nationally and internationally, but international stockmarkets appear to show greater mutual coherence than do the corresponding economies.

Market disruption or the threat thereof constitutes grounds for restraining countries under the U.S. Multifibre Arrangement (MFA). Since 1980, however, countries accounting for very small shares of U.S. imports have been restrained. This study estimates the determinants of U.S. voluntary export restraints under MFA I and MFA II-III using a bivariate probit model with sample selection. Results show a shift from targeting large developing country exporters to targeting those that are small but have rapidly growing sales. This raises the cost of the MFA to the United States. It also suggests that expansion of exports by developing countries will be met by restrictions on market access. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Empirical implications for the variability of firm value in various models of industry evolution are discussed. Under certain conditions, learning models imply that industries with higher sunk costs should exhibit greater difference in firm value between entering and exiting firms whereas external shocks models imply that industries with higher sunk costs should exhibit greater variability of firm value over time relative to a numeraire industry. The theoretical results from external shocks models are consistent with agricultural data from California and Florida. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The extreme bounds analysis in Leamer (1982) is extended to the Tobit model with censoring. The extension involves the simple modification of replacing the censored values of the dependent variable by their expectation conditional on the MLEs and using the negative of the Hessian evaluated at the MLEs in place of the inverse of the covariance matrix. The application of this method to a data set that pools U.S. nontariff barriers across industries and countries arrives at the surprisingly robust (to changes in the prior) conclusion that U.S. nontariff barriers against its largest trading partners are already significantly retaliatory. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Economists commonly estimate the value of characteristics not traded in explicit markets by hedonic pricing. Unfortunately, these nonexplicitly traded characteristics often display a lack of independent variation or multicollinearity. Often some prior information on the value of these characteristics is available from submarkets. This paper utilizes this type of prior information to circumvent multicollinearity problems in hedonic pricing models using an inequality restricted Bayesian estimator. The authors perform a Monte Carlo experiment and cross-validation analysis to demonstrate the superiority of inequality restricted Bayesian over ordinary least squares at many margins in a variety of situations typically faced in hedonic estimation. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Earlier studies have presented mixed evidence on the rationality of the Federal Reserve's preliminary money stock estimates. The authors investigate the rationality of M1A, M1, M2, and M3 for both seasonally and not seasonally adjusted data. They find preliminary growth rates of these aggregates to be rational for not seasonally adjusted data but irrational when data are seasonally adjusted. Using Monte Carlo studies, the authors conclude that irrationality in seasonally adjusted data arises from the specific seasonal adjustment procedure used by the Federal Reserve. As a result, researchers conducting similar tests may want to focus exclusively on not seasonally adjusted data. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

This paper proposes a methodology for obtaining estimates of firm-specific technical change econometrically and contrasts those estimates with a multilateral total factor productivity index. Based on a panel data set of airlines, two measures are contrasted in a variety of ways. To the extent that output characteristics differ as in the case of airlines, the two measures differ significantly. Both measures are regressed on a variety of factors potentially influencing technical efficiency, confirming that improvements in fuel efficiency and load factor have played major roles, with hubbing and competition playing smaller roles, in explaining efficiency improvements. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Hostile takeovers may reduce the prevalence of long-term employment contracts if they facilitate the opportunistic expropriation of extramarginal wage payments. Our tests of two versions of the expropriation hypothesis improve on existing research by using firm- and establishment-level data from an employer salary survey, and by performing both ex ante and ex post tests. First, we study the relationship between proxies for extramarginal wage payments and subsequent hostile takeover activity, and find little evidence of an expropriation motive. Then. since we observe wage and employment structures both before and after takeovers. we investigate whether proxies for extramarginal wages drop after hostile takeovers. The ex post experiments provide evidence consistent with one version of the expropriation hypothesis. In particular, such takeovers appear to reduce extramarginal wage payments to more-tenured workers, mostly through flattening wage-seniority profiles in firms with relatively senior work forces.

This paper develops a model of trade in differentiated intermediate goods and shows how the structure of the importing country's production will influence gross bilateral import volumes. A regression equation directly implied by the model is estimated using disaggregated bilateral trade data for the OECD countries in 1985. The data reject the model. A more general model suggested by the theory establishes strong links between a country's factor endowments and its gross trade volume. This model is dominated statistically by a fixed effects model and does not substantially alter the conclusions of earlier empirical studies about openness to trade in manufactured goods. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Hilary Ingham, Steve Thompson, Deregulation, Firm Capabilities and Diversifying Entry Decisions: The Case of Financial Services, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 177-183