Examining the correlation between trade and income cannot identify the direction of causation between the two. Countries’ geographic characteristics, however, have important effects on trade, and are plausibly uncorrelated with other determinants of income. This paper therefore constructs measures of the geographic component of countries’ trade, and uses those measures to obtain instrumental variables estimates of the effect of trade on income. The results provide no evidence that ordinary least-squares estimates overstate the effects of trade. Further, they suggest that trade has a quantitatively large and robust, though only moderately statistically significant, positive effect on income. (JEL F43, 040)

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Does Trade Cause Growth

The past twenty years have seen great theoretical and empirical advances in the field of corporate finance Whereas once the subject addressed mainly the financing of corporations--equity, debt, and valuation--today it also embraces crucial issues of governance, liquidity, risk management, relationships between banks and corporations, and the macroeconomic impact of corporations However, this progress has left in its wake a jumbled array of concepts and models that students are often hard put to make sense of Here, one of the world's leading economists offers a lucid, unified, and comprehensive introduction to modern corporate finance theory Jean Tirole builds his landmark book around a single model, using an incentive or contract theory approach Filling a major gap in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance is an indispensable resource for graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as researchers of corporate finance, industrial organization, political economy, development, and macroeconomics Tirole conveys the organizing principles that structure the analysis of today's key management and public policy issues, such as the reform of corporate governance and auditing; the role of private equity, financial markets, and takeovers; the efficient determination of leverage, dividends, liquidity, and risk management; and the design of managerial incentive packages He weaves empirical studies into the book's theoretical analysis And he places the corporation in its broader environment, both microeconomic and macroeconomic, and examines the two-way interaction between the corporate environment and institutions Setting a new milestone in the field, The Theory of Corporate Finance will be the authoritative text for years to come

The Theory of Corporate Finance

A recursive test procedure is suggested that provides a mechanism for testing explosive behavior, date-stamping the origination and collapse of economic exuberance, and providing valid confidence intervals for explosive growth rates. The method involves the recursive implementation of a right-side unit root test and a sup test, both of which are easy to use in practical applications, and some new limit theory for mildly explosive processes. The test procedure is shown to have discriminatory power in detecting periodically collapsing bubbles, thereby overcoming a weakness in earlier applications of unit root tests for economic bubbles. Some asymptotic properties of the Evans (1991) model of periodically collapsing bubbles are analyzed and the paper develops a new model in which bubble duration depends on the strength of the cognitive bias underlying herd behavior in the market. The paper also explores alternative propagating mechanisms for explosive behavior based on economic fundamentals under time varying discount rates. An empirical application to the Nasdaq stock price index in the 1990s provides confirmation of explosiveness and date-stamps the origination of financial exuberance to June 1995, prior to the famous remark in December 1996 by Alan Greenspan about irrational exuberance in financial markets, thereby giving the remark empirical content.

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EXPLOSIVE BEHAVIOR IN THE 1990s NASDAQ: WHEN DID EXUBERANCE ESCALATE ASSET VALUES? *

As China’s export juggernaut employs many imported inputs, there are many policy questions for which it is crucial to know the extent of domestic value added (DVA) in its exports. The best known approach is the concept of “vertical specialization” proposed by Hummels, Ishii and Yi (2001) (HIY for short). This approach is not appropriate for countries that engage in a lot of tariff/tax-favored processing exports such as China, Mexico, and Vietnam. We develop a general formula for computing domestic and foreign contents when processing exports are pervasive. Because this new formula requires some input-output coefficients not typically available from a conventional input-output table, we propose a mathematical programming procedure to estimate these coefficients by combining information from detailed trade statistics with input-output tables. By our estimation, the share of foreign content in China’s exports is at about 50%, almost twice the estimate given by the HIY formula. There are also interesting variations across sectors and firm ownership. Those sectors that are likely labeled as relatively sophisticated such as electronic devices have particularly high foreign content (about 80%). Foreign-invested firms also tend to have higher foreign content in their exports than do domestic firms.

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How much of chinese exports is really made in china? assessing domestic value-added when processing trade is pervasive

Exploiting the fact that insiders trade for a variety of reasons, we show that there is predictable, identifiable “routine” insider trading that is not informative about firms’ futures. A portfolio strategy that focuses solely on the remaining “opportunistic” traders yields value-weighted abnormal returns of 82 basis points per month, while abnormal returns associated with routine traders are essentially zero. The most informed opportunistic traders are local, nonexecutive insiders from geographically concentrated, poorly governed firms. Opportunistic traders are significantly more likely to have SEC enforcement action taken against them, and reduce trading following waves of SEC insider trading enforcement.

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Decoding Inside Information

This paper documents that at the individual stock level insiders sales peak many months before a large drop in the stock price, while insiders purchases peak only the month before a large jump. We provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on trading constraints and asymmetric information. We test our hypothesis against competing stories such as patterns of insider trading driven by earnings announcement dates, or insiders timing their trades to evade prosecution. Finally we provide new evidence regarding crashes and the degree of information asymmetry.

The Dog That Did Not Bark: Insider Trading and Crashes

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This article challenges the conventional wisdom that speculation in financial markets reduces long-run growth. It shows that the real impact of a (rational deterministic) speculative bubble depends on the type of asset that is being speculated on. Speculative bubbles on equity raise the market value of firms, thus encouraging entrepreneurship, firm creation, investment, and growth. On the other hand, speculation on other types of assets is shown to be unambiguously growth-impairing. The model can explain some stylized facts about financial development and growth. Finally, regulatory implications are discussed briefly.

Growth-Enhancing Bubbles

This article addresses the issue of optimal patent protection in an economy with a downstream and an upstream sector. The key insight is that higher patent protection in the downstream sector raises the incentives of agents to do R&D in that sector but discourages innovation in the upstream sector because of a market size effect. Hence, higher patent protection in the upstream sector accelerates growth whereas higher patent protection in the downstream sector slows it down. If some innovation is socially desirable, optimal patent protection is necessarily higher in the upstream than in the downstream sector.

Jacques Olivier

Papers

The Dog That Did Not Bark: Insider Trading and Crashes

The Dog That Did Not Bark: Insider Trading and Crashes

Growth-Enhancing Bubbles

Growth-Enhancing Bubbles

Optimal Patent Protection in a Two-Sector Economy