Multinational Firms' Ownership Structure Choices in Politically Risky Countries: An Integrative Strategic Management Approach

Multinational Firms' Ownership Structure Choices in Politically Risky Countries: An Integrative Strategic Management Approach
Author: Candace Agrella Martinez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2006
Genre:
ISBN:

Statistical analyses of the data revealed that firm-level variables that proxied for intangible resources and specific assets were, on the whole, statistically significant. The institutional environment proxies achieved statistical significance for political risk, but not for corruption.

Class Wargames

Class Wargames
Author: Richard Barbrook
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-12
Genre: Performance art
ISBN: 9781570272936

Why should radicals be interested in playing wargames? Surely the Left can have no interest in such militarist fantasies? Yet, Guy Debord - the leader of the Situationist International - placed such importance on his invention of The Game of War described it as his most significant of his accomplishment. Intrigued by this claim, a multinational group of artists, activists and academics formed Class Wargames to investigate the political and strategic lessons that could be learnt from playing his ludic experiment. While the ideas of the Situationists continue to be highly influential in the development of subversive art and politics, relatively little attention has been paid to their strategic orientation. Determined to correct this deficiency, Class Wargames is committed to exploring how Debord used the metaphor of the Napoleonic battlefield to propagate a Situationist analysis of modern culture and politics. Inspired by his example its members have also hacked other military simulations: H.G. Wells' Little Wars; Chris Peers' Reds versus Reds and Richard Borg's Commands & Colors. Playing wargames is not a diversion from politics: it is the training ground of tomorrow's communist insurgents. Fusing together historical research on avant-garde artists, political revolutionaries and military theorists with narratives of five years of public performances, Class Wargames provides a strategic and tactical manual for subverting the economic, political and ideological hierarchies of early-21st century neoliberal capitalism. The knowledge required to create a truly human civilisation is there to be discovered on the game board!

A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction

A Model of Growth Through Creative Destruction
Author: Philippe Aghion
Publisher: London : Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1990
Genre: Economic development
ISBN: 9780771411168

This paper develops a model based on Schumpeter's process of creative destruction. It departs from existing models of endogenous growth in emphasizing obsolescence of old technologies induced by the accumulation of knowledge and the resulting process or industrial innovations. This has both positive and normative implications for growth. In positive terms, the prospect of a high level of research in the future can deter research today by threatening the fruits of that research with rapid obsolescence. In normative terms, obsolescence creates a negative externality from innovations, and hence a tendency for laissez-faire economies to generate too many innovations, i.e too much growth. This "business-stealing" effect is partly compensated by the fact that innovations tend to be too small under laissez-faire. The model possesses a unique balanced growth equilibrium in which the log of GNP follows a random walk with drift. The size of the drift is the average growth rate of the economy and it is endogenous to the model ; in particular it depends on the size and likelihood of innovations resulting from research and also on the degree of market power available to an innovator.

The Relative Volatility of Commodity Prices

The Relative Volatility of Commodity Prices
Author: Mr.Rabah Arezki
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 23
Release: 2011-12-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1463925964

This paper studies the volatility of commodity prices on the basis of a large dataset of monthly prices observed in international trade data from the United States over the period 2002 to 2011. The conventional wisdom in academia and policy circles is that primary commodity prices are more volatile than those of manufactured products, even though most of the existing evidence does not actually attempt to measure the volatility of prices of individual goods or commodities. Rather the literature tends to focus on trends in the evolution and volatility of ratios of price indexes composed of multiple commodities and products. This approach can be misleading. Indeed, the evidence presented in this paper suggests that on average prices of individual primary commodities may be less volatile than those of individual manufactured goods.

Agriculture and Economic Growth

Agriculture and Economic Growth
Author: Yair Mundlak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 512
Release: 2000
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780674002289

Agriculture as a sector; Factor growth and allocation; Technology; Static and dynamic behavior.

Who Creates New Firms When Local Opportunities Arise?

Who Creates New Firms When Local Opportunities Arise?
Author: Shai Bernstein
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2018-09-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484377834

New firm formation is a critical driver of job creation, and an important contributor to the responsiveness of the economy to aggregate shocks. In this paper we examine the characteristics of the individuals who become entrepreneurs when local opportunities arise due to an increase in local demand. We identify local demand shocks by linking fluctuations in global commodity prices to municipality level agricultural endowments in Brazil. We find that the firm creation response is almost entirely driven by young and skilled individuals, as measured by their level of experience, education, and past occupations involving creativity, problem-solving and managerial roles. In contrast, we find no such response within the same municipalities among skilled, yet older individuals, highlighting the importance of lifecycle considerations. These responsive individuals are younger and more skilled than the average entrepreneur in the population. The entrepreneurial response of young individuals is larger in municipalities with better access to finance, and in municipalities with more skilled human capital. These results highlight how the characteristics of the local population can have a significant impact on the entrepreneurial responsiveness of the economy.

The Role of Productivity, Transportation Costs, and Barriers to Intersectoral Mobility in Structural Transformation

The Role of Productivity, Transportation Costs, and Barriers to Intersectoral Mobility in Structural Transformation
Author: Cem Karayalcin
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 30
Release: 2015-04-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484350057

The process of economic development is characterized by substantial reallocations of resources across sectors. In this paper, we construct a multi-sector model in which there are barriers to the movement of labor from low-productivity traditional agriculture to modern sectors. With the barrier in place, we show that improvements in productivity in modern sectors (including agriculture) or reductions in transportation costs may lead to a rise in agricultural employment and through terms-oftrade effects may harm subsistence farmers if the traditional subsistence sector is larger than a critical level. This suggests that policy advice based on the earlier literature needs to be revised. Reducing barriers to mobility (through reductions in the cost of skill acquisition and institutional changes) and improving the productivity of subsistence farmers needs to precede policies designed to increase the productivity of modern sectors or decrease transportation costs.

CoMap: Mapping Contagion in the Euro Area Banking Sector

CoMap: Mapping Contagion in the Euro Area Banking Sector
Author: Mehmet Ziya Gorpe
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 63
Release: 2019-05-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1498312071

This paper presents a novel approach to investigate and model the network of euro area banks’ large exposures within the global banking system. Drawing on a unique dataset, the paper documents the degree of interconnectedness and systemic risk of the euro area banking system based on bilateral linkages. We develop a Contagion Mapping model fully calibrated with bank-level data to study the contagion potential of an exogenous shock via credit and funding risks. We find that tipping points shifting the euro area banking system from a less vulnerable state to a highly vulnerable state are a non-linear function of the combination of network structures and bank-specific characteristics.

Das House-Kapital

Das House-Kapital
Author: Volker Grossman
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 82
Release: 2017-03-30
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1475590326

There are, by now, several long term, time series data sets on important housing & macro variables, such as land prices, house prices, and the housing wealth-to-income ratio. However, an appropriate theory that can be employed to think about such data and associated research questions has been lacking. We present a new housing & macro model that is designed specifically to analyze the long term. As an illustrative application, we demonstrate that the calibrated model replicates, with remarkable accuracy, the historical evolution of housing wealth (relative to income) after World War II and suggests a further considerable increase in the future. The model also accounts for the close connection of house prices to land prices in the data. We also compare our framework to the canonical housing & macro model, typically employed to analyze business cycles, and highlight the main differences.