Spartan Daily, October 15, 2008

Volume 131, Issue 26https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/10510/thumbnail.jp

Corporate Cash Flow and Stock Price Exposures to Foreign Exchange Rate Risk

This paper estimates the foreign exchange rate exposure of 6,917 U.S. nonfinancial firms on the basis of stock prices and corporate cash flows. The results show that several firms are significantly exposed to at least one of the foreign exchange rates Canadian Dollar, Japanese Yen and Euro, and significant exposures are more frequent at longer horizons. The percentage of firms for which stock price and earnings exposures are significantly different is relatively low, though it increases with time horizon. Overall, the impact of exchange rate risk on stock prices and cash flows is similar and determined by a related set of economic factors.corporate finance, risk management, exposure, foreign exchange rates, hedging

Economic effects analysis of public investment in road improvement works in Hokkaido. Simulation analysis based on a macro-econometric model of Hokkaido

The objective of this study is to clarify how public investment in road improvement projects over a given analytical period of time has affected Hokkaido`s economic structure on the whole in relation to the industrial economy, prefectural income, household consumption, and commodity prices, through a simulation analysis based on a macro-econometric model. More specifically, our goal is to model both the direct effects achieved through the use of improved roads including the reduction of time-distance coefficients, the reduction of transportation costs and market expansion, and the indirect effects such as enhancement of lifestyles and convenience and influence on other public projects including living area improvement and promotion of regional areas, and to identify these effects quantitatively. Taking data availability into consideration, this study covers a 21-year analysis period covering the years 1976 through 1996. In constructing a quantitative model, the effect flow to be modeled was examined from two perspectives: 1) an effect flow showing the effects of road improvement works on production efficiency and market efficiency; and 2) an effect flow showing the effects of road improvement works on living standards considering convenience and lifestyle improvement. Then we attempted building a model that could indicate the occurrence of these effects in both Flow and Stock contexts. As a result of the simulation analysis, it was clarified that application of road improvement works would bring about pronounced positive economic benefits in tertiary industries, particularly in the transportation-service and wholesale/retail sectors, and greatly expand the prefectural net product on the whole. It was also revealed that these expansion effects would stimulate an increase in the prefectural income and in private final consumption expenditure. Furthermore, a simulation analysis on the economic effects that the expansion of the express-highway network would have on Hokkaido`s entire economy revealed that there would be a large effect particularly on investment and production within the transportation/communication industry and also on the commercial output of the wholesale/retail industry.

The New Model of Foreign Aid Drawn from the Experiences of Japan and the United States

This paper compares Japan and the US as they provide different types of capital to the developing world, focusing especially on foreign aid and, to some extent, also on remittances and the role of NGOs. The main focus is on the quality of aid and on past conceptual differences and on an emerging convergence between these two major donors, with Japan having the potential advantage of being able to bring its own historical experience in development to bear.foreign aid, remittances, NGO, Japan, U.S.

Technological Changes in the Transportation Sector--Effects on U.S. Food and Agricultural Trade: A Proceedings

ERS sponsored a workshop, Technological and Structural Change in the Transportation Sector: Effects on U.S. Food and Agricultural Trade, March 17-18, 1999, in Washington, DC. The program's objectives were to raise awareness within ERS about the role and importance of transportation in U.S. food and agricultural trade and to discuss the need of an agency research agenda in this area. More than 60 people attended. Bob Thompson of the World Bank and Jeffrey Frankel of the Brookings Institution led with discussions about the role of transportation in the global food system and the importance of integrating geography and transportation in analysis of international trade. Other panels dealt with transportation technology, past and future, the changing policy environment for ocean shipping, logistical and technological developments aiding exports of specific commodities, including the use of supply chain management. Representatives of the Agricultural Marketing Service discussed the availability of transportation cost data, and the availability of other shipping data was discussed by representatives of the PIERS database, a product of the Journal of Commerce. Two ERS research projects were summarized, one using GTAP and another applying the gravity model to estimate the extent to which distance is less of an inhibiting factor in exporting certain U.S. agricultural exports. The administrator of the Agricultural Marketing Service, the ERS associate administrator, and representatives of the Transportation Research Board, the USDA's World Board, and the Farm Foundation discussed potential ways ERS could include the transportation variable in its research. The program was cosponsored by the Farm Foundation and World Perspectives, Inc.transportation, distance, technology, agricultural trade, United States, Public Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Analysis of roles and position of mobile network operators in mobile payment infrastructure

A number of different mobile payment solutions have been presented the last decade. The phone subscription with its security mechanisms are used for user identification and payments. This is the case for SMS based payment and ticketing systems that are getting more and more popular. However, there are other ways to implement a Trusted Element (TE) , where a SIM card architecture is only one. It can be in the mobile phone, as a separate integrated circuit, as an optional customer deployed plug-in device (e.g., microSD) or be running as an application on a server existing entirely as software. In this paper we analyze what roles and responsibilities different actors have in different types of mobile payments solutions. The main focus is on the implications for the mobile operator business. It turns out that new types of intermediary actors in most cases play an important role. Sometimes mobile operators are not even involved. The emergence of new payment together with other non-SIM card based TE solutions opens up for many different market scenarios for mobile payment services. --