The demographics of global corporate champions

This Working Paper presents a novel dataset documenting the demographics of the worldâ??s 500 largest companies by market capitalisation.The data illustrate a stark contrast between the main global economic regions. In Europe and Japan, large companies tend to be fairly old. In the United States, older champions coexist with a significant number of new ones. In emerging economies, most champions were born in the second half of the 20th century and reflect a rapid catch-up growth process.

Largest Mergers and Acquisitions by Corporations in 2005

[Excerpt] Mergers and acquisitions activity increased in 2004 over 2003 and 2005 looks to be an even bigger year for m&a. This report provides a listing of the largest mergers (announced value of at least two billion U.S. Dollars) or acquisitions during 2005 through November 18, 2005. Completion dates for the mergers or acquisitions are included and merger or acquisition failures noted. These data have been drawn from publicly available sources and have not been otherwise verified by CRS. This report will be updated monthly

Globalization and Worker Welfare in Late Nineteenth Century Europe

This paper asks whether the trend toward convergence in late nineteenth century Europe depends on the welfare measure used. We construct a Worker Development Index (WDI) composed of Williamson's real wage estimates, and new series of work hours and labor market regulations. Compared to GDP/person, the WDI shows a weaker tendency to converge. Across Europe, workers' experiences in the so-called glory days varied. Although increased trade led to higher levels of output, workers' welfare depended to a greater extent on union representation or a strong central authority. Cet article porte sur la relation entre la tendance vers la convergence en Europe à la fin du dix-neuvième siècle et l'indicateur de bien-être choisi. On construit un indice de bien-être des travailleurs qui comprend les séries de salaires de Williamson et deux nouvelles séries sur les heures de travail et les réglementations dans le marché du travail. Par rapport au PIB par habitant, le nouvel indice de bien-être indique une faible tendance vers la convergence. Partout en Europe, le bien-être des travailleurs était varié. Il est évident que la croissance économique était liée à l'augmentation des échanges internationaux, alors que le bien-être des travailleurs dépendait plus du taux de syndicalisation ou des politiques d'un gouvernement central puissant.Globalization, convergence, work hours, worker welfare, Mondialisation, convergence, heures de travail, bien-être des travailleurs

Still living with mortality: The longevity risk transfer market after one decade

This paper updates Living with Mortality published in 2006. It describes how the longevity risk transfer market has developed over the intervening period, and, in particular, how insurance-based solutions – buy-outs, buy-ins and longevity insurance – have triumphed over capital markets solutions that were expected to dominate at the time. Some capital markets solutions – longevity-spread bonds, longevity swaps, q-forwards, and tail-risk protection – have come to market, but the volume of business has been disappointingly low. The reason for this is that when market participants compare the index-based solutions of the capital markets with the customized solutions of insurance companies in terms of basis risk, credit risk, regulatory capital, collateral, and liquidity, the former perform on balance less favourably despite a lower potential cost.We discuss the importance of stochastic mortality models for forecasting future longevity and examine some applications of these models, e.g., determining the longevity risk premiumand estimating regulatory capital relief. The longevity risk transfer market is now beginning to recognize that there is insufficient capacity in the insurance and reinsurance industries to deal fully with demand and new solutions for attracting capital markets investors are now being examined – such as longevity-linked securities and reinsurance sidecars

Transnational corporate involvement in South Africa's military build-up

Presentation on ways transnational corporate trade and investments have built up the South African military industrial complex and enabled the success of apartheid. Originally presented as testimony to the UN Anti-Apartheid Committee in New York on February 21, 1978

Assessing Crash Risks on Curves

In Queensland, curve related crashes contributed to 63.44% of fatalities, and 25.17% required hospitalisation. In addition, 51.1% of run-off-road crashes occurred on obscured or open-view road curves (Queensland Transport, 2006). This paper presents a conceptual framework for an in-vehicle system, which assesses crash risk when a driver is manoeuvring on a curve. Our approach consists of using Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) to collect information about the driving context. The driving context corresponds to information about the environment, driver, and vehicle gathered from sensor technology. Sensors are useful to detect drivers’ high-risk situations such as curves, fogs, drivers’ fatigue or slippery roads. However, sensors can be unreliable, and therefore the information gathered from them can be incomplete or inaccurate. In order to improve the accuracy, a system is built to perform information fusion from past and current driving information. The integrated information is analysed using ubiquitous data mining techniques and the results are later used in a Coupled Hidden Markov Model (CHMM), to learn and classify the information into different risk categories. CHMM is used to predict the probability of crash on curves. Based on the risk assessment, our system provides appropriate intervention to the driver. This approach could allow the driver to have sufficient time to react promptly. Hence, this could potentially promote safe driving and decrease curve related injuries and fatalities

New Evidence on Financial Incentives and the Timing of Retirement

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. The causal effect is identified based on the natural experiment generated by an institutional reform. The results of a binary retirement model are robust to alternative model specifications, to a competing risks framework with endogenous panel attrition, and to alternative representations of unobserved individual-specific heterogeneity. We find strong behavioral effects of changes in financial retirement incentives. A permanent reduction of retirement benefits by 3.4 percent induces a decline in the age-specific annual retirement probability by over 50 percent. The response to the reforms intensifies over time suggesting that retirement behavior may be affected by social norms. The response to changes in financial retirement benefits varies with educational background: those with low education respond most strongly to an increase in the price of leisure.retirement insurance, incentives, social security, labor force exit, natural experiment, Switzerland

The Value of a Statistical Injury: New Evidence from the Swiss Labor Market

We study the monetary compensation for non-fatal accident risk in Switzerland using the number of accidents within cells defined over industry x skill-level of the job and capitalizing on the partial panel structure of our data which allows us to empirically isolate the wage component specific to the employer. Our results show that using accident risk at a lower level of aggregation, using narrower samples of workers, and using the wage component that is specific to the firm all yield higher estimates of risk compensation. Our preferred estimate gives an estimate of about 36,000 Swiss francs per prevented injury per year.Compensating wage differentials, value of a statistical injury, risk measurement

Contracts, Human Rights and Taxation: How a Company Exploits a Country, the Case of Glencore in the Drc

Deals with the exploitation of resourcesin DR

Linear and Nonlinear Foreign Exchange Rate Exposures of German Nonfinancial Corporations

It has been viewed as an unsolved puzzle that only for a small number of firms a significant impact of foreign exchange rate risk on firm value could be detected empirically. This paper investigates whether the results of previous studies can be explained by the fact that only the linear exposure component has been estimated or that exchange rate indices were used. For a comprehensive sample of German firms, empirical evidence is presented for the existence of significant linear and nonlinear exposures, which can be identified for bilateral as well as multilateral foreign exchange rates. The percentage of foreign sales, measures of firm liquidity and industry sectors are significant determinants of the exposure.foreign exchange rates, exposure, corporate finance, risk management, derivatives