Connecting People

This paper presents a model in which firms invest on their customer-networks to maintain current and future profits. The model is used to illustrate how the costs of maintaining networks and uncertainties about the customer-networks reduce the importance of making investments on the customer-based. Empirical evidence provides support for the theory.Network costs, Uncertainty, Pricing

Procyclical Monetary Policy and Governance

Weak governance adversely affects firm’s net worth and consequently the value of its collateral. This negative impact on the collateral reduces the external credit available for importing inputs constraining potential output. As a result, a stronger procyclical monetary policy stance is adopted for protecting the exchange rate and hence arresting the degradation in the collateral constraint.Collateral Constraints; Governance; Monetary Policy

Measuring Economic Policy Uncertainty in Pakistan

We develop an economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index for Pakistan in accordance with Baker, Bloom and Davis (2016) by extracting newspaper articles from Websites (i.e., Web-scraping) and we divided this into two indices. The main index, is based on four leading English-language Pakistan newspapers for the period of January 2015 to April 2020. To cover more historical ground, we also present a second index which uses two of the four newspapers and for which Web harvesting is plausible for a longer period of August 2010 to April 2020. The two indices are highly correlated thus they move in tandem and between them they capture events such as: the great floods of 2010; high terrorism activity; heightened exchange rate volatility; political turmoil; reshuffling of economic managers; the IMF program of 2019, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic

Mind the Gap: A Comment on Aggregate Productivity and Technology

This paper reconsiders the empirical results of Basu and Fernald (European Economics Review, 2002) which suggests a significant and persistent gap between the aggregate productivity and technology levels for the US private business sector. We we control for capacity utilisation, time-varying markup and use a superior system estimator, the profile of the gap is shown to change considerably.productivity, technology, welfare, hours, dynamic-markups

Nonlocality without inequality for almost all two-qubit entangled state based on Cabello's nonlocality argument

Here we deal with a nonlocality argument proposed by Cabello which is more general than Hardy's nonlocality argument but still maximally entangled states do not respond. However, for most of the other entangled states maximum probability of success of this argument is more than that of the Hardy's argument.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Biological activities of aerial parts of Tylophora hirsuta Wall

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How public information affects asymmetrically informed lenders: evidence from credit registry reform

We exploit exogenous variation in the amount of public information available to banks about a firm to empirically evaluate the importance of adverse selection in the credit market. A 2006 reform introduced by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) reduced the amount of public information available to Pakistani banks about a firm’s creditworthiness. Prior to 2006, the SBP published credit information not only about the firm in question but also (aggregate) credit information about the firm’s group (where the group was defined as the set of all firms that shared one or more director with the firm in question). After the reform, the SBP stopped providing the aggregate group-level information. We propose a model with differentially informed banks and adverse selection, which generates predictions on how this reform is expected to affect a bank’s willingness to lend. The model predicts that adverse selection leads less informed banks to reduce lending compared to more informed banks. We construct a measure for the amount of information each lender has about a firm’s group using the set of firm-bank lending pairs prior to the reform. We empirically show those banks with private information about a firm lent relatively more to that firm than other, less-informed banks following the reform. Remarkably, this reduction in lending by less informed banks is true even for banks that had a pre-existing relationship with the firm, suggesting that the strength of prior relationships does not eliminate the problem of imperfect information

Synthesis, Characterization and Biological Activity of Dimethyltin Dicarboxylates Containing Germanium

A series of diorganotin dicarboxylates of the general formula (CH3)2Sn(OCOCHR3CHR2GeR1)2 where R1=(C6H5)3, (P-CH3C6H4)3, N(CH2CH2O)3, R2=C6H5, H, CH3, P-CH3OC6H4, P-ClC6H4, P-CH3C6H4, R3=CH3 and H, have been synthesized by the reaction of dimethyltin oxide with germanium substituted propionic acid in 1:2 molar ratio in toluene. The H2O formed was removed azeotropically using a Dean and Stark apparatus. All the compounds have been characterized by IR, multinuclear (1H, 13C, 119Sn) NMR, mass and Mössbauer spectroscopies. All compounds were found to have potential activity against bacteria

Informal labour markets in Pakistan

This paper describes the results of a survey of informal-sector firms in Pakistan. Firms belong to the informal sector mainly because of scarce financial resources. There are significant differences in the level of wages and the flexibility of wages with the informal sector having both lower wages and greater flexibility than the formal sector. While minimum wages are less binding in the informal sector, indexation of wages to inflation is more common. In spite of these differences the reasons for not cutting wages in a recession are similar between the two sectors

Procyclical Monetary Policy and Governance

Weak governance adversely affects firm’s net worth and consequently the value of its collateral. This negative impact on the collateral reduces the external credit available for importing inputs constraining potential output. As a result, a stronger procyclical monetary policy stance is adopted for protecting the exchange rate and hence arresting the degradation in the collateral constraint