Trade costs, 1870–2000

What has driven trade booms and trade busts in the past century and a half? Was it changes in global output or in the costs of international trade? To address this question, we derive a micro-founded measure of aggregate bilateral trade costs based on a standard model of trade in differentiated goods. These trade costs gauge the difference between observed bilateral trade and frictionless trade in terms of an implied markup on retail prices of foreign goods. Thus, we are able to estimate the combined magnitude of tariffs, transportation costs, and all other macroeconomic frictions that impede international trade but that are inherently difficult to observe. We use this measure to examine the growth of global trade between 1870 and 1913, its retreat from 1921 to 1939, and its subsequent rise from 1950 to 2000. We find that trade cost declines explain roughly 55 percent of the pre–World War I trade boom and 33 percent of the post–World War II trade boom, while a precipitous rise in trade costs explains the entire interwar trade bust

Trigonometric Parallaxes for 1,507 Nearby Mid-to-Late M-dwarfs

The MEarth survey is a search for small rocky planets around the smallest, nearest stars to the Sun as identified by high proper motion with red colors. We augmented our planetary search time series with lower cadence astrometric imaging and obtained two million images of approximately 1800 stars suspected to be mid-to-late M dwarfs. We fit an astrometric model to MEarth's images for 1507 stars and obtained trigonometric distance measurements to each star with an average precision of 5 milliarcseconds. Our measurements, combined with the 2MASS photometry, allowed us to obtain an absolute K_s magnitude for each star. In turn, this allows us to better estimate the stellar parameters than those obtained with photometric estimates alone and to better prioritize the targets chosen to monitor at high cadence for planetary transits. The MEarth sample is mostly complete out to a distance of 25 parsecs for stars of type M5.5V and earlier, and mostly complete for later type stars out to 20 parsecs. We find eight stars that are within ten parsecs of the Sun for which there did not exist a published trigonometric parallax distance estimate. We release with this work a catalog of the trigonometric parallax measurements for 1,507 mid-to-late M-dwarfs, as well as new estimates of their masses and radii.Comment: ApJ, accepted. 36 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Please find our data table here: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/MEarth/DataDR2.htm

Barriers faced by SMEs in raising bank finance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to use univariate statistical analysis to investigate barriers to raising bank finance faced by UK small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs), specifically the impact of personal characteristics (ethnicity, gender and education). Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual model was developed and the results of a telephone survey of 400 SMEs conducted (before the “credit crunch”) by the Barclays Bank small business research team were analysed. The survey was based on a large stratified random sample drawn from the Bank's entire SME population. Findings – It was found that education made little difference to sources of finance, except that those educated to A‐level more frequently used friends and family and remortgaged their homes. However, graduates had the least difficulties raising finance. Though statistically insignificant, women respondents found it easier to raise finance than men. The survey confirmed that – and this finding was statistically significant – ethnic minority businesses, particularly black owner‐managers, had the greatest problem raising finance and hence relied upon “bootstrapping” as a financing strategy. Practical implications – The study makes an important contribution to filling a research gap, given the critical need of policy‐makers to understand differentials between different types of owner‐managers. It brings new insights into its field – access to finance – and with respect, especially, to marginalised groups. Originality/value – The paper adopts a different approach than many prior studies, with a large sample and robust analysis, to explore a critical need‐to‐know area in a new way – both for policy‐makers and academics in the field of SME finance

How SME owners' characteristics influence external advice and access to finance

Objectives: This paper aims to investigate the linkage between the use of external advice and access to finance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, with particular consideration of differences in personal characteristics: gender, ethnicity and education. Prior work: There is little evidence on gender, ethnic and educational differentials in obtaining external advice, with the exception of a paper by Barrett (1995) comparing the use of external advice by men and women. In the UK an extensive programme of research into the use of external advice has been undertaken, primarily by Robert Bennett and Paul Robson drawing from the Cambridge Centre for Business Research survey of SMEs in manufacturing and business services. A large number of other articles investigate business advice, but few attempt to make comparisons by personal characteristics. Approach: The approach adopted for the research is a telephone survey conducted by the Barclays small business research team in late 2005 on behalf of the authors. These data are quantitative in nature and involve a large sample of 400 SMEs with specific questions analysed by gender, ethnicity and education level. The approach adopted is robust and empirically sound and is a long established research methodology. Results: We find that there appears to be a correlation between the provision of external advice and the ability to raise bank finance. Furthermore, there are clear gender, ethnic and educational differentials in the use of particular sources of advice which are explored in detail in the paper. Implications: The study is of much relevance to policy-makers and providers of external advice (whether private sector or Government backed sources of advice) in that it provides insight into differences by personal characteristics, and secondly into the correlation between business advice and accessing finance. Value: The paper is the first that compares sources of external advice by gender, ethnicity and educational level and is therefore a major contribution to the already highly-developed literature on external business advic

Discouraged Advisees? The Influence of Gender, Ethnicity, and Education in the Use of Advice and Finance by UK SMEs

We investigate the influence of gender, ethnicity, and education in the use of external advice and finance by UK small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). A conceptual model of 'discouraged advisees' was developed as a framework for analysis of the results of a telephone survey of 400 SMEs. We found an association between the use of external advice and the ability to raise bank finance. Furthermore, both men and black and minority ethnic (BME) participants were more likely to use family and friends for advice, whilst women were twice as likely as men to use Business Link. BME business owners were discouraged from using less 'trusted' sources, such as Business Link, possibly believing them insufficiently tailored or that they would provide inappropriate advice. Therefore, the findings provide support for our conceptual model of discouraged advisees and have implications for the provision of advice for business owners from BME communities

Recovery Research, Katrina's Fifth Anniversary, and Lessons Relearned

What may be called “disaster science” is a broad field that begins with understanding hazards, risks, and population vulnerabilities and moves on to establishing best-practice models of response, mitigation, and recovery. Gaps abound in our collective knowledge in all of these areas, and it is fair to suggest that we have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of what we need to know. The goal continues to be to learn how to prevent disasters whenever possible and, when prevention is not possible, to at least optimize survival, preserve vital infrastructure, and return rapidly to a state of normalcy

Hurricane Sandy: Lessons Learned, Again

Hurricane Sandy was a sobering reminder to those of us who call New York home that it is a port city and subject to the whims of wind and water. The storm itself was massive: climatologically, a thousand miles wide at its peak; economically, an estimated excess of $50 billion in damages. In the New York metropolitan area, 97 people died in the storm, thousands were displaced from their homes, and 2 major hospitals required perilous evacuations even as the hurricane force winds engulfed the metropolitan region. For those of us in the fields of disaster medicine and public health preparedness, the question is, were we ready? During the past decade considerable public investment has been made in standardizing command and communication, assuring appropriate and rapid supply chains, and training the medical and public health workforces to respond appropriately. And yet, in the week after the storm, persistent reports of widespread gaps in the provision of coordinated relief were received from the Rockaways to Coney Island to Staten Island and New Jersey. The question was not one of capacity and capability as much as it was of communication and coordination. Resources did not always make it the last mile to reach those most in need

A Search for Additional Bodies in the GJ 1132 Planetary System from 21 Ground-based Transits and a 100 Hour Spitzer Campaign

We present the results of a search for additional bodies in the GJ 1132 system through two methods: photometric transits and transit timing variations of the known planet. We collected 21 transit observations of GJ 1132b with the MEarth-South array since 2015. We obtained 100 near-continuous hours of observations with the $Spitzer$ Space Telescope, including two transits of GJ 1132b and spanning 60\% of the orbital phase of the maximum period at which bodies coplanar with GJ 1132b would pass in front of the star. We exclude transits of additional Mars-sized bodies, such as a second planet or a moon, with a confidence of 99.7\%. When we combine the mass estimate of the star (obtained from its parallax and apparent $K_s$ band magnitude) with the stellar density inferred from our high-cadence $Spitzer$ light curve (assuming zero eccentricity), we measure the stellar radius of GJ 1132 to be $0.2105^{+0.0102}_{-0.0085} R_\odot$, and we refine the radius measurement of GJ 1132b to $1.130 \pm 0.056 R_\oplus$. Combined with HARPS RV measurements, we determine the density of GJ 1132b to be $6.2 \pm 2.0$\ g cm$^{-3}$, with the mass determination dominating this uncertainty. We refine the ephemeris of the system and find no evidence for transit timing variations, which would be expected if there was a second planet near an orbital resonance with GJ 1132b.Comment: 29 pages, 4 Tables, 8 Figures, Submitted to ApJ. Comments welcom