Does Foreign Exchange Intervention Matter? Disentangling the Portfolio and Expectations Effects for the Mark

The time is ripe for a re-examination of the question whether foreign exchange intervention can affect the exchange rate. We attempt to isolate two distinct effects: the portfolio effect, whereby an increase in the supply of marks must reduce the dollar/mark rate (for given expected rates of return) and the additional expectations effect, whereby intervention that is publically known may alter investors expectations of the future exchange rate, which will feed back to the current equilibrium price. We estimate a system consisting of two equations, one describing investors' portfolio behavior and the other their formation of expectations, where the two endogenous variables are the current spot rate and investors' expectation of the future spot rate. We use relatively new data sources: actual daily data on intervention by the Bundesbank, newspaper stories on known intervention, and survey data on investors' expectations. We find evidence of both an expectations effect and a portfolio effect. The statistical significance of the portfolio effect suggests that even sterilized intervention may have had positive effects during the sample period. (It tends to be significant only during the later of our two sample periods, October 1984 to December 1987. That intervention appears less significant statistically during the earlier period, November 1982 to October 1984, could be attributed to the fact that little intervention was undertaken until 1985.) For the magnitude of the effects to be large requires that intervention be publically known. Our (still preliminary) estimates suggest that a typical $100 million of "secret" intervention has an effect of less than 0.1 per cent on the exchange rate, but that the effect of news reports of intervention can be as large as an additional 4 per cent.

Digital Interorganizational Collaboration

How can digital technology enable flexible interorganizational collaborations (IOCs)? This study investigates a challenge facing firms seeking to build highly flexible interfirm relationships to remain competitive in the digital age. It explores how flexible IOCs characterized by changing goals, organizations and organizational actors can leverage digital technology to rapidly generate interorganizational dynamic capabilities (IDCs) in the absence of pre-existing routines. Using multiple case studies of COVID-19 task forces in the US and Canada, we observe how digital generativity derives from a diverse and changing set of digital tools used together to respond to a rapidly changing environment. In doing so, this study extends digital generativity beyond digital platforms into more flexible applications of digital technology. This approach addresses a central problem in the IOC literature: how organizations competing in the digital age can shift their strategic focus from competition to collaboration (Gkeredakis & Constantinides 2019)

The Snowball Effect - Why the U.S. Gets Knocked Out Cold in Vietnam and Afghanistan

Since the late 1940s, the United States (U.S.) has made several attempts at nation-building, defined as U.S. political, economic, and military intervention into a foreign country with the intent of establishing a pro-U.S. government or democracy. Many Americans associate nation-building with catastrophic failure, largely due to Vietnam in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021. The primary reason for the U.S.\u27 failure to nation-build was the lack of political and public support, both from the populations of the U.S. at home, and the native Vietnamese / Afghani populations. Growing resentment, or lack of interest in the war effort destroyed American morale, creating a desire to quickly end the conflict. When combined with disorganized military and political objectives, as well as a lack of cultural understanding of Vietnam / Afghanistan on the part of the Americans, it becomes clear why both these efforts ended in catastrophe, and the desperate evacuation of civilians from the U.S. embassy in Saigon in 1975, or Kabul in 2021

Scaleable transient transfection of intensified rAAV production processes

Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

Interactive food and beverage marketing: targeting children and youth in the digital age

The proliferation of media in children\u27s lives has created a new \u27marketing ecosystem\u27 that encompasses cell phones, mobile music devices, instant messaging, videogames, and virtual, three-dimensional worlds. These new marketing practices are fundamentally transforming how food and beverage companies do business with young people in the twenty-first century. Today, U.S. children are confronting myriad diseases associated with excessive weight gain and poor nutrition. Type 2 diabetes, a serious medical condition previously found only in adults, has become common in children and adolescents. Government agencies and public health professionals have become increasingly concerned over the role of advertising in promoting \u27high-calorie, low-nutrient\u27 products to young people. Most of the policy debate has focused on TV commercials targeted at young children. However, marketing now extends far beyond the confines of television and even the Internet, into an expanding and ubiquitous digital media culture.&nbsp

Moving At-Risk Teenagers Out of High-Risk Neighborhoods: Why Girls Fare Better Than Boys

neighborhood effects; social experiment; mixed methods; youth risk behavior