Characterizing the Business Cycles of Emerging Economies

We document the properties of business cycles using the dating algorithm by Harding andPagan (2002) on a quarterly database for 58 countries —21 industrial countries and 37 emerging market economies (EMEs)— from 1970q1 to 2007q4. We find that: (a) recessions are deeper, steeper and costlier among EMEs (especially, in East Asia and Latin America) and that recoveries are swifter and stronger. (b) Recessions have become less costly during the globalization period (1990-2007) than before (1970-89) for industrial countries and EMEs. (c) The main characteristics of downturns are amplified when associated to crisis episodes. (d) The time path of macroeconomic indicators around peaks in real GDP is more volatile in downturns associated with crisis compared to other downturns. (e) Financial cycles (credit and asset prices) tend to precede real output cycles. (f) Credit and stock prices are strongly pro-cyclical while real exchange rates, capital flows and terms of trade tend to be a-cyclical. Finally, an exploratory analysis on the conditional correlates of the cost of recessions shows that: (i) adverse terms of trade shocks raise the cost of recessions in countries with a more open trade regime and deeper financial markets. (ii) Recessions tend to be deeper if they coincide with a sudden stop, but the effect is smaller in countries with deeper domestic credit markets. (iii) Floating exchange rate regimes appear to act as shock absorbers.Business cycles, peaks and troughs, emerging markets

Removing the Constraints for Growth: Some Guidelines Some Guidelines

One strand of the empirical growth literature has cast doubt on the ability of the policy recommendations from Washington Consensus in enhancing growth. They argue that not only the design but also the policy mix has an important country-specific component (e.g. Hausmann, Rodrik and Velasco, 2005 and Zettelmeyer, 2006). We argue that the effectiveness of policies in promoting growth depends upon the set of structural policies implemented or already existing in the country. This paper empirically examines the role of policy complementarities in explaining growth and development from two dimensions. First, we construct a regression-based policy index in the same vein of Burnside and Dollar (2000), and we decompose this index afterwards into domestic and outward policy indices. Second, we evaluate the role of policy complementarities in the growth process by interacting our policy index with specific country characteristics that affect growth. We repeat the same exercise with the domestic and outward policy indices. We found that outward oriented and domestic policies are highly complements to each other. Specifically, the growth effects of trade and financial openness are enhanced when domestic policies are correct and, moreover, financial and trade openness are also complements. Regarding structural factors, we found that human capital increase growth as expected but it is neither a complement nor a substitute of economic policy. On the other hand institutions and financial depth are complements with economic policy. This could be an explanation why some countries have stabilized their economies but they are not growing faster, this could be due to low financial development or bad institutions. Finally, we should remark that in addition to the Fatas and Mihov (2006) result that policy volatility hurts growth, we find that a good policy environment could propel growth by mitigating the negative effect of aggregate volatility and, more specifically, the volatility of external shocks.Growth, volatility, economic policy

Labor Market Regulations and Income Inequality: Evidence for a Panel of Countries

This paper presents evidence on the impact of labor regulations on income inequality using two recently published databases on labor institutions and outcomes (Rama and Artecona, 2002; Botero, Djankov, La Porta, López-de-Silanes and Shleifer, 2003) and different cross-section and panel data analysis techniques for a sample of 121 countries over the 1970-2000 period. When we consider the techniques most likely to be robust, we find that: (i) de jure regulations do not improve income distribution; (ii) relative compliance with existing regulations improves income distribution; (iii) de facto regulations are weakly associated with improving income inequality. This result partly reflects the fact that regulations are endogenous and, more interestingly, different regulations have quite distinct effects. In particular, we find that any redistributive effect of labor regulations may come from trade union membership, public employment and mandated benefits (proxied by maternity leave).

Baldwin company degree by Capsim business simulator

In this final report, there will be described an analysis of the execution of the strategy during the years. With this analysis, the executive board has the complete picture to determine if the strategy defined from the beginning was really followed and if it was a success at the end of the simulation. The analysis is focused in the most important departments, Research and Development and Marketing and divided by the 5 segments of the products

Communication of Digital Material Appearance Based on Human Perception

Im alltägliche Leben begegnen wir digitalen Materialien in einer Vielzahl von Situationen wie beispielsweise bei Computerspielen, Filmen, Reklamewänden in zB U-Bahn Stationen oder beim Online-Kauf von Kleidungen. Während einige dieser Materialien durch digitale Modelle repräsentiert werden, welche das Aussehen einer bestimmten Oberfläche in Abhängigkeit des Materials der Fläche sowie den Beleuchtungsbedingungen beschreiben, basieren andere digitale Darstellungen auf der simplen Verwendung von Fotos der realen Materialien, was zB bei Online-Shopping häufig verwendet wird. Die Verwendung von computer-generierten Materialien ist im Vergleich zu einzelnen Fotos besonders vorteilhaft, da diese realistische Erfahrungen im Rahmen von virtuellen Szenarien, kooperativem Produkt-Design, Marketing während der prototypischen Entwicklungsphase oder der Ausstellung von Möbeln oder Accesoires in spezifischen Umgebungen erlauben. Während mittels aktueller Digitalisierungsmethoden bereits eine beeindruckende Reproduktionsqualität erzielt wird, wird eine hochpräzise photorealistische digitale Reproduktion von Materialien für die große Vielfalt von Materialtypen nicht erreicht. Daher verwenden viele Materialkataloge immer noch Fotos oder sogar physikalische Materialproben um ihre Kollektionen zu repräsentieren. Ein wichtiger Grund für diese Lücke in der Genauigkeit des Aussehens von digitalen zu echten Materialien liegt darin, dass die Zusammenhänge zwischen physikalischen Materialeigenschaften und der vom Menschen wahrgenommenen visuellen Qualität noch weitgehend unbekannt sind. Die im Rahmen dieser Arbeit durchgeführten Untersuchungen adressieren diesen Aspekt. Zu diesem Zweck werden etablierte digitalie Materialmodellen bezüglich ihrer Eignung zur Kommunikation von physikalischen und sujektiven Materialeigenschaften untersucht, wobei Beobachtungen darauf hinweisen, dass ein Teil der fühlbaren/haptischen Informationen wie z.B. Materialstärke oder Härtegrad aufgrund der dem Modell anhaftenden geometrische Abstraktion verloren gehen. Folglich wird im Rahmen der Arbeit das Zusammenspiel der verschiedenen Sinneswahrnehmungen (mit Fokus auf die visuellen und akustischen Modalitäten) untersucht um festzustellen, welche Informationen während des Digitalisierungsprozesses verloren gehen. Es zeigt sich, dass insbesondere akustische Informationen in Kombination mit der visuellen Wahrnehmung die Einschätzung fühlbarer Materialeigenschaften erleichtert. Eines der Defizite bei der Analyse des Aussehens von Materialien ist der Mangel bezüglich sich an der Wahnehmung richtenden Metriken die eine Beantwortung von Fragen wie z.B. "Sind die Materialien A und B sich ähnlicher als die Materialien C und D?" erlauben, wie sie in vielen Anwendungen der Computergrafik auftreten. Daher widmen sich die im Rahmen dieser Arbeit durchgeführten Studien auch dem Vergleich von unterschiedlichen Materialrepräsentationen im Hinblick auf. Zu diesem Zweck wird eine Methodik zur Berechnung der wahrgenommenen paarweisen Ähnlichkeit von Material-Texturen eingeführt, welche auf der Verwendung von Textursyntheseverfahren beruht und sich an der Idee/dem Begriff der geradenoch-wahrnehmbaren Unterschiede orientiert. Der vorgeschlagene Ansatz erlaubt das Überwinden einiger Probleme zuvor veröffentlichter Methoden zur Bestimmung der Änhlichkeit von Texturen und führt zu sinnvollen/plausiblen Distanzen von Materialprobem. Zusammenfassend führen die im Rahmen dieser Dissertation dargestellten Inhalte/Verfahren zu einem tieferen Verständnis bezüglich der menschlichen Wahnehmung von digitalen bzw. realen Materialien über unterschiedliche Sinne, einem besseren Verständnis bzgl. der Bewertung der Ähnlichkeit von Texturen durch die Entwicklung einer neuen perzeptuellen Metrik und liefern grundlegende Einsichten für zukünftige Untersuchungen im Bereich der Perzeption von digitalen Materialien.In daily life, we encounter digital materials and interact with them in numerous situations, for instance when we play computer games, watch a movie, see billboard in the metro station or buy new clothes online. While some of these virtual materials are given by computational models that describe the appearance of a particular surface based on its material and the illumination conditions, some others are presented as simple digital photographs of real materials, as is usually the case for material samples from online retailing stores. The utilization of computer-generated materials entails significant advantages over plain images as they allow realistic experiences in virtual scenarios, cooperative product design, advertising in prototype phase or exhibition of furniture and wearables in specific environments. However, even though exceptional material reproduction quality has been achieved in the domain of computer graphics, current technology is still far away from highly accurate photo-realistic virtual material reproductions for the wide range of existing categories and, for this reason, many material catalogs still use pictures or even physical material samples to illustrate their collections. An important reason for this gap between digital and real material appearance is that the connections between physical material characteristics and the visual quality perceived by humans are far from well-understood. Our investigations intend to shed some light in this direction. Concretely, we explore the ability of state-of-the-art digital material models in communicating physical and subjective material qualities, observing that part of the tactile/haptic information (eg thickness, hardness) is missing due to the geometric abstractions intrinsic to the model. Consequently, in order to account for the information deteriorated during the digitization process, we investigate the interplay between different sensing modalities (vision and hearing) and discover that particular sound cues, in combination with visual information, facilitate the estimation of such tactile material qualities. One of the shortcomings when studying material appearance is the lack of perceptually-derived metrics able to answer questions like "are materials A and B more similar than C and D?", which arise in many computer graphics applications. In the absence of such metrics, our studies compare different appearance models in terms of how capable are they to depict/transmit a collection of meaningful perceptual qualities. To address this problem, we introduce a methodology to compute the perceived pairwise similarity between textures from material samples that makes use of patch-based texture synthesis algorithms and is inspired on the notion of Just-Noticeable Differences. Our technique is able to overcome some of the issues posed by previous texture similarity collection methods and produces meaningful distances between samples. In summary, with the contents presented in this thesis we are able to delve deeply in how humans perceive digital and real materials through different senses, acquire a better understanding of texture similarity by developing a perceptually-based metric and provide a groundwork for further investigations in the perception of digital materials

Government debt and economic growth

The growth prospects of a nation are stymied by the burden of government debt. This study has two goals: first, it tests whether public debt hinders growth; and, second, it explores whether economic policy ameliorates this effect. A large panel data of countries for 1970-2010 reveal a negative and robust effect of public debt on growth. Strong institutions, high quality domestic policies, and outward-oriented policies partly mitigate this adverse effect. An enhanced policy environment and its interaction with public debt has helped explain the improved growth performance of industrial and developing countries for the years 2001-05 compared to the years 1991-95. Viewing the actual performance of the Latin America and the Caribbean region, South America encompasses the group of countries more benefited by improvement of economic policies, while Central America and the Caribbean lag considerably. A simultaneous sharp reduction in public debt and an improvement in the policy environment induce an increase in the growth rate per capita of 1.7 percentage points for the Caribbean and 2 percentage points for South America. A more conservative scenario that considers an upgrade in quality of policies and a reduction of public debt leads to lower but still significant growth benefits for the Caribbean and South America, by 0.85 and 1.5 percentage points, respectively

Cuanto Explican las Reformas y la Calidad de las Instituciones el Crecimiento Chileno? Una Comparación Internacional

The main goal of the present paper is to evaluate the sources of growth in Chile and the world over the last decades, but stressing the role of complementarities in economic policies. Hence, we evaluate the growth determinants for a sample of 28 countries with information over the 1970-2000 period. In contrast to Gallego and Loayza (2002), we test directly the existence of complementarities between trade and financial liberalization policies with: a) the initial conditions of the economy, b) human capital policies, and c) the level of institutions.

Labor Market Regulations and Income Inequality: Evidence for a Panel of Countries

This paper presents evidence on the impact of labor regulations on income inequality using two recently published databases on labor institutions and outcomes (Rama and Artecona, 2002; Botero, Djankov, La Porta, López-de-Silanes and Shleifer, 2003) and different cross-section and panel data analysis techniques for a sample of 121 countries over the 1970-2000 period. When we consider the techniques most likely to be robust, we find that: (i) de jure regulations do not improve income distribution; (ii) relative compliance with existing regulations improves income distribution; (iii) de facto regulations are weakly associated with improving income inequality. This result partly reflects the fact that regulations are endogenous and, more interestingly, different regulations have quite distinct effects. In particular, we find that any redistributive effect of labor regulations may come from trade union membership, public employment and mandated benefits (proxied by maternity leave)