Assessing the Competitiveness of International Financial Services in Particular Locations: A Survey of Methods and Perspectives

The International Financial Services (IFS) industry is restructuring internally and by location. This paper outlines the economic forces and analytical methods that may be applied to examine the economic drivers of these processes as ever more cities, particularly in East Asia, are vying to attract IFS providers and their clients. The ICT revolution has made those IFS that can be commoditized footloose in search of cost efficiency. High value-added financial services, however, will continue to be developed and coordinated in a few major IFS centers that have invested in, or capitalized on, regional or global advantages for themselves and their clients. The resulting pattern of functional fragmentation and geographic dispersal may facilitate analyses of the competitiveness of different lines of the financial services business in a particular location by methods such as Data Envelopment and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. These forms of comparative efficiency analysis have recently been questioned and their results reinterpreted.offshore centers, international financial services, Data Envelopment Analysis, Stochastic Frontier Analysis

Dependence on External Finance by Manufacturing Sector: Examining the Measure and its Properties

Rajan & Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors’ Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about how to obtain representative values of DEF by sector and about why these values differ between sectors have been used widely to show that sectors benefit unequally from a country’s level of financial development. However, the assumptions as such have not been examined. The present study, conducted with cyclically adjusted annual DEF measures, attempts to do so using U.S. industry data for 1977-1997 aggregated by sector. The key findings are that structural/ technological variables have low explanatory power for DEF and that the DEF figures calculated from micro data do not correspond closely to what is obtained from aggregate data. Hence assumptions crucial for RZ's argumentation have not been validated.Growth and finance, financial development, industry structure

Corporate Investment: Does Market Valuation Matter in the Aggregate?

macroeconomics, corporate investment, market valuation

Dependence on external finance: an inherent industry characteristic?

Rajan and Zingales (1998) use U.S. Compustat firm data for the 1980s to obtain measures of manufacturing sectors? Dependence on External Finance (DEF). They take any differences in these measures to be structural/technological and thus applicable to other countries. Their joint assumptions about how to obtain representative values of DEF by sector and about why these values differ fundamentally between sectors have been adopted in additional studies seeking to show that sectors benefit unequally from a country?s level of financial development. However, the assumptions as such have not been examined. The present study, conducted with cyclically adjusted annual measures of DEF derived from U.S. industry data for 1977-1997, attempts to do so using data that are aggregated by sector. We find that those variables that may be regarded as structural/ technological have very low explanatory power, and that the DEF figures calculated from micro data do not correspond closely to what is obtained from aggregate figures. Hence key assumptions on which RZ's argumentation is based could not be validated. --Growth and finance,financial development,industry structure

Performance Measurement under Rational International Overpromising Regimes

Overpromising remains ingrained in international agreements, clouding their expected aggregate outcomes and how to assess the Parties’ performance. This paper provides a theory-based explanation and evaluation of this regime and its consequences, with an empirical application to the Kyoto Protocol. It shows (1) overpromising to be part of a sustainable strategy for electoral success, and (2) there are common determinants of the countries’ overpromising values that characterize the group regime. (3) Targets need to be adjusted for regression-predicted overpromising to yield rationally-expected outcomes. (4) Individual countries’ performance is best identified by deviations of outcomes from their adjusted, not the agreed, targets

Assessing the Competitiveness of International Financial Services in Particular Locations: A Survey of Methods and Perspectives

The International Financial Services (IFS) industry is restructuring internally and by location. This paper outlines the economic forces and analytical methods that may be applied to examine the economic drivers of these processes as ever more cities, particularly in East Asia, are vying to attract IFS providers and their clients. The ICT revolution has made those IFS that can be commoditized footloose in search of cost efficiency. High value-added financial services, however, will continue to be developed and coordinated in a few major IFS centers that have invested in, or capitalized on, regional or global advantages for themselves and their clients. The resulting pattern of functional fragmentation and geographic dispersal may facilitate analyses of the competitiveness of different lines of the financial services business in a particular location by methods such as Data Envelopment and Stochastic Frontier Analysis. These forms of comparative efficiency analysis have recently been questioned and their results reinterpreted

Conditional Indexation Bias in Yields Reported on Inflation-Indexed Securities with Special Reference to UDIBONOS and TIPS

The real rate of return on inflation-indexed government securities is calculated and published as if indexation succeeded perfectly in keeping the real value of coupon and principal payments unchanged. In fact the procedure of indexing to the lagged momentum of the seasonally unadjusted CPI gives rise to three types of indexation bias that may change the expected real value of the future stream of payments in relation to the current par value. These biases are due to i) seasonality, ii) non-seasonal fluctuations in reported inflation rates, and iii) any expected “permanent” changes in future rates of inflation (or the reporting thereof) being capable of creating predictable changes in the real value of the inflation-adjusted principal with the indexation procedure actually in force. They are one more, directly quantifiable, reason why the reported yields do not provide the long-sought definite revelation of the riskless real rate of interest and hence of the expected rate of inflation by comparison with nominal interest rates.

Mexico versus Canada: Stability Benefits from Making Common Currency with USD?

Using a de facto classification of exchange-rate regimes, this paper investigates how the volatility of PPP-GDP per person and per hour of work is associated with such regimes in Mexico and in Canada. It finds that, for Mexico unlike Canada, the macroeconomic volatility left is much greater during periods when the nominal exchange rate with USD changes appreciably than when it is quasi-pegged. However, Mexico cannot safely peg to USD except through formal US-dollarization. Hence this finding suggests that the stability benefits of monetary union are greatest for emerging-market countries inside an economically integrating region and non-existent for financially highly advanced countries