Foreign Direct Investment and its Determinants in the Chilean Case: Unit Roots, Structural Breaks, and Cointegration Analysis.

This paper examines the major economic and institutional factors underlying the surge in foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to Chile during recent decades. It presents econometric evidence for the 1960-2003 period which indicates that market-based economic reforms and major changes in the institutional-legal status of foreign capital are, in large measure, responsible for the rapid increase in FDI inflows to leading sectors of the Chilean economy. Single break unit root and cointegration analysis suggest that market size, the real exchange rate, the debtservice ratio, the secondary enrollment ratio, physical infrastructure, and institutional reforms such as the elimination of restrictions on profit and dividend remittances and the implementation of a selective debt conversion program are economically significant in explaining the variation in FDI inflows to the country. The paper also addresses the long-term negative effects which rapidly growing profit and dividend remittances may have on the financing of capital formation and the Chilean balance of payments.Akaike Information Criterion (AIC), Chilean economy, cointegration analysis, error correction model, FDI flows, Granger causality test, Johansen and Juselius test, remittances of profits and dividends, Structural breaks and unit roots, Theil inequality coefficient, Zivot and Andrews one-break unit root test

Marx, Globalization, and the Falling Rate of Profit: A Critical Study.

This paper argues that Marx’s views on globalization and its supposed inevitability underwent a substantial evolution and revision after the publication of the Communist Manifesto. His writings relating to India, and particularly China and Russia, show that he was no longer certain that “the country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” (Vol. I, p. 13). In the case of China, a prime example of the Asiatic mode of production, Marx even doubted whether globalization (capitalism) would ever be able to accomplish its historical mission of developing the forces of production and creating the material conditions for a higher mode of production, viz., Communism. While in the Russian case, he seriously entertained the notion that it could bypass the hardships and vicissitudes of capitalism and forge its own unique path to socialism. If accepted, this interpretation represents a serious challenge to the universality and validity of Marx’s materialist conception of history. The paper also addresses the role of the law of the tendency of the falling rate of profit in the geographic expansion of competitive capitalism. It contends that Marx did not believe there was an iron-clad connection between the falling rate of profit and globalization; in addition, it argues that Marx believed that the capitalists’ insatiable search for colonial markets was driven by their desire to overcome recurrent (and growing) realization problems in the home market arising from deficient aggregate demand on the part of both workers and capitalists.Asiatic Mode of Production, Globalization, Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit, Materialist Conception of History, Underconsumptionist Tendencies.

Improved table for cutting and welding

Welding table covered with parallel inverted steel angles improves metal torch cutting of various types and thicknesses

Economic and Institutional Determinants of FDI Flows to Latin America: A Panel Study

This paper estimates a pooled (fixed-effects) FDI investment function that seeks to identify some of the major economic and institutional determinants of FDI flows to nine major Latin American countries during the 1980-2001 period. First, it develops a conceptual framework of analysis that seeks to identify some of the major economic and institutional determinants of FDI. Second, the paper gives an overview of FDI flows to Latin America during the 1990-2006 period, with particular emphasis on their contribution to the financing of gross capital formation. Third, an empirical model for FDI flows to Latin America is outlined and an economic rationale is provided for the included variables and their expected signs. Fourth, the estimates from a panel regression designed to explain the variation in FDI flows to Latin America during the 1980-2001 period suggests that market size (proxied by real GDP), credit provided by the private banking sector, government expenditures on education, the real exchange rate, and the level of economic freedom have a positive and significant effect. On the other hand, public investment spending, the debt-service ratio, and the volatility of the real exchange rate have a negative and significant effect on FDI flows. The panel unit root tests on the residuals of the relevant panel regressions also suggest that there is a stable, long-term relationship among the included variables; i.e., the selected variables in the reported regressions are cointegrated over the relevant time period. Finally, the paper summarizes the major findings and offers some policy prescriptions for attracting FDI flows to the region and enhancing their positive direct and indirect effectsADF Fisher statistic. Economic Freedom Index (EFI), Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Latin America, Panel Unit Root Tests, Pedroni Residual Cointegration Test, Pooled Regression, and Seemingly Unrelated Regression (SUR)

A Panel Unit Root and Panel Cointegration Test of the Complementarity Hypothesis in the Mexican Case, 1960-2001

Using panel data, this paper tests whether public and private capital have a positive and significant effect on aggregate output and labor productivity for Mexico during the 1960-2001 period. The richer information set made possible by the sectorial data enables this study to utilize the methodologically sound “group-mean” Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) procedure developed by Pedroni to generate consistent estimates of the relevant panel variables in the cointegrated production (labor productivity) function. The results suggest that, in the long run, changes in the stocks of public and private capital and the economically active population (EAP) have a positive and economically significant effect on output ( and labor productivity). The period is also broken down into two sub-periods: 1960-81 (state-led industrialization) and 1982-2001 (neoliberal model). The estimate for the public capital variables clearly shows that it had a relatively more important economic effect during the earlier state-led period.Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS), Panel Unit Roots, Panel Cointegration Test, Complementarity Hypothesis, Mexican Labor Productivity

The quantitative measure and statistical distribution of fame

Fame and celebrity play an ever-increasing role in our culture. However, despite the cultural and economic importance of fame and its gradations, there exists no consensus method for quantifying the fame of an individual, or of comparing that of two individuals. We argue that, even if fame is difficult to measure with precision, one may develop useful metrics for fame that correlate well with intuition and that remain reasonably stable over time. Using datasets of recently deceased individuals who were highly renowned, we have evaluated several internet-based methods for quantifying fame. We find that some widely-used internet-derived metrics, such as search engine results, correlate poorly with human subject judgments of fame. However other metrics exist that agree well with human judgments and appear to offer workable, easily accessible measures of fame. Using such a metric we perform a preliminary investigation of the statistical distribution of fame, which has some of the power law character seen in other natural and social phenomena such as landslides and market crashes. In order to demonstrate how such findings can generate quantitative insight into celebrity culture, we assess some folk ideas regarding the frequency distribution and apparent clustering of celebrity deaths.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure