Financial Integration, Exchange Rate Regimes in CEECs, And Joining the EMU: Just Do It...

Candidate countries of central and eastern Europe (CEECs) are suppose to join the EU in 2004, June, which imply that they will face important challenges in the conduct of macroeconomic policy, in order to be able to enter the ERM-II system and eventually enter the EMU (European Monetary Union). Abandoning an independent monetary policy might entail significant costs for countries, which have succeeded in recovering and are in a process of catching-up. However those costs have probably been exaggerated, and their estimation biased by the traditional optimal currency area criteria. The main criticism against a too strong emphasis on the latter rests on two arguments. The first one is that assessing the trade-off for joining the EMU does not deliver the same conclusion ex ante and ex post. Meanwhile, the degree of financial integration will likely increase dramatically, which in turns will decrease the opportunity cost of loosing the monetary policy for absorbing country specific shocks. In a world of capital mobility, the room left for an independent monetary policy is very narrow, maybe close to zero in small, emerging countries, more vulnerable to speculative attacks than countries in the core. The second argument is more empirical. While the link between the exchange rate regime and the fundamentals is rather weak, the political agenda of joining the EU and subsequently the EMU seems to explain the choice of the exchange rate regime.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40036/3/wp650.pd

The Political Business Cycles in the EU enlarged

The rationale behind the EU enlargement has been extensively debated3. Several authors emphasised the lack of convergence between old and new members, and the risk of jeopardizing economic growth by limiting the room for political adjustment, others considered that the process of enlargement was a way of anchoring the transition towards the market, of stabilising the economies, and of accelerating the speed of convergence and catching-up. The most popular analytical framework used for assessing the pros and cons of the enlargement of the EMU is the OCA (Optimal Currency Area) theory. Basically, the theory tells that in the absence of economic symmetry, two countries are less likely to benefit from a common currency, and that if they do, the task will be easier with flexible markets.More recent studies go further by demonstrating that the process of monetary unification is an endogenous process. Once the political decision of entering a common market and sharing the same currency has been taken, business cycles become more synchronized - thanks to the increase in intra-industry trade amongst others - internal openness increases, capital marketimperfection vanishes, contributing to ease the financing of backward regions.EU area, political business cycles

Investment, Efficiency, and Credit Rationing: Evidence from Hungarian Panel Data

Relying upon a rich and unique panel of Hungarian firms over 7 years, from 1992 up to 1998, this paper estimates simultaneously TFP, Total Factor Productivity, identified as efficiency, and the parameters of a model where investment depends upon internal funds, wages, and sales, as in Prasnikar J. and Svejnar J. (2000). It shows that while real investment is higher in foreign firms, the improvement in efficiency due to investment is significantly higher in Hungarian domestic firms. We test the possibility that this higher than average foreign investment may exacerbate other firms credit constraints by crowding them out of domestic capital markets. Of course one must control for that foreign firms may simply be more profitable and have access to more collateral, hence be a better investment for lending institutions. All firms (foreign, private and domestically owned, and State-owned) are credit rationed, including foreign firms. State-owned firms do not have an investment behaviour compatible with profit maximisation, a result which emphasises the soft budget constraint persistence (but not through the providing with soft credit). For these firms, wages increase together with investment.Investment, credit rationing, soft budget constraint, ownership, transition to a market economy, Hungary

Barter in Russia: Liquidity Shortage versus Lack of Restructuring

The rapid growth of barter is one of the most surprising phenomena in Russia: As a percentage of industrial sales it steadily increased from 5% in 1992 to nearly 55% in 1998. Unknown in CEEC's transition countries, barter is only one aspect of the Russian economy's demonetisation [process, along with dollarisation, growing arrears, and the widespread use of veksels and offsets. Barter is often seen as the consequence of the lack of restructuring, but some authors argue that it is a mechanism used to avoid shutting down potentially viable firms, in a context of market imperfections. The implications differ depending on the analysis chosen: in the first case, an expansionary monetary policy might not be appropriate, while the contrary is true if the demonetisation process jeopardizes potentially good enterprises. This paper aims to assess this phenomenon in the Russian economy. The paper's main contribution to work in this field (reviewed and documented in section II) is to highlight two different rationales for barter. Before studying the latter more closely, section III uses official monthly data collected by the central bank of Russia, the Goskomstat, and the Russian Economic Barometer (REB), to emphasize the macro-economic features of barter in Russia, and, more specifically, the link between monetary policy and bartering activity. It appears that macroeconomic policy and macroeconomic indicators are unable to explain the whole process. In section IV, quarterly statistics for 1995 and 1996 taken from the REB survey of roughly 200 firms make it possible to implement a more qualitative survey. The conclusion is striking: barter is used by potentially viable firms as a way of avoiding closure, while at the same time financing increasing inventories and soft goods in the case of indebted firms who use barter transactions, bank credit and choose to accumulate arrers in order to avoid restructuring.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39655/3/wp271.pd

Second order asymptotics for matrix models

We study several-matrix models and show that when the potential is convex and a small perturbation of the Gaussian potential, the first order correction to the free energy can be expressed as a generating function for the enumeration of maps of genus one. In order to do that, we prove a central limit theorem for traces of words of the weakly interacting random matrices defined by these matrix models and show that the variance is a generating function for the number of planar maps with two vertices with prescribed colored edges.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009117907000000141 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Inference on a Generalized Roy Model, with an Application to Schooling Decisions in France

This paper considers the identification and estimation of an extension of Roy's model (1951) of occupational choice, which includes a non-pecuniary component in the decision equation and allows for uncertainty on the potential outcomes. This framework is well suited to various economic contexts, including educational and sectoral choices, or migration decisions. We focus in particular on the identification of the non-pecuniary component under the condition that at least one variable affects the selection probability only through potential earnings, that is under the opposite of the usual exclusion restrictions used to identify switching regressions models and treatment effects. Point identification is achieved if such variables are continuous, while bounds are obtained otherwise. As a result, the distribution of the ex ante treatment effects can be point or set identified without any usual instruments. We propose a three-stages semiparametric estimation procedure for this model, which yields root-n consistent and asymptotically normal estimators. We apply our results to the educational context, by providing new evidence from French data that non-pecuniary factors are a key determinant of higher education attendance decisions.Roy model, nonparametric identification, exclusion restrictions, schooling choices, ex ante returns to schooling

Computable infinite dimensional filters with applications to discretized diffusion processes

Let us consider a pair signal-observation ((xn,yn),n 0) where the unobserved signal (xn) is a Markov chain and the observed component is such that, given the whole sequence (xn), the random variables (yn) are independent and the conditional distribution of yn only depends on the corresponding state variable xn. The main problems raised by these observations are the prediction and filtering of (xn). We introduce sufficient conditions allowing to obtain computable filters using mixtures of distributions. The filter system may be finite or infinite dimensional. The method is applied to the case where the signal xn = Xn is a discrete sampling of a one dimensional diffusion process: Concrete models are proved to fit in our conditions. Moreover, for these models, exact likelihood inference based on the observation (y0,...,yn) is feasable