Search results for "TRADE"
showing 10 items of 1475 documents
All that glitters is not gold. The rise of gaming in the COVID-19 pandemic
2020
Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented situation, with incalculable health, social, and economic consequences. At the start of the outbreak, the financial markets collapsed, although not all sectors suffered equally. The gaming and eSports industry is one of those that has suffered the least from the fall in the markets. Millions of people locked up at home, bored, stressed, and anguished, gave gaming and eSports companies growing prominence throughout the first half of 2020. This prominence has elicited interest in analyzing which variables can influence the returns in an industry in better financial health than many others. Using a logit–probit model, this research aim…
Production of innovative, recycled and high-performance asphalt for road pavements
2010
Abstract The paper deals with a specific laboratory study aiming at perfectioning recycled asphalt with high mechanical performance, for surface and structural layers of flexible pavements. The aim of the research was to combine in the same material the maximum possible quantity of recycled asphalt (RA), coming from degraded asphalt layers, together with high structural performance of the recycled mixtures obtained (mainly stability, load spreading properties, rutting and fatigue resistance) that should not be lower, or possibly better than those offered by traditional asphalt mixture, made with virgin binder and aggregate. For this purpose, innovative recycled mixtures, close-graded and wi…
Trade Costs, Trade Balances, and Current Accounts: an application of Gravity to Multilateral Trade
2005
In this paper we test the well-known hypothesis of Obstfeld and Rogoff (NBER Macroeconomics Annual 7777:339–390, 2000) that trade costs are the key to explaining the so-called Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Our approach has a number of novel features. First, we focus on the interrelationship between trade costs, the trade account and the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Second, we use the gravity model to estimate the effect of trade costs on bilateral trade and, third, we show how bilateral trade can be used to draw inferences about desired trade balances and desired intertemporal trade. Our econometric results provide strong support for the Obstfeld and Rogoff hypothesis and we are also able to recon…
Supply chain finance: The role of credit rating and retailer effort on optimal contracts
2021
Abstract Supply chain finance aims at finding the best financing arrangements within a given buyer-supplier dyad. The source of capital can be internal (buyer or supplier) or external (financial institution) to the supply chain. So far, many studies have investigated the optimal mix of the sources of capital; our study aims at contributing to the recent literature that explores the interface of operations and finance extending the supplier-based financing models. As the Covid-19 pandemic hits economic activity, the financial constraints have ever greater importance; knock-on effects of the Covid-19 crisis urges on the critical role of a supply chain that should provide financial resources, …
Who Uses Intermediaries in International Trade? Evidence from Firm-level Survey Data
2013
The present paper uses data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey conducted in Turkey in 2005 to shed light on the firms that use intermediaries in international trade. It lends robust empirical support to recent theories which suggest that indirect exporters are mostly small firms that are not profitable enough to cover the high fixed costs of building an own distribution network abroad. Manufacturers who develop new products are more likely to use trade intermediaries, as are firms that produce low-quality goods. In contrast, neither foreign ownership nor credit constraints are correlated with the choice of export mode. Moreover, firms that rely on trade intermediaries to sell their goods…
Competitiveness and interregional as well as international trade: The case of Catalonia
2010
Recent years have seen a surge of interest among industrial organization economists in using data on international trade flows as windows into competitiveness. For countries that are at least mid sized (e g., Spain), interregional trade tends to be as large as or significantly larger than international trade. The case of Catalonia, a Spanish region, illustrates how ignoring interregional flows can lead to erroneous inferences about a region's external competitiveness. Accounting for Catalonia's interregional as well as international flows shifts what is generally assessed to be a chronic trade deficit in goods into a surplus and changes diagnoses of which Catalan sectors generate external s…
Arms exports and restructuring in the Russian defence industry
2004
The defence industry has been one of the industries most seriously affected by the Russian economic crisis since 1992. The main restructuring policy applied in the industry during the first years of transition was conversion, that is, trying to re-use military resources for productive civil ends. By the mid-1990s, however, such a policy was already considered a failure, and since 1997 the Ministry of Economy has taken over the running of the defence industry and changed the direction of reform. In the summer of 1999 the responsibility for the running of the defence industry was transferred to five independent agencies, and this remains the situation. From 1997 the aim was still to restructu…
International competition in the first wave of globalization: new evidence on the margins of trade
2015
We pose a seemingly ageless question in economic history. To what extent did new entrants in the late nineteenth‐century cotton‐textile industry threaten the customary markets of the European core? Exploiting a newly constructed dataset on textile imports to Spain, we find that as trade costs fell, new rivals began to sell a greater variety of products. Along this dimension, competition can be said to have increased. In response, producers in Europe adjusted the type and number of goods exported. By 1914, specialization mapped onto endowments of skilled labour, capital, and access to raw materials. While firms in new industrializing countries exported low‐end varieties, incumbents in the co…
Cultural Distance and International Trade in Services: A Disaggregate View
2020
Abstract In this paper, we estimate the effect of “cultural distance” on bilateral trade in services. The measure of cultural distance we use is based on scores that reflect country averages of individuals’ attitudes towards inequality, self-orientation, competition, uncertainty, traditions, and indulgence. Controlling for standard ingredients of gravity equations, we show that an aggregate measure of cultural distance has a significantly negative effect on total bilateral services trade. Once we take a more disaggregate view, we find that the strength of this effect differs across various types of services and various aspects of cultural distance.
Industrial productivity and convergence in Chinese regions: The effects of entering the world trade organisation
2011
Abstract Chinese economic growth is tremendously important, both due to how fast it is occurring and also its effect on the world economy as a whole. The size of the economy and the rate at which it is growing has opened up significant internal regional differences that are visible in the trends displayed by industry as the main exponent of this growth. This article analyses regional differences in industrial productivity using a dynamic approach (Malmquist index), that is, by determining regional productivity growth as well as the change in value added inequality from one region to another (sigma and beta convergence). Both approaches distinguish between the periods dating from 1995 to 200…