This paper deals with two issues. On the one hand, it shows that structural changes in financial markets and in the hedge funds industry make the “light-touch” arguments for regulating hedge funds no longer relevant. On the other hand, pleas for stronger regulation of hedge funds are getting more attention. In the first part of the paper the huge expansion of the industry is outlined and the state of current regulation is highlighted. In the second part an in-depth analysis of risks associated with hedge funds is carried out. It is shown that systemic risk can arise from leverage and from concentration of exposures amongst hedge funds. The part played by hedge funds in the spread of the crisis of structured credit is portrayed. In the third section, the recommendations of professional organisations, regulatory authorities and international institutions are summed up within the framework of risk mapping. This oversight shows the ways to reform: the need for direct regulation, the enhancement of indirect regulation and the overhaul of securitization. The prospective pattern of regulation encompasses macro- and micro-issues, and impinges upon factors of demand and supply. It emphasizes the enhanced role of public regulators and displays the conditions for an effective market discipline performed by long run institutional investors.

In this paper we compare the interregional and international degree of real exchange rate variability of a number of EMS-countries. This allows us to gain insights into the costs of a monetary union. Our major conclusion is that a monetary union among all EMS members would be costly for some of them if it were instituted today. We also find that a monetary union among a «hard-core» of EMS-countries (Benelux, Germany, Denmark) would not involve major costs.

The aim of this paper is to derive and test equilibrium relations between aggregated indices of market power, concentration and foreign trade variables. Encaoua and Jacquemin (1980) established such relationships between different measures of concentration and Lerner indices, but do not take into account international competition.

The first part of this paper provides a brief survey of previous theoretical work concerning the impact of foreign trade on domestic market performance, and derives a set of oligopolistic models for both homogeneous and differentiated goods in a open economy. The second part tests these models using a sample of 31 Belgian industrial sectors in 1973.

Because Belgium is a small open economy, Belgian producers are unable to affect prices on international markets for homogeneous goods (assuming there are no impediments to trade). Thus Belgian firms are expected to be price-takers enjoying no market power whatever the level of concentration. There are, however, situations in which firms in a small open economy could theoretically enjoy some market power. First, if there are impediments to trade, the domestic market can be separated from the foreign market so that domestic producers are able to charge higher prices at home than given world market price (price discrimination). Second, industries manufacturing differentiated goods for which no perfect substitutes are being produced in the rest of the world face a downward-sloping demand curve.

The non-stationarity of many macroeconomic time-series has lead to an increased demand for economic models that are able to generate fragile equilibria. For instance, the natural unemployment rate is allowed to shift over time depending on past unemployment. Actually, many European unemployment series seem to exhibit a unit root or persistence. This view is questioned in the paper using German data on unemployment. A new class of time-series models, the fractionally integrated ARMA model, that allows the difference parameter to take real values, enables the researcher to separate long memory and short memory in the data. It is shown that using this approach the unit root hypothesis is rejected but unemployment exhibits long memory.

The formulation of legal rules is a challenging issue for lawmakers. Tradeoffs are inevitable between providing more guidance by specific rules and enlarging the scope by general rules. Using real options theory we show that the degree of precision should be considered as a degree of flexibility which increases the value of the text. Thus, we derive a normative principle for a draftsman to choose between rules versus standards and to decide when the law should be enacted. In highly innovating environments, delaying the enactment allows lawmakers to obtain more information. Therefore, the lower the degree of precision of the law, the shorter the delay.

Smith advanced a particular view of altruism that should prove to be relevant to the modern literature on the subject. It provided the backbone of his critique of three different theories. These three theories have been reincarnated in three modern approaches : Robert Axelrod’s “egoistic”, Gary Becker’s “egocentric”, and George Herbert Mead and Robert Frank’s ”altercentric” views. Axelrod’s approach repeats the failing, which Smith found in Mandeville’s. Becker’s theory echoes the shortcoming, which Smith identified in Hobbes’. Mead/Frank’s view duplicates the fault, which Smith uncovered in the approach of Francis Hutcheson and other figures of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Metropolization is not a new phenomenon: metropolises have been around for centuries. The prime and permanent function of a metropolis is the coordination of economic activities at a world scale. This function has been applied to different activities in history, depending on technological conditions and economic organization, and consequently it generated different forms of metropolises. The resulting continuities and discontinuities in the metropolises' evolution can be understood in terms of agglomeration economies. In the pre-industrial period, the trading metropolis coordinates long range trade. The industrial revolutions generate new needs for coordination of production and give rise to the manufacturing metropolis. Finally, the information revolution and the emergence of the post-industrial economy create the global metropolis.

Les divers critères qui ont été mis de l’avant pour identifier la structure de substitution-complémentarité des biens de consommation forment, à priori, une littérature sans principe d’unité. Un économiste confronté pour la première fois avec le critère d’Allais (1943) risque fort de le rejeter–comme ont fait ses élèves–pour la simple raison qu’il parait en dehors du courant actuel et donc particulièrement obscur.

In this paper we consider the problem of evaluating the performance of production units in terms of their technical efficiency. Several attempts have been made to solve this problem and a number of different measures appear in the economic literature : the technical efficiency, here used, is defined to be the ability of a productive organization to operate close to, or on the boundary of its production set; the problem will be analyzed only in terms of physical input and output quantities, without any references to prices or costs structures. This concept of technical efficiency is inspired from the work by Koopmans (1951); it received a first empirical application in Farrel (1957). An interesting survey on this topic may be formed in Førsund, Lovell and Schmidt (1980). Measuring efficiency of this kind for any data set requires first to determine what the boundary of the unknown production set can be; and then, to measure the distance between any observed point and this boundary. In this paper, we concentrate on the Farrel method of estimating technical efficiencies. There the production set is typically a convex polyhedron generated from the observed data with small modifications in view of the assumptions on disposabilities of input and/or on disposibilities of outputs. The distances from the efficient frontier are then measured in a radial sense, i.e. with fixed technology.

In this article, we concern ourselves with the modelling of macroeconomic time series within the unit-roots framework. We apply two approaches which seem to be well suited to model business cycles and long-run growth phenomena. First, we apply the Markov-switching model which is built around the idea that a variable may be associated with different regimes. We extend this approach to allow for asymmetries in business cycles and find that with this modification the model identifies regimes which cannot be associated with notions of the business cycle. Second, in a cointegration analysis we examine common stochastic trends and international transmission of macroeconomic shocks. The results show that transient shocks do not vanish, but have long persistent effects. Furthermore, we supplement the cointegration approach with an impulse response analysis and find that there exists a transmission of shocks between countries which indicates great international dependencies in economic activity.

The paper surveys, without proofs, recent axiomatic results on the utilization of common property resources, by this author and some others. Problems discussed include the division of unproduced commodities (the traditional fair division problem), and the cooperative production of a private or public good.

Axioms contrast No Envy with two monotonicity properties, respectively when the population owning the resources in common increases, and when these resources themselves grow.

In this paper, we examine the consequences of delaying retirement in an overlapping generations model with domestic production and parental transfers in the form of grandchild care. We show that a change in age at retirement influences the employment rates of both the young and the old. This interdependency stems from the provision of family transfers. Postponing retirement may increase time devoted to grandchild care transfers, which allows the young to work more on the labor market. We then study the conditions under which this positive family externality holds. Finally, using numerical simulations, we assess the consequences of delaying retirement on labor participation and account for public policy implications.

As has been found in previous studies, the labor market performance of individuals is often affected by demographic determinants like cohort size, age, marriage status and family size. While most of this analysis was studied for earnings, the paper investigates the issue for labor mobility. Mobility is measured here by the number of new employers and the frequency of unemployment of an individual in a particular period. Given the discrete nature of the data, the ordinal probit model and the censored Poisson as the censored negative binomial model was estimated. Since the choice of the statistical model is not clear a priori, various model comparisons are carried out and some new pseudo-R2 measures are proposed and used in the analysis. Results indicate that demographic determinants matter for labor mobility.

Nous présentons dans cet article un modèle d'equilibre général intertemporel qui rend compte de l'influence de l'inflation dans le cycle en France et aux Etats-Unis. L'adoption d'une fonction d'utilité assez générate permet de degager l'importance des élasticités de substitution instantanée et intertemporelle dans la dynamique d'ajustement de l'économie et l'éventuelle présence d'un effet Tobin. La simulation stochastique du modèle et sa comparaison avec les données françaises et américaines montre qu'il permet une reproduction de la dimension réelle du cycle similaire à celle des modèles RBC traditionnels. La reproduction de la dimension nominale du cycle s'avère plus décevante, un étalonnage réaliste du modèle (en particulier de la valeur des élasticités intertemporelles de substitution) ne permet pas de reproduire conjointement les faits stylisés nominaux principaux et les profils de réponses des variables réelles à un choc monétaire.

Following up a number of previous exercises in spatial econometrics, this paper presents, after a short introduction to the characteristics of spatial models, some more results, specifically on

— the estimation of the complete spatial autocorrelation matrix of the random elements in the multiple linear regression case;

— the extension to an interdependent model, of which the identification problem is especially taken up.

This article contributes to the small literature on the relationship between the range of local public services and population size. Using new data on French local jurisdictions, we test the hypothesis that larger jurisdictions provide a broader range of public goods (the so-called “zoo effect”, Oates (1988)). We take advantage of the fact that, in France, many municipalities recently joined together, forming groups of municipalities (or communities) in order to achieve economies of scale. Using spatial econometrics, we find some evidence for the existence of a zoo effect in French communities. In other terms, larger communities provide a broader range of services than smaller ones. The intensity of the zoo effect is higher in urban than in rural areas.

The paper discusses the relation between the justly famous Hotelling’s [1929] paper on stability in competition and the corresponding passages of the often ignored Launhardt’s [1885] book, devoted to mathematical economics. Launhardt is sometimes credited for the anticipation of Hotelling’s spatial model and analysis of oligopolistic competition with product differentiation. The paper argues that Launhardt’s model is in fact significantly more general, in particular in introducing vertical along with horizontal differentiation, and that his analysis of strategic competition is correspondingly finer and more complete. Thus, the earlier author does not appear to be a forerunner of the later, rather the later a successor of the earlier. However, Hotelling did (objectively) innovate, in a significant way, by endogenizing locations as strategic variables, and principally by developing the concept of an abstract characteristics space, which transcends the geographical space.