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Ebook Macroeconomic Risk and Banking Crises in Emerging Market Countries: Business Fluctuations with Financial Crashes

Submitted by wulan on Tue, 08/04/2009 - 03:01

Banking crises are not a strange episode in market economies. Indeed, they have been recurrent in emerging market countries during the last 25 years (see Lindgren et al., 1996; Caprio and Klingebiel, 1997, 1999; and Bordo et al., 2001). As long as banks are major players in modern economies, a banking crisis sparks off multiple adverse consequences including output losses, monetary instability, and other nonmonetary effects associated with information losses. The sequels of widespread banking failures are worse in developing countries because their banks own a larger share of total financial assets than the share owned by banks in industrial countries. Furthermore, the costs of restructuring a bankrupt banking system are inversely related to the degree of poverty of the nations and can be as large as one fourth of the GDP (Goldstein and Turner, 1996; Hoggart et al., 2001).

Notwithstanding being costly, to some extent crises are inevitable because every financial system is risky. An examination of the way banks do business reveals that under a reason ably high level of leverage, banks cannot guarantee the claims of investors if large adverse macroeconomic shocks occur (Dewatripont and Tirole, 1994, chap. 2). The value of the banks’ portfolios may fall because of a weak economic performance of the banks’ borrowers, specially when some credit risk cannot be diversified. A slowdown of the economy bankrupts a higher proportion of borrowers compared to “normal times”, and it is conceivable that the downturn will be severe enough that the banks themselves are in distress and cannot fully repay their creditors. This reasoning along with the greater volatility of emerging market economies can account for the higher vulnerability of these economies to waves of banking failures.

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Ebook A Low Carbohydrate Diet: Treating Obesity Related Disorders In Adults

Submitted by wulan on Sat, 08/15/2009 - 05:06

Since the 1960’s the rate of overweight and obesity in children and adults has been growing at alarming rates within most industrialized countries. Obesity (body mass index [BMI] > 30) in United States adults increased from 22.9% to 30.5% from 1988 to 2000 (Flegal, Carroll, Ogden, & Johnson, 2002).

The positive relationship between obesity and negative psychosocial issues, discrimination, chronic diseases, and morbidity are well documented (Pi-Sunyer, 1999). Many health professionals believe the increase in the rate of obesity is not related to genetics, but instead to a reduction in daily caloric expenditure associated with twentieth century industrial and domestic technology and an increased availability of calorically dense convenience foods (Ebbeling, Pawlak, & Ludwig, 2002).

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PDF Ebook On the Structural Dimension of Competitive Strategy

Submitted by antoq on Mon, 12/07/2009 - 06:26

This paper aims at establishing the existence of systematic differences in the nature of competitive strategies available to individual firms across industries. By means of qualitative content analysis, we extracted a matrix of 76 industries times 12 strategies reported as being characteristic in a series of monographs. Subsequent tests for the statistical significance of observed differences in the typical strategy portfolio show an evident link to an industry’s general reliance on intangible investments, human resources, and inputs from external services.

A dominant attitude found in many popular books on business economics is to present corporate strategy as an almost exclusive feat of ingenuity and leadership performed by the top-level executives of the respective company. 1 In more thorough expositions, this thesis is often complemented by an emphasis on the social aspects of firm organization that bring the creative potential within its workforce to economically productive use. 2 Although we acknowledge that strategic choices are made by individuals within the more or less tightly- woven systems of social organization, our purpose in this paper is to test for the existence of a complementary structural dimension to corporate strategy. Specifically we demonstrate that systematic differences between industries with respect to their characteristic input relationships, have an important and statistically measurable impact on the set of strategic choices typically considered at the company’s executive board.

The core of our view of markets and firm organization is evolutionary. In particular, we share the emphasis on the fundamental diversity in corporate behaviour being a necessary condition for any kind of industrial dynamics. This assertion is rooted in two congruent strands of evolutionary economics. It is a necessary assumption in order to model market competition as a dynamic process driven by the evolutionary interplay of variation, cumulation and selection (e.g. Metcalfe, 1998), and it is also found in the resource-based (Penrose, 1959) or capabilities-based view of the firm (e.g. Teece-Pisano, 1998). All these scholars unequivocally stress the diversity in firm behaviour and the emergence of distinct capabilities as the ultimate source of competitive advantage.

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