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on Central and Western Asia |
| By: | Roy, Tirthankar |
| Abstract: | The paper contributes to the debate on relative levels of living in the early modern world by estimating the income of and probable range of income growth in Bengal before European colonization. The exercise yields two conclusions, (a) average income in Bengal was significantly smaller than that in contemporary Western Europe, and (b) there is insufficient basis to infer either growth or decline in average income in the 50 years before colonization and the century after. The former conclusion is relevant to the discussion on the origins of international economic inequality, or ‘divergence’, and the latter is relevant to the scholarship that considers the economic effects of colonialism. |
| Keywords: | Colonial India; Comparative development; National income |
| JEL: | N10 N15 |
| Date: | 2009–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:7522&r=cwa |
| By: | Sule Sahin; Adem Yavuz Elveren |
| Abstract: | The returns from individual accounts in pension schemes are subject to fluctuations in capital markets. This increases income uncertainty for the beneficiary and exposes individuals to the risk of fluctuations in the economy in general, and of the stock market in particular. This fact has recently gotten considerable attention from policymakers. A minimum pension guarantee is a way to avoid this pitfall by providing a minimum annuity regardless of the actual investment performance of individual accounts. In this study, we present a cost analysis of a minimum benefit guarantee mechanism for the Individual Pension System in Turkey, a privately managed defined contribution scheme which was introduced in 2003 as a complement to the traditional pay-as-you-go system. We examine the cost estimates and the probability of guaranteed payoffs under various economic and demographic assumptions. |
| Keywords: | Contribution, Individual Pension System, Pension Guarantees, Turkey |
| Date: | 2009 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:uta:papers:2009_13&r=cwa |
| By: | Elena Meschi (CEE, Institute of Education, University of London); Erol Taymaz (Department of Economics, Middle East Technical University, Ankara); Marco Vivarelli (Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano; Institute for the Study of Labour (IZA), Bonn; Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena; Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation (CSGR), Warwick University) |
| Abstract: | In this paper we report evidence on the relationship between trade openness, technology adoption and the relative demand for skilled labour in the Turkish manufacturing sector, using firm level data over the period 1980-2001. In a dynamic panel data setting, using a unique database comprising data from 17,462 firms, we estimate an augmented cost share equation whereby the wage bill share of skilled workers in a given firm is related to international exposure and technology adoption. Both at the sectoral and firm level, it emerged that R&D expenditures are positive and significantly related to skill upgrading. This result supports the skill biased technological change argument in the case of a middle-income country such as Turkey. Moreover, the sectoral analysis revealed that increasing export towards more industrialised countries (mainly the E.U.) tends to shift the production toward less skill-intensive activities. While this result is consistent with the HOSS theorem, on the other hand import penetration from more developed countries turns out to facilitate the adoption of new technologies embodied in capital and intermediate goods, thus shifting the production toward more skill-intensive technologies. This result is confirmed by the firm level analysis that finds a positive impact of technological transfer from abroad, foreign ownership and export on the demand for skills, highlighting the role of increasing globalisation in fostering skill upgrading within firms. Our microdata also allowed us to investigate the direct impact of import flows in shaping the relative demand for skills. The results showed that those firms belonging to the sectors that most raised their inputs from more developed countries also experienced a higher increase in their labour cost share of skilled workers. This finding is a further support to the hypothesis that imports from industrialised countries imply a transfer of new technologies, in turn leading to a higher demand for skilled labour. |
| Keywords: | globalization, technology transfer, skills, panel data, GMM-SYS |
| JEL: | F16 O15 O33 |
| Date: | 2009–11–18 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:jrp:jrpwrp:2009-097&r=cwa |
| By: | Ramalingam, Abhijit |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the rationality of status concerns amongst co-workers and the impact of such rational status concerns on a firm's profits. We find that it is individually rational for agents in a firm to develop and exhibit status concerns. Workers are, by their choices of status concerns, able to transfer surplus from the the rm to themselves. Further, relative concerns are shaped by the relative strengths and weaknesses of the workers in the firm. Finally, a firm's profit is reduced (relative to the benchmark moral-hazard model) by workers who exhibit such "endogenous" relative concerns. |
| Keywords: | status; incentives; endogenous preferences; surplus transfer; profits |
| JEL: | D86 L14 M51 M52 |
| Date: | 2009–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:18759&r=cwa |
| By: | Onur Olgun (Department of International Trade and Finance, Izmir University of Economics); Ý. Hakan Yetkiner (Department of Economics, Izmir University of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper aims to compare the effectiveness of constant hedge ratio estimates (obtained through OLS and VECM methods) and time-varying hedge ratio estimates (obtained via M-GARCH method) for future contracts of ISE-30 index of TurkDEX. We use portfolio variance reduction as the measure of hedging effectiveness. We find that time-varying hedge ratios outperform the constant ratios for both in-sample and out-of-sample datasets and provide the minimum variance values. |
| Keywords: | Futures Pricing, Hedging, MGARCH, Hedging Effectiveness |
| JEL: | G13 |
| Date: | 2009–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:izm:wpaper:0907&r=cwa |