The purpose of this paper is to assess under what conditions exchange rate volatility exerts a positive effect on a firm's labour demand. As the exchange rate volatility increases, so does the value of the export option provided the firm under study is flexible. Flexibility is important because...

Given that a multinational enterprise can react flexibly upon exchange rate movements, international trade flows may be interpreted as an option. An enterprise will opt to export if the profits obtained from exporting under given exchange rate developments are greater than if foreign subsidiary...

The mainstream model of option pricing is based on an exogenously given process of price movements. The implication of this assumption is that price movements are not affected by actions of market participants. However, if we assume that there are indeed impacts on the price movements it no...

In the framework of the industrial economics approach to banking we extend the analysis of hedging against default on loans to the case of two types of credit risk. Standard results on the optimal hedge volume and the hedging effectivity from the single?risk case are shown to carry over to the...

The industrial organization approach to the microeconomics of banking augmented by uncertainty and risk aversion is used to examine credit derivatives and macro derivatives as instruments to hedge credit risk for a large com- mercial bank. In a partial-analytic framework we distinguish between...

This paper considers the statistical analysis of large panel data sets where even after conditioning on common observed effects the cross section units might remain dependently distributed. This could arise when the cross section units are subject to unobserved common effects and/or if there are...

This paper provides a review of the literature on unit roots and cointegration in panels where the time dimension (T), and the cross section dimension (N) are relatively large. It distinguishes between the first generation tests developed on the assumption of the cross section independence, and...

Present value calculations require predictions of cash flows both at near and distant future points in time. Such predictions are generally surrounded by considerable uncertainty and may critically depend on assumptions about parameter values as well as the form and stability of the data...

In this paper we study the impact of more transparency in the interbank market on the volume of bank intermediated loans and on the profitability of the banking business. Transparency is modeled by means of the informational content of publicly observable signals correlated to the random...

The competitive allocation of labor across different sectors of an economy may not be socially optimal when one sector uses foreign capital. We argue that a suitably designed government intervention is required to restrict the sectors to their optimal size and maximize national welfare. Such a...