Adjustment to Target Capital, Finance, and Growth

Does financial development result in capital being reallocated more rapidly to industries where it is most productive? We argue that if this was the case, financially developed countries should see faster growth in industries with investment opportunities due to global demand and productivity shifts. Testing this cross-industry cross-country growth implication requires proxies for (latent) global industry investment opportunities. We show that tests relying only on data from specific (benchmark) countries may yield spurious evidence for or against the hypothesis. We therefore develop an alternative approach that combines benchmark-country proxies with a proxy that does not reflect opportunities specific to a country or level of financial development. Our empirical results yield clear support for the capital reallocation hypothesis.

Contributos da Bolsa de Valores de Cabo Verde para o Crescimento da Economia do País

O trabalho monográfico ora apresentado, pretende evidenciar as potencialidades da Bolsa de Valores de Cabo Verde, no que tange a sua criação, desempenho, evolução, funcionamento e contribuição para a economia do país. O presente trabalho tem também como propósito, estudar de que forma como o mercado de capitais contribui para a economia de um país, o porque das empresas recorrerem a esse mercado, quais os benéficos ao estar cotada numa Bolsa e ainda qual a razão de algumas não estarem inseridas nele. Esse mercado que hoje conquista vários investidores a nível mundial, é considerado como sendo uma opção infalível e de grande relevância para a economia de qualquer país, sendo também uma escolha para poupar e financiar investimentos. Entendemos que, a existência de um Mercado de Capitais num país como o nosso, sendo este um PDM, onde existe forte dependência do estrangeiro e há necessidade de criar atributos capazes de garantir o apoio à sua economia, é um privilégio, pois apesar dos riscos e dificuldades enfrentados encontra-se em activa e sempre com rumo a uma melhoria. Em forma de conclusão, afirmamos que o nosso mercado de capitais além de ser rudimentar, apresenta baixos níveis de liquidez em relação a frequência de transacção de títulos. Pelo que ficamos com alguma reserva quanto aos benefícios que terão os potenciais investidores. The monograph presented here, aims to highlight the potential of the Stock Exchange of Cape Verde, with respect to its creation, performance, development, operation and contribution to the economy. This work also has the purpose to study that how the capital market contributes to the economy of a country, why companies resort to this market, which benefits by being listed on a stock exchange and also the reason some do not being inserted in it. This market that many investors now conquering the world, is considered to be infallible and a choice of great importance to the economy of any country, is also a choice to save and fund investments. We understand that the existence of a capital market in a country like ours, this being a developed country average, where there is heavy reliance on overseas and need to create features that would guarantee support for its economy, it is a privilege, because despite the risks and difficulties faced is in active and always towards an improvement. By way of conclusion, we note that our capital market as well as being rough, has low levels of liquidity in relation to frequency of trading of securities. Therefore we are left with some reservations about the benefits that have the potential investors.

The capital gains from trade are not enough: Evidence from the environmental accounts of Venezuela and Mexico

In principle, a country can not endure negative genuine savings for longperiods of time without experiencing declining consumption. Nevertheless,theoreticians envisage two alternatives to explain how an exporter ofnon-renewable natural resources could experience permanent negativegenuine savings and still ensure sustainability. The first one allegesthat the capital gains arising from the expected improvement in theterms of trade would suffice to compensate for the negative savings ofthe resource exporter. The second alternative points at technologicalchange as a way to avoid economic collapse. This paper uses the dataof Venezuela and Mexico to empirically test the first of these twohypotheses. The results presented here prove that the terms oftrade do not suffice to compensate the depletion of oil reservesin these two open economies.

Capital, wages and growth: Theory and evidence

Returns to scale to capital and the strength of capital externalities play a key role for the empirical predictions and policy implications of different growth theories. We show that both can be identified with individual wage data and implement our approach at the city-level using US Census data on individuals in 173 cities for 1970, 1980, and 1990. Estimation takes into account fixed effects, endogeneity of capital accumulation, and measurement error. We find no evidence for human or physical capital externalities and decreasing aggregate returns to capital. Returns to scale to physical and human capital are around 80 percent. We also find strong complementarities between human capital and labor and substantial total employment externalities.

Macroprudential policy, countercyclical bank capital buffers and credit supply: Evidence from the Spanish dynamic provisioning experiments

We analyze the impact of countercyclical capital buffers held by banks on the supplyof credit to firms and their subsequent performance. Spain introduced dynamicprovisioning unrelated to specific bank loan losses in 2000 and modified its formulaparameters in 2005 and 2008. In each case, individual banks were impacteddifferently. The resultant bank-specific shocks to capital buffers, coupled withcomprehensive bank-, firm-, loan-, and loan application-level data, allow us toidentify its impact on the supply of credit and on real activity. Our estimates showthat countercyclical dynamic provisioning smooths cycles in the supply of credit andin bad times upholds firm financing and performance.

Civil conflict and human capital accumulation: The long-term effects of political violence in Perú

This paper provides empirical evidence of the persistent effect of exposure to political violence on humancapital accumulation. I exploit the variation in conflict location and birth cohorts to identify the longandshort-term effects of the civil war on educational attainment. Conditional on being exposed toviolence, the average person accumulates 0.31 less years of education as an adult. In the short-term,the effects are stronger than in the long-run; these results hold when comparing children within thesame household. Further, exposure to violence during early childhood leads to permanent losses. I alsoexplore the potential causal mechanisms.

Social capital, government expenditures, and growth

Countries with greater social capital have higher economic growth. We show that socialcapital is also highly positively correlated across countries with government expenditureon education. We develop an infinite-horizon model of public spending and endogenousstochastic growth that explains both facts through frictions in political agency whenvoters have imperfect information. In our model, the government provides servicesthat yield immediate utility, and investment that raises future productivity. Voters aremore likely to observe public services, so politicians have electoral incentives to underprovidepublic investment. Social capital increases voters' awareness of all governmentactivity. As a consequence, both politicians' incentives and their selection improve.In the dynamic equilibrium, both the amount and the efficiency of public investmentincrease, permanently raising the growth rate.

Capital formation in machinery and industrialization. Chile 1844-1938

The present paper revisits an old theme in Latin American and Chilean economic history; the early industrialization in the XIX - XX centuries. The difference with previous approaches is the elaboration of new quantitative series of Chilean machinery investment in the long run and its relative prices and composition, in the period when some authors have sited the beginning of the industrialization in the continent. Initial findings, based on the participation of capital formation in machinery imports and GDP, do not reinforce the idea of early industrialization in Chile.

Human capital and regional development

We investigate the determinants of regional development using a newly constructed database of 1569 sub-national regions from 110 countries covering 74 percent of the world s surface and 97 percent of its GDP. We combine the cross-regional analysis of geographic, institutional, cultural, and human capital determinants of regional development with an examination of productivity in several thousand establishments located in these regions. To organize the discussion, we present a new model of regional development that introduces into a standard migration framework elements of both the Lucas (1978) model of the allocation of talent between entrepreneurship and work, and the Lucas (1988) model of human capital externalities. The evidence points to the paramount importance of human capital in accounting for regional differences in development, but also suggests from model estimation and calibration that entrepreneurial inputs and possibly human capital externalities help understand the data.