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DEREGULATION AND CONVERGENCE OF BANKING:THE EU EXPERIENCE.
In the last two decades, the European Union has undergone a major reduction in banking regulation. This paper investigates whether this deregulatory process was associated with increasing similarity, or convergence, of banking industries across the European Union. It reports that the deregulation at the national level and the opening of banking markets to international competition led to convergence, or greater similarity, of the banking industries' main indicators of bank profitability or earning patterns, but not necessarily their asset-liability management practices. Overall, the deregulatory process appears to explain most of the changes that occurred in the dispersion of banking structure across the European Union.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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ECONOMIC POVERTY IN FINLAND 1971-2004.
We examined trends in the economic poverty in Finland using two data sources, the Income Distribution Survey and the Consumption Expenditure Survey. We drew on the recent literature on poverty analysis to analyse a range of poverty measures, using dominance conditions to rank the distributions of living standards. Whilst the total numbers in poverty during the 1987—2004 on various definitions rose markedly, the composition of the poor also changed significantly. There is little doubt that unemployed households are the most vulnerable group of the population. Another vulnerable group is families with youngest children less than seven years.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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IN A HERD? HERDING WITH COSTLY OBSERVATION AND AN UNKNOWN NUMBER OF PREDECESSORS.
We consider a sequential decision to adopt/not adopt a technology in a herding environment with costly observation. The novelty compared to the previous models on herding with costly observation, such as Kultti and Miettinen (2006a), is that the agents do not know how many other agents have been in the same situation earlier. It turns out that herding no longer arises deterministically. We show that when observation costs are low there exists a unique symmetric pure strategy equilibrium where all agents observe the actions of two immediate predecessors in order to find out whether they are in a herd or not.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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ON THE IDENTIFICATION OF MONETARY (AND OTHER) SHOCKS.
The present DSGE model spells out explicitly the instrumentation of monetary policy. The interest rate is determined depending on supply and demand for reserves which are affected by fundamental shocks. Unexpected changes in the monetary conditions of the economy are interpreted as monetary shocks and have the usual effects on economic activity. This view of monetary policy may have important consequences for empirical research: In the model, contemporaneous correlations between interest rates, prices and output are due to the simultaneous effect of all fundamental shocks. We provide an example where these contemporaneous correlations may be misinterpreted as a Taylor rule.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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OWNER-OCCUPIED HOUSING AND DEMAND FOR RISKY FINANCIAL ASSETS: SO ME FINNISH EVIDENCE.
This paper studies the linkage between owner-occupied housing and portfolio choice. Using a theoretical simulation model with Finnish asset return data we find that a leveraged position in housing has a clear negative effect on the share of stocks in a mean-variance efficient portfolio. The second part of the paper studies how owner-occupied housing actually affects households' financial portfolios using Finnish household data. The main result indicates that the more valuable house a homeowner resides in, at a given level of net wealth, the less likely it is to own stocks. However, it seems that housing has only a small effect if any on the share of financial assets a household invests in stocks conditional on stockholding.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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PREFERENCES AS HUMAN CAPITAL: RATIONAL CHOICE THEORIES OF ENDOGENOUS PREFERENCES AND SOCIOECONOMIC CHANGES.
We discuss the theoretical and empirical foundations of modern economic theories of cultural transmission. The importance of cultural factors in shaping economic and social transformations has been the focus of a long-standing debate in social sciences since the XIXth Century. Neoclassical economics has remained at the marging of this debate. However, there has been a recent surge of interest among economists for cultural factors. The economic models of cultural transmission borrow the main ideas from the anthropological literature, but endogeneize the efforts parents exert to transmit specific cultural variants or preference parameters. We distinguish between paternalistic models where parents use their own values to evaluate their children's utility, and non-paternalistic or utilitarian models in which parents choose their children's preferences to maximize the children's well-being. We discuss recent examples, focusing in particular on corruption, patience, and work ethic.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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SADDLES AND BIFURCATIONS IN AN OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS ECONOMY WITH A RENEWABLE RESOURCE.
We incorporate a renewable resource as a factor of production and store of value into an overlapping generations model. We characterize dynamics and stability of steady state equilibria by introducing the concave resource growth function. The nature of equilibria in the presence of 'well-behaved' resource stock growth depends on the size of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution in consumption. If it is at least half, but not exactly one, steady states are saddle points. For intertemporal elasticity less than one half we use a parametric example with logistic growth to demonstrate the existence of stable equilibria (indeterminacy) and a subcritical bifurcation.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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WAGES, EMPLOYMENT AND FUTURES MARKETS.
This paper places the competitive firm under output price uncertainty in a standard efficiency wage model, wherein the work effort of labor depends on the wage rate set by the firm. Irrespective of the availability of a commodity futures market, we show that the Solow condition holds in that the equilibrium effort-wage elasticity is unity. The optimal wage rate is preference-free and independent of the underlying output price uncertainty under the efficiency wage hypothesis. Furthermore, we show that the introduction of the commodity futures market induces the firm to hire more labor and thereby produce more output if the firm is sufficiently risk averse.ABSTRACT FROM AUTHORCopyright of Finnish Economic Papers is the property of Finnish Economic Papers and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract.
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