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201. The Value of International Education to U.S. Business and Industry Leaders: Key Findings from a Survey of CEOs

Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Institute of International Education
Abstract:
Study abroad experience is widely recognized among senior management as having the potential to cultivate valued skills and desirable personal qualities in new recruits. In a recent survey, ninety percent of senior management who reported studying abroad during their own careers also reported a hiring or promotion strategy that actively sought out and rewarded study abroad experience. This suggests that individuals with personal experience studying abroad are more likely to place a higher value on the study abroad experience of a potential employee. However, appreciation of study abroad experience in recruitment is not limited to management with personal study abroad experience: 60 percent of all respondents reported that the hiring and promotion strategy of their companies acknowledge the importance of a study abroad experience.
Topic:
Education, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and Labor Issues
Political Geography:
United States

202. Flexible Employment, Flexible Families, and the Socialization of Reproduction

Author:
Wolfgang Streeck
Publication Date:
11-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
The progress of markets erodes traditional relations of social solidarity that are essential for the stability and performance of societies. As markets advance, pressures build on the state to replace informal social obligations with formal ones. Regulation may fail, however, which tends to give rise to demands for public services substituting for private reciprocity and compliance with institutionalized normative expectations. As a result, demands on public finances increase. The paper demonstrates this sequence by describing how the pressures and attractions of labor markets undermined the “Fordist family” of the 1960s; how the complex interaction between increasingly more flexible employment and loosening family structures resulted in declining fertility in a variety of modern societies; and how providing for societies' physical reproduction increasingly became a matter of public policy in some countries but not in others. Parallels are drawn to active labor market policy and the recent rescue of the money-making industry by Western governments. Moreover, special attention is paid to differences between countries, especially Sweden on the one hand and the United States on the other, in particular to the conditions under which governments apparently can afford not to heed calls for ever deeper and ever more expensive intervention in social relations. Exploring the increasingly negative relationship between fertility and “familialism,” the paper also shows how advanced commodification of labor and individualization of social life has effectively made it impossible to return to traditional social arrangements, such as the postwar family.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, Labor Issues, Sociology, and Governance
Political Geography:
United States

203. The global financial crisis: will state emergency measures trigger international investment disputes?

Author:
Anne Van Aaken and Jürgen Kurtz
Publication Date:
03-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
Several developed countries have introduced emergency measures to mitigate the effects of the Global Financial Crisis, including Australia, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Although the measures taken are still undergoing changes by the executive branch and are thus a “moving target”, our survey reveals early evidence of differentiation between foreign and domestic actors in the emergency plans adopted by this sample grouping. It is this differentiation that may give rise to liability as breaching guarantees against discrimination of foreign investors under international investment law.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, International Affairs, Foreign Direct Investment, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Ireland

204. The NWIMBY Effect (No Walmart in My Backyard): Big Box Stores and Residential Property Values

Author:
Kristina M. Lybecker, Daniel K.N. Johnson, Nicole Gurley, Alex Stiller-Shulman, and Stephen Fischer
Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Department of Economics and Business, Colorado College
Abstract:
Recent Wal-Mart openings have been accompanied by public demonstrations against the company's presence in the community, asserting (among other things) that their presence is deleterious to residential property values. Consider the following review of the film “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”: At the start of intrepid muckraker Robert Greenwald's awareness-building documentary, Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott addresses an ecstatic crowd of employees to announce yet another year of unparalleled growth for the world's largest store. And though this success also makes Wal-Mart a bigger target of envy and bad feelings, he exhorts the crowd to stay the course: Wal-Mart is vital to families struggling to get by on a budget; to the suppliers who depend on Wal-Mart to sell their goods; and to the “associates” who depend on Wal-Mart for a paycheck. But is it possible that rather than serve these dependents, Wal-Mart is actually destroying them? How can a store that drives down property values and kills off mom-and-pop businesses that can't afford to compete with Wal-Mart's high-volume, low-price strategy be good for a community?
Topic:
Economics and Markets
Political Geography:
United States

205. Three Lessons from the Financial Crisis

Author:
John H. Makin
Publication Date:
09-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
More than two years have passed since the U.S. housing bubble burst. That event ushered in a financial crisis that was not only intense but also stunning. So stunning in fact, that in August of last year, just a month before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the global economy was close to a crisis worthy of comparison with the Great Depression, yet neither the markets nor the Federal Reserve had much of an inkling of what was to come. The Standard and Poor's (S) 500 Index had come down to about 1,300 from its October 2007 high of 1,576. Positive growth had just been reported for the U.S. economy during the second quarter of 2008 at an annual rate of 2.8 percent (later revised down to 1.5 percent). Almost one percentage point of that growth came from U.S. consumption, and government spending also contributed. The wave of relief after the Bear Stearns scare in March 2008 had provided a nice boost to the economy and to markets. That boost was further enhanced by the substantial contribution to growth from net exports (2.9 percentage points) thanks to what was, then, continuing strength in the global economy, especially in China, which had reported blistering 10.1 percent year-over-year growth in the second quarter of 2008. These and other positive components more than offset a drag from inventories and residential investment. In short, the real economy had not shown much evidence of damage emanating from the chaos that was churning in the financial sector.
Topic:
Economics, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Markets, Monetary Policy, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States and China

206. Wall Street Is Dancing Again

Author:
John H. Makin
Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research
Abstract:
Wall Street is dancing again to the music of a sharp rise in stock prices. The question that remains is whether Main Street, currently languishing in a sad world of job losses, unavailable credit, and weakened balance sheets, will get to join the party. To put the question more precisely, will the “adverse feedback loop” that saw a financial collapse last fall that crushed the real economy work in reverse, so that a financial bounce boosts the real economy in coming quarters? The jury is still out on this important question.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States

207. Beyond Market Forces: Regulating the Global Security Industry

Author:
James Cockayne (ed.)
Publication Date:
07-2009
Content Type:
Book
Institution:
International Peace Institute
Abstract:
In late 2008, seventeen states, including the US, UK, China, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others, endorsed the Montreux Document on Pertinent International Legal Obligations and Good Practices for States related to Operations of Private Military and Security Companies during Armed Conflict (2008). This provides important guidance to states in regulating private military and security companies (PMSCs). However, there is a need to do more, to provide increased guidance to the industry and ensure standards are enforced.
Topic:
Conflict Prevention, Security, and Markets
Political Geography:
Afghanistan, United States, China, and Iraq

208. Square pegs in round holes: How the Farm Bill squanders chances for a pro-development trade deal

Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Oxfam Publishing
Abstract:
When trade ministers from 35 countries gather in Geneva at the World Trade Organization [WTO] for what is being billed yet again as a last-ditch attempt to forge a Doha trade deal, they will be forced to meet an unwelcome guest: the 2008 US Farm Bill. With a host of newly bolstered subsidies that will hurt farmers in developing countries, as well as higher farm payment rates, squeezing the new Farm Bill into the 'boxes' defined under existing WTO obligations will be a remarkable trick. That speaks poorly about the willingness of the US to accept new disciplines on agricultural subsidies, and demonstrates that the US Congress is unwilling - thus far - to take the necessary steps for a new trade agreement that would prioritize development.
Topic:
Agriculture, International Organization, International Trade and Finance, Markets, and World Trade Organization
Political Geography:
Geneva and United States

209. Political Disagreement, Lack of Commitment and the Level of Debt

Author:
Davide Debortoli and Ricardo Nunes
Publication Date:
07-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
We analyze how public debt evolves when successive policymakers have different policy goals and cannot make credible commitments about their future policies. We consider several cases to be able to disentangle and quantify the respective effects of imperfect commitment and political disagreement. Absent political turnover, imperfect commitment drives the long-run level of debt to zero. With political disagreement, debt is a sizeable fraction of GDP and increasing in the degree of polarization among parties, no matter the degree of commitment. The frequency of political turnover does not produce quantitatively relevant effects. These results are consistent with much of the existing empirical evidence. Finally, we find that in the presence of political disagreement the welfare gains of building commitment are lower.
Topic:
Economics, Markets, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
United States

210. Optimal Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Customer Markets

Author:
David M. Arseneau and Sanjay K. Chugh
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
A growing body of evidence suggests that ongoing relationships between consumers and firms may be important for understanding price dynamics. We investigate whether the existence of such customer relationships has important consequences for the conduct of both long-run and short-run policy. Our central result is that when consumers and firms are engaged in long-term relationships, the optimal rate of price inflation volatility is very low even though all prices are completely flexible. This finding is in contrast to those obtained in first-generation Ramsey models of optimal fiscal and monetary policy, which are based on Walrasian markets. Echoing the basic intuition of models based on sticky prices, unanticipated inflation in our environment causes a type of relative price distortion across markets. Such distortions stem from fundamental trading frictions that give rise to long-lived customer relationships and makes pursuing inflation stability optimal.
Topic:
Economics and Markets
Political Geography:
United States