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After he had only tightly lost the election in July 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Coalición claimed fraud and asserted that unfair conditions during the campaign had diminished his chances to win the presidency. The paper investigates this latter allegation centering on a perceived campaign of hate, unequal access to campaign resources and malicious treatment by the mass media. It further analyzes the mass media’s performance during the conflictual post electoral period until the final decision of the Federal Electoral Tribunal on September 5th, 2006. While the media’s performance during the campaign tells us about their compliance with fair media coverage mechanisms that have been implemented by electoral reforms in the 1990s, the mass media is uncontained by such measures after the election. Thus, their mode of coverage of the postelectoral conflicts allows us to “test” the mass media’s transformation to a more unbiased, social responsible “fourth estate”. Finally the paper scrutinizes whether the claims of fraud and the protests by the leftist movement resulted in lower levels of institutional trust and democratic support. The analysis of the media performance is based on data provided by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Its Media Monitor encompassed more than 150 TV stations, 240 radio stations and 200 press publications. However, there is no comparable data available for the postelectoral period. Interviews with Mexican media experts, which the author has conducted during the postelectoral period, serve as empirical basis for the second part. Data on the public opinions and attitudes of Mexican citizens are taken from the 2007 Latinobarometro, the 2006 Encuesta Nacional and several polls conducted by Grupo Reforma. The results do not support López Obradors notions. Even though a strong party bias is characteristic of the Mexican media system, all findings hint at a continuity of balanced campaign coverage and fair access to mass media publicity. Coverage during the postelectoral period was more polarized, yet both sides remained at least partially open for oppositional views. The claims of fraud, mass protest mobilization and anti-institutional discourse by Lopez Obrador’s leftist movement seem not to have caused significant loss in institutional trust, support of and satisfaction with democracy, even though these levels remain quite low.
Recent models with liquidity constraints and impatience emphasize that consumers use savings to buffer income fluctuations. When wealth is below an optimal target, consumers try to increase their buffer stock of wealth by saving more. When it is above target, they increase consumption. This important implication of the buffer stock model of saving has not been subject to direct empirical testing. We derive from the model an appropriate theoretical restriction and test it using data on working-age individuals drawn from the 2002 and 2004 Italian Surveys of Household Income and Wealth. One of the most appealing features of the survey is that it has data on the amount of wealth held for precautionary purposes, which we interpret as target wealth in a buffer stock model. The test results do not support buffer stock behavior, even among population groups that are more likely, a priori, to display such behavior. The saving behavior of young households is instead consistent with models in which impatience, relative to prudence, is not as high as in buffer stock models. JEL Classification: D91
The Inuit inhabit a vast area of--from a European point of view--most inhospitable land, stretching from the northeastern tip of Asia to the east coast of Greenland. Inuit peoples have never been numerous, their settlements being scattered over enormous distances. But nevertheless, from an ethnological point of view, all Inuit peoples shared a distinct culture, featuring sea mammal and caribou hunting, sophisticated survival skills, technical and social devices, including the sharing of essential goods and strategies for minimizing and controlling aggression.
We develop a utility based model of fluctuations, with nominal rigidities, and unemployment. In doing so, we combine two strands of research: the New Keynesian model with its focus on nominal rigidities, and the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, with its focus on labor market frictions and unemployment. In developing this model, we proceed in two steps. We first leave nominal rigidities aside. We show that, under a standard utility specification, productivity shocks have no effect on unemployment in the constrained efficient allocation. We then focus on the implications of alternative real wage setting mechanisms for fluctuations in unemployment. We then introduce nominal rigidities in the form of staggered price setting by firms. We derive the relation between inflation and unemployment and discuss how it is influenced by the presence of real wage rigidities. We show the nature of the tradeoff between inflation and unemployment stabilization, and we draw the implications for optimal monetary policy. JEL Classification: E32, E50
Acquiring foreign firms far away might be hazardous to your share price: evidence from Germany
(2007)
This paper examines shareholder wealth effects of cross-border acquisitions. In a sample of 155 large acquisitions by German corporations from 1985–2006 international transactions in total do not lead to significant announcement returns. Geography, however, makes a difference: Shareholders of acquiring firms gain 6.5% in cross-border transactions into countries that have a common border with Germany but lose 4.4% in other international transactions. We find proximity to be one of the most important success factors in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, even when we control for firm, deal and country characteristics.
We analyze the effect of committee formation on how corporate boards perform two main functions: setting CEO pay and overseeing the financial reporting process. The use of performance-based pay schemes induces the CEO to manipulate earnings, which leads to an increased need for board oversight. If the whole board is responsible for both functions, it is inclined to provide the CEO with a compensation scheme that is relatively insensitive to performance in order to reduce the burden of subsequent monitoring. When the functions are separated through the formation of committees, the compensation committee is willing to choose a higher pay-performance sensitivity as the increased cost of oversight is borne by the audit committee. Our model generates predictions relating the board committee structure to the pay-performance sensitivity of CEO compensation, the quality of board oversight, and the level of earnings management.
We introduce a multivariate multiplicative error model which is driven by componentspecific observation driven dynamics as well as a common latent autoregressive factor. The model is designed to explicitly account for (information driven) common factor dynamics as well as idiosyncratic effects in the processes of high-frequency return volatilities, trade sizes and trading intensities. The model is estimated by simulated maximum likelihood using efficient importance sampling. Analyzing five minutes data from four liquid stocks traded at the New York Stock Exchange, we find that volatilities, volumes and intensities are driven by idiosyncratic dynamics as well as a highly persistent common factor capturing most causal relations and cross-dependencies between the individual variables. This confirms economic theory and suggests more parsimonious specifications of high-dimensional trading processes. It turns out that common shocks affect the return volatility and the trading volume rather than the trading intensity. JEL Classification: C15, C32, C52
Exchanges in Europe are in a process of consolidation. After the failure of the proposed merger between Deutsche Börse and Euronext, these two groups are likely to become the nuclei for further mergers and co-operation with currently independent exchanges. A decision for one of the groups entails a decision for the respective trading platform. Against that background we evaluate the attractiveness of the two dominant continental European trading systems. Though both are anonymous electronic limit order books, there are important differences in the trading protocols. We use a matched-sample approach to compare execution costs in Euronext Paris and Xetra. We find that both quoted and effective spreads are lower in Xetra. When decomposing the spread we find no systematic differences in the adverse selection component. Realized spreads, on the other hand, are significantly higher in Euronext. Neither differences in the number of liquidity provision agreements nor differences in the minimum tick size or in the degree of domestic competition for order flow explain the different spread levels. We thus conclude that Xetra is the more efficient trading system. JEL Classification: G10, G15
Call-by-need lambda calculi with letrec provide a rewritingbased operational semantics for (lazy) call-by-name functional languages. These calculi model the sharing behavior during evaluation more closely than let-based calculi that use a fixpoint combinator. In a previous paper we showed that the copy-transformation is correct for the small calculus LR-Lambda. In this paper we demonstrate that the proof method based on a calculus on infinite trees for showing correctness of instantiation operations can be extended to the calculus LRCC-Lambda with case and constructors, and show that copying at compile-time can be done without restrictions. We also show that the call-by-need and call-by-name strategies are equivalent w.r.t. contextual equivalence. A consequence is correctness of all the transformations like instantiation, inlining, specialization and common subexpression elimination in LRCC-Lambda. We are confident that the method scales up for proving correctness of copy-related transformations in non-deterministic lambda calculi if restricted to "deterministic" subterms.
This paper extends the internal frank report 28 as follows: It is shown that for a call-by-need lambda calculus LRCCP-Lambda extending the calculus LRCC-Lambda by por, i.e in a lambda-calculus with letrec, case, constructors, seq and por, copying can be done without restrictions, and also that call-by-need and call-by-name strategies are equivalent w.r.t. contextual equivalence.