... The government understands the value of these alternative choices to the public and importance of having access to safe, quality ... to regulate traditional Chinese medicine so that the therapeutic benefits of it can be provided to those Ontarians who wish to take ...
Story - acrobat - 06/09/2008 - 12:50 - 0 comments - 0 attachments
For the last two decades, we have observed a remarkable increase in outsourcing in the world. Two strands of literature investigating this ongoing phenomenon have emerged. The first strand takes the view that the increase in outsourcing emanates from the decline in transaction costs in connection with the intensified use of information technology (see, for instance, Abraham and Taylor, 1996). The main research question in this literature concerns the impact of outsourcing activities on productivity. In the second strand, the trade-related aspects of outsourcing have attracted increasing attention (see, for instance, Feenstra and Hanson, 1996, 1999). The main subject here is the impact of outsourcing on wage inequality for skilled and unskilled workers. The former strand centers on a firm’s decision to contract out business activities and does not distinguish between international and domestic outsourcing (we have coined the term “general outsourcing” to describe this) or between skilled and unskilled labor productivity, whereas the latter strand deals with the role of mainly international outsourcing as a mechanism for moving unskilled-intensive production to unskilled-abundant countries, thereby affecting wage differentials within industries.
Is there any link between these two strands? In this paper, we argue that, given the nature of competitive economies, the skilled and unskilled labor productivity impacts of general and international outsourcing and their wage differentials may be related. Our idea is that either general outsourcing or international outsourcing may be biased toward skilled labor productivity, and thus the biased impacts on skilled labor productivity may result in wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers in labor markets. We attempt to empirically investigate such linkages based on six-digit NAICS US manufacturing industries. We also examine what type of outsourcing is more significant in explaining the linkages.
In this paper we examine how firms make capital structure decisions in the context of acquisitions, equity issues, and share buybacks. In particular, we ask two questions. First, are capital structure decisions consistent with the predictions of the “best” empirical capital structure models, i.e. the models that have the largest predictive power of leverage ratios in the literature ? Second, can deviations from these predictions be explained by market timing?
Due to the existence of large and persistent global current account imbalances in the last two decades, economists and policy makers have paid more attention to the issue of current account. Determinants of current account balances are of considerable interest in open economy macroeconomics. The behaviour of the current account balance contains important information about an economy's economy performance, and also provides valuable macroeconomic policy recommendations.
