Volume 64, Issue 1

Recent studies provide clear evidence that the quality of telecommunications infrastructure has strong impacts on economic growth. Especially in Germany there is a controversial debate how to stimulate telecommunications investment to foster the introduction of Next Generation Networks. To find appropriate policies to enhance infrastructure investment one has to get a thorough understanding of the determinants of infrastructure investment. Using a panel consisting of 30 OECD countries for the period 1990 to 2011 and taking account of possible non-stationarities in aggregate data, we investigate the main drivers of telecommunications investment on an aggregate level applying dynamic panel data methods. Our main finding is an inverted U-shaped relationship between per capita telecommunications investment and competition.

We apply a structural pricing model to bond market data in order to estimate the default risk for Argentina in 2000/2001. The model explicitly considers short-term and long-term debt service payments and their dependencies by employing compound option theory. In this way, it is possible to take into account both the empirically observed dependency between the term structure of bond spreads and the default risk as well as the finding that the ratio of short-term to long-term debt is of special importance for default risk. The model parameters are estimated using Duan’s (1994) time series-based maximum likelihood approach.

Based on new estimates of public and private capital stocks for 22 OECD countries we study the dynamic effect of public capital on the real gross domestic product using a vector autoregression approach. Whereas most former studies put effort on examining the effects of public capital in a single country, this paper covers a large set of OECD countries. The results show that public capital has a positive effect on output in the short-, medium- and long-run in most countries. In countries where the effect is negative, possible explanations as the different productivities of investments, crowding out or high growth rates of government debt are analyzed.

Sunk firing and hiring costs shelter existent employment. This effect is typically amplified by uncertainty due to an option value of waiting. Thus, if (i) sunk firing costs are high, for example due to an employment protection legislation or due to the loss of firm-specific human capital, or if (ii) (after a future recovery) recruiting a new qualified staff is difficult and recession-related losses are expected to be only transitory, firms have to consider labour hoarding as a relevant strategy. In this environment a moderate temporary employment subsidy will be sufficient to avoid layoffs by firms currently operating at losses. Depending on the size of sunk (re-)hiring costs, cyclical layoffs or even permanent job destruction can be avoided by short run subsidies during the beginning of a recession.