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The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyse how different exchange rate regimes affect the links between monetary fundamentals and exchange rates in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Using the Pedroni method for panel cointegration, mean group and pooled mean group and the panel vector autoregressive technique, this study empirically investigates whether monetary fundamentals impact exchange rates similarly in both regimes. Thus, the author acquires needed and credible empirical data.

The result suggests that the impact is dissimilar. In the floating regime, an increase in relative money supply and relative real output depreciates and appreciates the nominal exchange rate in the long run whereas in the non-floating regime, the evidence is mixed. Thus, exchange rates bear a theoretically consistent relationship with monetary fundamentals across SSA countries with floating regimes but fails under non-floating regimes. This provides evidence that regime choice is important if the relationship between monetary fundamentals and exchange rates in SSA are to be theoretically consistent.

This study empirically incorporates the dissimilarities in exchange rate regimes in a panel framework and study the links between exchange rates and monetary fundamentals. The focus on how exchange rate regimes might alter the equilibrium relationships between exchange rates and monetary fundamentals in SSA is a pioneering experiment.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework conceptualizing the relative openness of a supply chain and its impact on organizational performance.

The literature on system theory and the attributes of supply chain management are used to develop a framework describing the relative openness of a supply chain.

Different supply chain terminologies – such as adaptive supply chain network, best value supply chain, and open inter-organizational system – partially draw upon the basic premises of an open system. The relative openness of a supply chain and, consequently, the dynamics of different supply chain attributes remain understudied. This supports the idea that an open system perspective of the supply chain is imperative to improve the understanding of the influence of supply chain openness on organizational performance.

The conceptual framework posits that different supply chain attributes affect the openness of supply chain to a varying degree which ultimately influences the organizational performance. The proposed framework and research propositions will serve as a springboard for conducting future empirical studies.

The effect of the relative supply of Hispanics on the relative earnings of Blacks in US labour markets is examined. The data source for the empirical estimates is the March 1988 Current Population Survey. The results support one of the key features of the Becker model of discrimination, namely, that the extent of discrimination is affected by relative supply. Results also indicated that an increase in the number of Hispanics in a local labour market will reduce the income of otherwise comparable Blacks. However, if the Black labour supply in a local labour market is sufficiently large, a given percentage increase in the relative supply of Blacks will have a more negative impact on average Black earnings than would the same percentage increase in the number of Hispanics.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effect of an increase in the relative supply of immigrants on natives’ task reallocation, with a focus on Germany. Specifically, it investigates whether natives, as a response to increased immigration, re-specialise in communication-intensive occupations, where they arguably have a comparative advantage due to language proficiency.

The analysis uses regional data from the German Labour Force Survey between 2002 and 2014. To derive data on job tasks requirements, it employs the US Department of Labor’s O*NET database, the results of which are tested through a sensitivity analysis using the European Working Condition Survey and the Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies data sets.

The paper finds that indeed German workers respond to increasing immigration by shifting their task supply and providing more communication relative to manual tasks. Importantly, the decrease in the supply of communication tasks is stronger and more robust than the increase in the supply of manual tasks, pointing to a potential displacement effect taking place between natives and immigrants, alongside task reallocation. This would suggest that countries with relatively more rigid labour markets are less responsive to immigration shocks. Moreover, it suggests that labour market rigidity can minimise the gains from immigration and exacerbate employment effects.

The paper not only investigates task reallocation as a result of immigration in a different institutional context and labour market functioning, but the results feed into broader policy and scholarly discussions on the effects of immigration, including questions about how the institutional context affects labour market adjustment to immigration, worker occupational mobility in a more rigid labour markets and the fine balance needed between flexibility and rigidity.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate skilled labor demand determinants in Brazil, considering alternatives explanations: changes in relative wages, non-homothetic technology output growth and skill-biased technical change.

This study relies on a rich and unique matched employer-employee data set for manufacturing sector, from 1996 to 2003. The analysis considers a translog functional form labor demand system estimated using seemingly unrelated regression and instrumental variables to control for possible measurement errors and wages and output endogeneity.

The demand function estimates suggest that: labor demand underlying technology is non-homothetic, research and development investment is biased toward skilled workers, the non-homothetic technology is not skill biased so output changes contributed positively for skilled labor increase, relative wages played a significant role and international trade has little explanatory power explaining labor demand shifts.

This is the first paper that considers alternative explanations for the increase in the demand of skilled workers for manufacturing in Brazil simultaneously: changes in relative wages, output changes with non-homothetic technology, skill-biased technical change and, to a lesser extent, international trade. The study challenges current empirical evidence that considers trade and trade liberalization as the main factor explaining labor demand shifts.

Investment returns from property derive from rental income and change in value, and a property's value is a function of the current rent and the expected future rent. So, ultimately, investment returns derive from rent, and successful investment will depend on an understanding of the principles and forces which explain the market's determination of rental value. This paper explains the significance of supply elasticity to the determination of rental value and investigates the probable elasticities of the four main types of investment property. It concludes that, due to the very inelastic supply of farmland and prime High Street shops, trends in rental growth will reflect the profitability of occupation whereas, in general, the rental value of office and industrial property will tend to reflect development costs, due to their relatively elastic supply. The article investigates how far such predictions appear to be supported by evidence and briefly discusses the relative impact of obsolescence on the four property types.

This paper aims to empirically investigate the sources of real exchange rate fluctuations in Egypt using structural vector autoregression (SVAR). The data covers the period between 1980 and 2016, where exchange regime has been changed more than once.

This paper investigates the source of real exchange rate fluctuations for the period between 1980 and 2016 using the SVAR method. The SVAR method will incorporate real gross domestic product (GDP), real effective exchange rate (REER) and price level in a multidimensional equations system. However, impulse response function (IRF) and error variance decompositions (EVDC) will be generated by the system to have a behavioral insight of real exchange rate in response to economic shocks.

The IRF and EVDC results indicate a significant impact of demand shocks over the real exchange rate relative to supply shocks and monetary shocks in the period between 1980 and 2016. On the other hand, monetary shocks will have a negligible effect on the real exchange rate in the short run and converging to its previous level in the covering period of the study.

In the best of the authors' knowledge, the topic of the source of the real exchange rate fluctuations in Egypt has not been discussed in a wide range due to the lack of time series data. However, this study provides constructed data for REER for Egypt with the published method in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Furthermore, the study involves theoretical and econometric modeling to ensure the reliability of the economic results.

The economic literature starting with Borjas (2001) suggests that immigrants are more flexible than natives in responding to changing sectoral, occupational and spatial shortages in the labor market. The purpose of this paper is to study the relative responsiveness to labor shortages by immigrants from various origins, skills and tenure in the country vis-à-vis the natives, and how it varied over the business cycle during the Great Recession.

Using data primarily from the EU Labor Force Survey and the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions, the authors calculate a wage-based measure of labor shortages in the first stage while in the second stage the authors use them in a first-differences fixed-effects model as a regressor to explain changes in immigrants’ distribution across sectors, occupations and countries vis-à-vis the natives.

The authors show that immigrants have responded to changing labor shortages across EU member states, occupations and sectors at least as much and in many cases more flexibly than natives. This effect is especially significant for low-skilled immigrants from the new member states or with the medium number of years since migration, as well as with high-skilled immigrants with relatively few (one to five) or many (11+) years since migration. The relative responsiveness of some immigrant groups declined during the crisis years (those from Europe outside the EU or with 11 or more years since migration), whereas other groups of immigrants became particularly fluid during the Great Recession, such as those from new member states.

The results suggest that immigrants may play an important role in labor adjustment during times of asymmetric economic shocks, and support the case for well-designed immigration policy and free movement of workers within the EU. Some limitations include alternative interpretations of the wage premium as our measure of shortage, as well as possible endogeneity of this measure in the model.

The results provide new insights into the functioning of the European Single Market and the roles various immigrant groups play for its stabilization through labor adjustment during the times of uneven economic development across sectors, occupations and countries.

This paper aims to theoretically find out whether investments could close the formal-informal wage gap in India.

The paper builds a general equilibrium model of a developing economy with a large informal sector and a capital-intensive formal sector with sector-specific capital and incorporates endogenous demand.

With homothetic preferences, a small initial wage premium and elastic relative demand, investment in the formal sector is likely to close the wage gap, but the gap persists with non-homothetic preferences. However, investment in the informal sector is unlikely to close the wage gap with either type of preferences.

Though labour market distortions in developing economies leading to a formal-informal wage gap are well-documented in the development literature, little attention has been given to the question of whether such a gap would close over time.

This paper aims to seek to explain the influence of power asymmetry and the moderating role of an organization’s absorptive and desorptive capacity on enhancing supply chain competence from its orientation to open innovation with its supply network.

To perform this study, the authors use data collected from 262 European firms. They apply regression analysis to test the moderating role of an organization’s absorptive and desorptive capacity on enhancing its supply chain competence from its orientation to open innovation.

The results confirm both the influence of power asymmetry and absorptive capacity on obtaining benefits that derive from an organization’s orientation to open innovation. The results do not, however, support the moderating effect of an organization’s desorptive capacity. Subsequent analyses performed in the study show that organizations that achieve complementarity among their own absorptive capacity and the capacities of its supply network manage to obtain greater benefits from its orientation to open innovation.

This paper responds to the need to study innovation in the context of a supply network and respond to calls in the literature on open innovation and supply chain management for the need to study the moderating role of absorptive and desorptive capacity.