This paper examines the U.S. Free Trade Agreements with Chile and Singapore. The structures of the agreements are explained, the existing economic conditions of the countries are examined, the bilateral trade pattern between these nations and the United States is provided, a summary of the major...

This paper seeks evidence of the relationship between US households' consumption and imports, notably imports from China. Using MSA-level data from the consumer expenditure survey from 1986 to 2007, we find that in general imports, and especially those from China, are positively related with...

This empirical study investigates the relationship between local fiscal decentralisation and economic development among all US states from 1977 through 1997 by employing a vector autoregression (VAR) model. While past literature focused on a one way relationship between fiscal decentralisation...

This paper explains the effects of the Japanese recession and the accelerated pace of globalisation and technological diffusion on the rationalisation of what were previously held up as the mainstays of Japanese management. These are the key questions: What caused the failure of the superior...

This paper addresses the problem of portfolio selection under a multifactor asset return model, using Bayesian analysis to deal with uncertainties in parameter estimation and model specification. These sources of error are ignored in the classical mean-variance method. We apply two approaches:...

The number of institutions in the US banking industry has decreased from around 14,000 in the 1980s to fewer than 7,000 presently. Any change in the number of banks must be due to the formation of new banks, mergers among existing banks, and the failure of existing banks. Over the years from the...

We analyse the current Japanese economic downturn in the context of unique Japanese socio-cultural features, and contrast the Japanese conditions with those in the US. We find that socio-cultural factors shed light on economic conditions. In particular, the Japanese collectivist culture,...