The issue of outsourcing as a form of foreign direct investment (FDI) has been widely discussed in the recent past. In this essay, I analyze what determines the outsourcing activity by looking at U. S. manufacturing industries between 1972 and 2002. I concentrate on correlation between the...

Are occupations that are well diversified across sectors less volatile, and less susceptible to external shocks? Most external shocks (e.g. manufacturing offshoring, oil shocks) impact the labor market along sectoral lines, i.e. they impact product and output markets; consequently, they affect...

In this study we concentrate our efforts on the consequences that the existence and manifestation of globalization have on various domains of human activity. The impact of globalization will be analyzed from the perspective of the cause-effect relationship, with a special emphasis on the...

Some theories on the determinants and impacts of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) are presented and critically discussed. In the empirical investigations which follow this, the effects of some macroeconomic variables such as economic growth, market size, degree of openness, real effective...

Why are investors rushing to purchase US government securities when the US is the epicentre of the financial crisis? This column attributes the paradox to key emerging market economies’ exchange practices, which require reserves most often invested in US government securities. America’s...

Half a decade has passed since the resurgence of international capital flows to many developing countries. The recent surge in capital inflows was initially attributed to domestic developments, such as the sound policies and stronger economic performance of a handful of countries. Eventually, it...

This paper examines the importance of exchange rate risk in the return generating process for a large sample of non-financial firms from 37 countries. We argue that the effect of exchange rate exposure on stock returns should be conditional and show evidence of a significant return premium to...

The American economy has undergone a dramatic structural change in the first decade of the 21st Century. The real-economy causes of this transformation, and their expression via the real estate market and its financial derivatives’ market, and their final manifestation in world financial...

We study how competitive pressure influences the make-or-buy decision that oligopolistic firms face between producing an intermediate component in-house or purchasing it from a domestic supplier. We model outsourcing as a bilateral relationship in which the supplier undertakes relationship...

The importance of SMEs in any economy cannot be overlooked as they form a major chunk in the economic activity of nations. India has nearly three million SMEs, which account for almost 50 per cent of industrial output. However, SMEs which form the backbone of industrial development in India are...