A growing body of empirical work has documented the superior performance characteristics of exporting plants and firms relative to non-exporters. Employment, shipments, wages, productivity and capital intensity are all higher at exporters at any given moment. This paper asks whether good firms become exporters or whether exporting improves firm performance. The evidence is quite clear on one point: good firms become exporters, both growth rates and levels of success measures are higher ex-ante for exporters. The benefits of exporting for the firm are less clear. Employment growth and the probability of survival are both higher for exporters; however, productivity and wage growth is not superior,

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We study the monetary-transmission mechanism with a data set that includes quarterly observations of every insured U.S. commercial bank from 1976 to 1993. We find that the impact of monetary policy on lending is stronger for banks with less liquid balance sheets—i.e., banks with lower ratios of securities to assets. Moreover, this pattern is largely attributable to the smaller banks, those in the bottom 95 percent of the size distribution. Our results support the existence of a “bank lending channel” of monetary transmission, though they do not allow us to make precise statements about its quantitative importance.

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C'est dans le bureau d'Elisabeth Szuyska, de réparties mi-plaisantes mi-sérieuses, que le nom de CONDOR survint. Elisabeth fut ainsi associée à la naissance même du séminaire, auquel elle participa activement à ses débuts. Elle préparait chaque année l'édition des Actes, rappelant à l'ordre les auteurs quand il le fallait, rassemblant les textes et les corrigeant avec le soin et la minutie qu'elle mettait en toute chose. Elle nous a quittés en 1996 et sa présence discrète et efficace nous manque aujourd'hui.. Ces Actes, avec les imperfections qu'ils peuvent comporter, lui sont dédiés.

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We explore behavioral explanations for sub-optimal corporate investment decisions. Focusing on the sensitivity of investment to cash flow, we argue that personal characteristics of chief executive officers, in particular overconfidence, can account for this widespread and persistent investment distortion. Overconfident CEOs overestimate the quality of their investment projects and view external finance as unduly costly. As a result, they invest more when they have internal funds at their disposal. We test the overconfidence hypothesis, using data on personal portfolio and corporate investment decisions of CEOs in Forbes 500 companies. We classify CEOs as overconfident if they repeatedly fail to exercise options that are highly in the money, or if they habitually acquire stock of their own company. The main result is that investment is significantly more responsive to cash flow if the CEO displays overconfidence. In addition, we identify personal characteristics other than overconfidence (education, employment background, cohort, military service, and status in the company) that strongly affect the correlation between investment and cash flow. We are indebted to Brian Hall and David Yermack for providing us with the data. We are very grateful to Jeremy Stein for his invaluable support and comments. We also would like to thank Philippe Aghion, George

Artificial neural networks used to be considered only as a machine that learns using small modifications of internal parameters. Now this is changing. Such learning method do not allow to generate big neural networks for solving real world problems. This thesis defends the following three points: ffl The key word to go out of that dead-end is "modularity". ffl The tool that can generate modular neural networks is cellular encoding. ffl The optimization algorithm adapted to the search of cellular codes is the genetic algorithm. The first point is now a common idea. A modular neural network means a neural network that is made of several sub-networks, arranged in a hierarchical way. For example, the same subnetwork can be repeated. This thesis encompasses two parts. The first part demonstrates the second point. Cellular encoding is presented as a machine language for neural networks, with a theoretical basis (it is a parallel graph grammar that checks a number of properties) and a comp...

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Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) has proved to be very successful over the years. This has brought with it an increasing interest to use FLOSS for complex and industrial-strength applications. An important aspect of this is the formal and rigorous analysis of the quality and safety properties of FLOSS along with other related challenges. This volume contains the preproceedings of the 3rd International Work-shop on Foundations and Techniques for Open Source Software Certification (OpenCert 2009) held as a satellite event of the 12th European Joint Con-