Pure Altruistic Gift and the Ethics of Transplant Medicine

The article argues that altruistic giving based on anonymity, which is expected to promote social solidarity and block trade in human body parts, is conceptually defective and practically unproductive. It needs to be replaced by a more adequate notion which responds to the human practices of giving and receiving. The argument starts with identification of the main characteristics of the anonymous altruistic donation: social separation of the organ donor (or donor family) from the recipient, their mutual replaceability, non-obligatoriness of donation, and non-obligatoriness of reciprocation on the recipient’s part. Since these characteristics are also central to typical market relations, anonymous altruistic donation not only cannot promote solidarity but may encourage proposals for (regulated) markets of transplantable organs. Thus, transplant ethics needs to be reframed. It needs to be rooted in, rather than promote, the practices of giving and receiving known to human societies. As the basis for such reframing, the idea of sharing in another’s misfortune is proposed. It relies on the human practices of giving and receiving and, with appropriate regulatory safeguards, can provide a better conceptual basis for blocking commercial exchanges of human body parts.

The Effects of Political Institutions on the Extensive and Intensive Margins of Trade

We present a model of political networks that integrates both the choice of trade partners (the extensive margin) and trade volumes (the intensive margin). Our model predicts that regimes secure in their survival, including democracies as well as some consolidated authoritarian regimes, will trade more on the extensive margin than vulnerable autocracies, which will block trade in products that would expand interpersonal contact among their citizens. We apply a two-stage Bayesian LASSO estimator to detailed measures of institutional features and highly disaggregated product-level trade data encompassing 131 countries over a half century. Consistent with our model, we find that (a) political institutions matter for the extensive margin of trade but not for the intensive margin and (b) the effects of political institutions on the extensive margin of trade vary across products, falling most heavily on those goods that involve extensive interpersonal contact.

Mimicking behaviour in bulk and block trading of institutional investors in the stock market

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the mimicking behaviour of institutional investors in the stock market.Design/methodology/approachThe study focusses on examining the herding behaviour among institutional investors in the stock market by considering the bulk and block trade on the constituent NIFTY 50 index during the period 2005–2015 using Lakonishok–Schleifer–Vishny (1992) model. The study also aims to find out whether their herding behaviour is intentional or unintentional in nature.FindingsThe findings of the study showed no sign of herding behaviour in the market; out of 50 constituent stocks of NIFTY 50, there was significant herding in 15 stocks, with buy herding in 11 stocks and sell herding in four stocks, and remaining 35 stocks were totally free from herding behaviour. In addition, the results proved that the herding behaviour observed on the stocks is of unintentional in nature.Research limitations/implicationsPresent study is limited to the use of constituent stocks of the Benchmarking Index NIFTY 50.Originality/valueThis study is the first attempt to investigate the herding behaviour of institutional investors in the market using bulk and block trade and also to explore their intent in herding behaviour.

Economic Unions and the Gravity Model: Evidence from Eurasian Economic Union

The purpose of this study is to analyze trade creation and trade diversion effects in the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), which is an evolution of regional trade agreements. The research will analyze intra-block trade flows and test trade creation and diversion in EEU determined by customs union agreements. Gravity model has been applied to annual bilateral export flows for EEU countries paired with a sample of 58 partner countries in the period of 2005-2016, using augmented gravity model with panel year fixed effect, this paper analyzes trade creation and diversion effects of EEU in general. The results are similar to other identical studies and suggest that EEU is mostly trade-diverting with a minor effect of trade creation.

Modelling non-linear behaviour of block price deviations when trades are executed outside the bid-ask quotes

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test and model non-linearities in block price deviations when they are executed outside the bid-ask quotes. The author conducts an empirical analysis on 662,312 transactions that were traded outside the bid-ask quotes in 2014 on the London Stock Exchange. Design/methodology/approach The tests reject the linearity hypothesis and the paper shows that the exponential smooth transition autoregressive model is capable of capturing the non-linear behaviour of block price misalignments. Findings The findings imply that when the deviation of block prices from their quoted value is small (large), trading will occur slowly (rapidly) to restore equilibrium, suggesting that trading costs eliminate continuous trading and that the block trade market is efficient. Originality/value The purpose of this paper is to re-model block price deviations from the bid-ask quotes. The major contribution is that the paper presents new empirical evidence, which explicitly allows for the possibility that block price misalignments from the bid-ask quotes can be characterized by a non-linear mean reverting process. The author demonstrates that the presence of transaction costs induces non-linear adjustments of block trade prices.