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The article addresses financial troubles in French amateur football clubs and their origins. Previous literature has demonstrated that – in particular in French football – club bankruptcies are triggered by demand shocks. The present research intends highlighting the determinants of demand shocks on those clubs playing French amateur football top two tiers with a longitudinal analysis (2009/2010-2019/2020). Various exogenous elements that influence club demand (i.e. revenues) are taken on board, namely, macroeconomic variables, such as the variation of GDP growth rate between two football seasons, a dummy for the Covid-19 sanitary crisis, and a sport dummy for the effect of the French national team winning the 2018 male football World Cup. The latter is used to check a potential trickle-down effect on amateur elite football. None of these variables do explain demand shocks except if the heterogeneity of clubs' economic models is taken into account. The determinants of shock demands appear to be clubs' strategic orientations (towards win maximization vs. a stable economic organization). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses financial accounting data of the universe of Italian worker cooperatives, from 2011 to 2018, to examine whether cooperatives were able to achieve employment stabilization in a period of prolonged recession. Since wages have experienced, in most of the period, a negative growth, we further consider whether wages' downward flexibility had been sufficient to sustain employment stabilization and whether, under these circumstances, cooperatives' financial solidity had weakened. Given the non-experimental setting, we proceed by defining a control group of conventional firms to which we compare the group of worker cooperatives. We find evidence that, relative to the control group, during negative demand shocks, worker cooperative contained employment drop and allowed a greater downward wage adjustment. Their profitability and equity ratio also fell by more than in the control group. We find significant-sector heterogeneity, especially in response to positive demand shocks; in Less Knowledge Intensive Services and in Constructions, which together comprise more than 70% of worker cooperatives, it is employment, rather than wages, that rises by more than in conventional firms. This suggests that in the aftermath of a prolonged recession most worker cooperatives chose to favour growth at the expense of members' wage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the dynamic impact of geopolitical risks (GPRs) on real oil returns for the period February 1974 to August 2017, using a time-varying parameter structural vector autoregressive (TVP-SVAR) model. Besides the two variables of concern, the model also includes growth in world oil production, global economic activity (to capture oil-demand), and world stock returns. We show that GPRs (based on a tally of newspaper articles covering geopolitical tensions), in general, has a significant negative impact on oil returns, primarily due to the decline in oil demand captured by the global economic activity. Our results, thus, highlight the risk of associating all GPRs with oil supply shocks driven by geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, and hence, ending up suggesting that higher GPRs drive up oil prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data for a sample of advanced and developing countries, the paper studies variation in the effects of aggregate demand shocks on the macro-economy and distinguish between the effects of expansionary and contractionary shocks. The aim is to study the determinants and implications of cyclicality across representative countries in each group. The composite evidence points to high degree of cyclicality in many countries. The risk of cyclicality is higher in developing countries as high trend inflation limits the scope to mobilize growth and increases downward rigidity of prices. Policy priorities in developing countries should be focused on fighting inflation and improving the investment environment towards maximizing the return on investment and sustaining growth and capacity building. Policy priorities in advanced countries should be focused on mobilizing resources to ease capacity constraints and finance larger investment, with limited crowding out, to maximize the potential of real growth and combat inflationary pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a simple macroeconomic modeling of a monetary union made of two structurally heterogeneous countries, with distortions in the supply function. We find that higher taxes are always output stabilizing in the event of demand shocks, but that stronger automatic stabilizers are often inflation destabilizing in the framework of large supply-side distortions. These inflationary risks are only limited if the transmission mechanisms of economic policies are more efficient, if countries are weakly open, and if economic authorities care more about price stability than instrument smoothing. Furthermore, our model also shows that in the event of supply shocks, higher taxation rates would be inflation as well as output destabilizing, and all the more as distortions are accentuated in the supply function. Therefore, reducing taxes may often improve economic stabilization. Indeed, there would be a ‘critical level of supply-side distortions’ above which some of the stabilization properties of automatic stabilizers become perverse even in case of demand shocks. Furthermore, the necessity to reduce the tax burden would be much more acute in the smallest and most open European countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]