Fourth Quarter 1997
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas

Economic Review was published until 1999.

Has Long-Run Profitability Risen in the 1990s?
John V. Duca

This article analyzes the recent rebound in nonfinancial corporate profitability, as measured by after-tax profits as a share of output. Virtually all the resurgence in corporate profitability during the 1990s reflects a cyclical increase in profits and a decline in net interest expense associated with deleveraging and lower interest rates. In this sense, it is not clear that a long-lasting upward shift in the economic returns to capital has occurred, after accounting for short-run cyclical-related movements and for how deleveraging and lower interest rates have shifted capital payments away from debtholders toward equityholders.

Intellectual Property Rights and Product Effectiveness
Stephen P. A. Brown and William C. Gruben

Recent economic literature concludes that an invention-importing country, where domestic invention is scarce or nonexistent, may reduce its welfare and, in some cases, world welfare, by protecting intellectual property developed elsewhere. The analysis presented in this article uses economic theory to show that such a conclusion may not be fully warranted for a wide range of products, such as antibiotics, fungicides, herbicides, and pesticides, whose effectiveness diminishes with cumulative use. Both developed and developing countries may find that protecting intellectual property rights for these products will enhance welfare-even when their invention is provided for free.

Is the Business Cycle of Argentina "Different"?
Finn E. Kydland and Carlos E. J. M. Zarazaga

Despite the relative success of Real Business Cycle (RBC) models to replicate key moments of the business cycles of the United States and several European countries, economic research in Latin America tends to take the more traditional view that monetary factors play a predominant role in the economic fluctuations of countries in that part of the world. The different theoretical approach is often justified on the grounds that business cycles in Latin America are "different." However, few comparative studies have analyzed the relevant differences between the business cycles of Latin America and those of the United States and Europe.

In this article, Finn Kydland and Carlos Zarazaga present business-cycle facts for Argentina, following as closely as possible the empirical methodology and statistics other studies have used to characterize U.S. and European business cycles. Overall, the authors find no a priori evidence that dynamic general equilibrium models, in which real shocks are the only source of economic fluctuations, cannot potentially account for as much of the Argentinean business cycle as such models do for business cycles in the United States and Europe.