Other Economics Commons^™

Determinantes Explícitos E Implícitos De La Deuda Externa Pública Peruana, José Manuel Martin Coronado

José-Manuel Martin Coronado

This research aims to prove that sound economic policies are nothing more that basic conditions for the foreign public debt problem. In fact, by studying the factors of public debt issues in Peru, Latin America and the emerging economies it’s clear that some implicit economic and non-economic factors have to be considered because of the social complexity and variable characteristics in emerging economies. This causes failures in economic policies assumptions, inefficiencies, distorted causality and nonrational behavior. This paper proposes, first, to perform a deep and comparative analysis of the foreign debt determinants in emerging economies, then, to allocate financial resources, …

“Black People’S Money”: The Impact Of Law, Economics, And Culture In The Context Of Race On Damage Recoveries, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

“’Black People’s Money’: The Impact of Law, Economics, and Culture in the Context of Race on Damage Recoveries” is one of a series of articles by the author dealing with black economic marginalization; prior work considered such topics as shopping and selling as forms of deviance, street vending, restraints on leisure, and the importance of informality in loan transactions. This article deals with the linkage between the social significance of black people’s money and its material value. It analyzes the construction of “black money,” its association with cash, and the taboos and cultural practices that assure that black money will …

Food Safety: What Is Economists’ Value Added?, Julie Caswell

Julie Caswell

Economists are contributing to the food safety arena by analyzing demand for food safety, the consumer level benefits of improved food safety, the costs and benefits to companies from quality assurance for food safety, and the benefits and costs of government regulations aimed at improving food safety. In the food safety area, too much attention has been paid to risk assessment and not enough to risk management. Economists have a very important role to play in improving private and public risk management in areas such as pathogen reduction, use of traceability, and biotechnology.

Ceo Turnover And Foreign Market Participation, Bruce A. Blonigen, Rossitza B. Wooster

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Anecdotal evidence suggests that new CEOs with foreign backgrounds direct their firms to become more international in their operations. We examine this hypothesis formally using data on U.S. S&P-500 manufacturing firms from1992 through 1997 and biographical information on CEOs’ birth and education locations that allow us to identify changes from U.S.- to foreign-connected CEOs. Robust to a variety of specifications, we find that a U.S. firm’s switch from a U.S. to a foreign CEO leads to substantial increases in the firm’s proportion of its foreign assets and foreign affiliate sales. In fact, our preferred specification indicates that foreign asset and …

Trends. National Security And The United States Government 2004 Federal Budget: Is It Good For Security?, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses the (under)funding of homeland security and defense in an Executive Branch proposal for the United States Government 2004 federal budget.

Trends. Thinking On Transportation Security, Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses the necessity of gathering intelligence successfully to combat terrorism as it pertains to commerce.

Information Policy And Genetically Modified Food: Weighing The Benefits And Costs, Mario F. Teisl, Julie A. Caswell

PERI Working Papers

The labeling of genetically modified foods (GMFs) is the topic of a debate that could dramatically alter the structure of the U.S. and international food industry. The current lack of harmonization of policy across countries makes GMF labeling an international trade issue. The U.S. and Canada do not require GMFs to be labeled unless the GMF is significantly different than the conventional food or the GMF presents a health concern. However, many other countries are requiring GMFs to be labeled. This paper discusses empirical work on the sources and magnitude of benefits and costs from labeling programs, with particular emphasis …

A Tale Of Two Clams: Policy Anticipation And Industry Productivity, Sylvia Brandt

PERI Working Papers

Sound environmental regulation must achieve environmental objectives while maximizing economic efficiency. This paper evaluates the impact of regulation on efficiency by measuring annual productivity across regulatory regimes in two similar fisheries with differing policy expectations. Anticipation of regulatory change produced strategic behavior in one fishery, leading to depressed productivity; in the other, regulatory change was not expected, and productivity did not suffer. These results imply that fisheries regulation should take into account both firms’ policy expectations and the potentially perverse incentives that may be created by policy change.

The Impact Of Reforming Wheat Importing State-Trading Enterprises On The Quality Of Wheat Imported, Nathalie Lavoie

PERI Working Papers

Recent surveys of wheat importers indicate that countries that import wheat via a state-trading enterprise (STE) are less sensitive to quality issues in import decision-making than countries that import wheat through private traders. This study examines conceptually and empirically the impact of the deregulation of wheat imports on the quality and source of wheat imports.

A Comparison Of Cheap Talk And Alternative Certainty Calibration Techniques In Contingent Valuation, Mihail Samnaliev, Thomas Stevens, Thomas More

PERI Working Papers

A field test of cheap talk and two types of certainty calibration in contingent valuation of public lands indicated that cheap talk does not reduce WTP estimates. Use of a ten point certainty calibration scale reduces WTP estimates by about half. However, adjusting for uncertainty using a ‘Not Sure’ option does not reduce WTP estimates but increases the variance in responses. There may be a conceptual difference between these two ways of accounting for respondents’ uncertainty, which may suggest why they provide different WTP value estimates and variances.

Assessing Environmental Externalities Of The Us Coal Base Load Electric Utility Industry Using Data Enveloping Analysis, Faisal Z. Ahmed

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

This paper attempts to address two issues. First, is how to objectively measure carbon dioxide emissions from the generation of electricity that uses predominantly coal. Second, is how to incorporate these ‘environmental’ variables into an efficiency model. Using a technique called Data Enveloping Analysis (DEA) a non-parametric piecewise surface (or frontier) over the data is constructed, so as to be able to calculate technical efficiencies (which I call environmental efficiency) relative to this surface. These ‘environmental efficiency’ measures are analyzed. The technique utilized in this study may be extended to calculate each agent’s allocative and scale efficiencies in order to …

Enterprises And The Constitution Of The World Economy, Jean-Philippe Robé

Jean-Philippe Robé

No abstract provided.

Excess Capacity: A Note, Sougata Poddar

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In a two period model of strategic entry deterrence where the incumbent firm moves before the entrant by installing capacity for production, Dixit (1980) argued that in a (perfect) equilibrium excess capacity would not be observed, contradicting Spence's (1977) result on the same issue. In this note, we show that Dixit may not always remain true when we allow for demand uncertainty.

Investor Skepticism V. Investor Confidence: Why The New Research Analyst Reforms Will Harm Investors, John L. Orcutt

Law Faculty Scholarship

Part I of this Article provides an overview of research analysts and their basic functions, including a discussion of sell-side analysts' role in the market's recent boom and bust. Part II examines the conflicts of interest that have plagued sell-side research, and Part III reviews the Regulatory Actions that are meant to address these conflicts. In Part IV, the author will make the case for encouraging, rather than lessening, investor skepticism in sell-side research and will explain why the Regulatory Actions are not likely to improve the performance of sell-side analysts. Finally, Part V will offer a simpler proposal to …

Can World Poverty Be Eliminated?, William F. Felice

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

World Poverty: New Policies to Defeat an Old Enemy edited by Peter Townsend and David Gordon. Bristol: The Policy Press, 2002. 454pp.

and

World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms by Thomas Pogge. Malden, MA: Blackwell/Polity, 2002. 264pp.

and

There is an Alternative: Subsistence and Worldwide Resistance to Corporate Globalization edited by Veronica Benholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas, and Claudia von Werlhof. New York: Zed Books. 2001. 288pp.

Corporate Control Transactions: Introduction, Edward B. Rock, Michael L. Wachter

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of Human Life Expectancy And Intelligence In Hunter-Gatherer Economies, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

The economics of hunting and gathering must have driven the biological evolution of human characteristics, since hunter-gatherer societies prevailed for the two million years of human history. These societies feature huge intergenerational resource flows, suggesting that these resource flows should replace fertility as the key demographic consideration. It is then theoretically expected that life expectancy and brain size would increase simultaneously, as apparently occurred during our evolutionary history. The brain here is considered as a direct form of bodily investment, but also crucially as facilitating further indirect investment by means of learning-by-doing.

Rjvs In Product Innovation And Cartel Stability, Luca Lambertini, Sougata Poddar, Dan Sasaki

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We characterise the interplay between firms' decision in product development undertaken through a research joing venture (RJV), and the nature of their ensuing market behaviour. Participant firms in an RJV face a trade-off between saving the costs of product innovation by developing similar products to one another, e.g. by sharing most of the basic components of their products, and investing higher initial efforts in product innovation in order to develop more distinct products. We prove that the more the fims' products are distinct and thus less substitutable, the easier their collusion is to sustain in the marketing supergame, either in …

Survey Instrument For Case Studies Of Food Safety Innovation, Elisabete Salay, Julie A. Caswell, Tanya Roberts

PERI Working Papers

Firms innovate to prevent the presence of microbial pathogens in foods and to address other safety problems. To date, studies on the economics of food safety innovation are relatively rare. We designed a series of case studies of such innovation in the meat industry. Our objectives were to identify and analyze different types of innovation, the drivers of innovation, the mode of innovation development, and the impact of innovation on food safety and firm performance. Here we present the survey instrument developed to conduct the case studies. This instrument can be applied, with minor modifications to reflect research objectives, to …

Evaluating Tradable Property Rights For Natural Resources: The Role Of Strategic Entry And Exit, Sylvia Brandt

PERI Working Papers

This paper presents an econometric approach to the evaluation of environmental regulation using tradable property rights. Existing empirical research on this issue, which compares overall industry efficiency before and after the introduction of new regulations, conflates two distinct phenomena: efficiency changes due to exit of excess capital, and changes in the efficiency of individual firms. Because the regulatory process induces firms of different types to enter and exit the industry at different rates, the true efficiency and equity effects of tradable property rights cannot be assessed without correcting for these changes in sample composition. This paper examines the impact of …

A Meta-Analysis Of Hypothetical Bias In Stated Preference Valuation, James J. Murphy, Geoffrey Allen, Thomas H. Stevens, Darryl Weatherhead

PERI Working Papers

Individuals are widely believed to overstate their economic valuation of a good by a factor of two or three. This paper reports the results of a meta-analysis of hypothetical bias in 28 stated preference valuation studies that report monetary willingness-to-pay and that used the same mechanism for eliciting both hypothetical and actual values. The papers generated 83 observations with a median value of the ratio of hypothetical to actual value of 1.35, and the distribution has severe positive skewness. Since a comprehensive theory of hypothetical bias has not been developed, we use a set of explanatory variables based on issues …

Mechanisms For Addressing Third Party Impacts Resulting From Voluntary Water Transfers, James J. Murphy, Ariel Dinar, Richard E. Howitt, Erin Mastrangelo, Stephen J. Rassenti, Vernon L. Smith

PERI Working Papers

This paper uses laboratory experiments to test alternative water market institutions designed to protect third party interests. The institutions tested include taxing mechanisms that raise revenue to compensate affected third parties and a market in which third parties actively participate. The results indicate that there are some important trade-offs in selecting a policy option. Active third party participation in the market is likely to result in free riding that may erode some or all of the efficiency gains, and may introduce volatility into the market. Taxing transfers and compensating third parties offers a promising balance of efficiency, equity and market …

Production Of Chlorofluorocarbons In Anticipation Of The Montreal Protocol, Maximilian Auffhammer, Bernard J. Morzuch, John K. Stranlund

PERI Working Papers

Anticipation of an International Environmental Agreement provides an incentive for countries to change their production behavior prior to negotiations in order to gain a favorable bargaining position. Increased historical production figures at the time of negotiations may influence the magnitude of the baseline from which cutbacks will be specified. In this paper we empirically measure the magnitude of such strategic production behavior in the case of the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer of 1987. Due to data limitations we specify a two player Nash-Cournot game between the United States and the rest of the world. We …

New Models Of Regulation And Interagency Governance, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

On The Macroeconomic Effects Of Establishing Tradability In Weak Property Rights, Gunnar Eliasson, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

The New Economy is closely associated with computing & communications technology, notably the Internet. We discuss property rights to, and trade in, the difficult-to-define intangible assets increasingly dominating the New Economy, and the possibility of under-investment in these assets. For a realistic analysis we introduce a Schumpeterian market environment (the experimentally organized economy). Weak property rights prevail when the rights to access, use, andtrade in intangible assets cannot be fully exercised. The trade-off between the benefits of open access on the Internet, and the incentive effects of strengthened property rights, depend both on the particular strategy a firm employs to …

Discrete Choice Models And Valuation Experiments, Massimiliano Mazzanti

Massimiliano Mazzanti

No abstract provided.

Technical Efficiency Of The Danish Trawl Fleet: Are The Industrial Vessels Better Than Others?, Niels Vestergaard, Dale Squires, Frank Jensen, Jesper Levring Andersen

Niels Vestergaard

Technical efficiency in the Danish trawl fishery in the North Sea is estimated for 1997-1998 with a stochastic production frontier model. This model allows for both technical efficiency and a stochastic environment. The results show that the production frontier can be modelled by a translog function with time effects and a technical inefficiency function. The type of fishery (industrial or consumption) and size of vessel give a good explanation for the inefficiency of the fleet. The average technical efficiency is estimated to be 0.80. On avrage, industrial vessels have a higher technical efficiency than human consumption vessels, and smaller industrial …