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3A183163502X.jsonld | Chapter 36 Tax Incentives in Cultural Policy | Cultural policy discussions are increasingly concerned with the creation and restructuring of tax incentives; thus, cultural policy and tax policy are becoming more and more intertwined. With the widely held perception that there has been a general decrease in the availability of direct public resources for culture, a search has begun for other sources of support and for ways to provide incentives for those other sources. Moreover, with the growth in the use of forms of decentralization, désétatisation, and devolution in cultural policy, increased attention has been paid to tax policy as a way of spreading decision making over public resources more broadly. Thus, there has been a rise in the use of tax policy to provide incentives for what is considered to be desirable behavior vis-à-vis the arts and culture, particularly though not exclusively with respect to its nonprofit component. It has been clearly documented that the indirect aid embedded in various taxes forgone by the various levels of American government are a much more important source of financial support than are the government programs of direct support and that foremost among these is the deductibility of charitable contributions. As a result, many countries have begun to pay more attention to the “American model” of cultural support with its high level of reliance on private donors and its attendant tax incentive structure. Adopting a “tax expenditure” perspective, this chapter begins with a summary of the existing literatures on tax policy in cultural policy. It then proceeds to a consideration of the accumulated evidence with respect to the effects of tax exemption: the price elasticity of giving; the income elasticity of giving; the differences between individual and collective decision making with respect to distributing public resources to the arts and culture; the kinship between tax incentives and matching grants; the economics of tax incentives for corporate contributions; the incidence of tax incentives in comparison to the incidence of direct support; and the extent to which tax incentives promote crowding out or crowding in behavior with respect to other revenue sources. While most research has been focused on American tax incentives for charitable giving, some studies do exist for other countries, and their results are summarized where available. For the moment, the econometric results depend substantially on the model specification and the type of dataset used. For those who would argue in favor of tax-based incentives, at least with respect to charitable donations, there is considerable evidence in support of the view that such incentives would have the desired economic effects. But those who are dubious about the net effects can also find evidence to support their arguments. Despite the ambiguity of the econometric evidence in the United States, the use of tax-based incentives is proliferating. A set of contemporary international examples suggests (i) that indirect aid is the terrain in which many of the most interesting innovations and variations in the funding of the arts and culture are taking place, and (ii) that this proliferation is more likely due to the influence of politics and advocacy than to the influence of reasoned analysis. |
3A1831640287.jsonld | Chapter 18 Demographic variables and income inequality | This chapter explores a variety of areas in which demographic variables may play an important role in the distribution of income, introduces a host of demographic issues relating to marriage, fertility, and household living arrangementsusing the household as the unit of analysis. The chapter focuses on the large literature that analyzes the effects on the distribution of income among married couples of marital sorting and the joint labor supply behavior of husbands and wives, changing population composition because of differential fertility, migration, and mortality by income classes, and analyzes the effects of differential fertility across income classes on the distribution of income. Changes in fertility, mortality, migration, marriage, household composition, and age structure will plausibly have a variety of effects on income inequality. A change in the age structure of the population, for example, will in general change the measure of income inequality in the population, even if there is no change within each age group in mean income or age-specific income inequality. The chapter demonstrates that it is possible in many cases to derive instructive analytics about these compositional effects. |
3A1831644312.jsonld | Chapter 38 Executive compensation | This chapter summarizes the empirical and theoretical research on executive compensation and provides a comprehensive and up-to-date description of pay practices (and trends in pay practices) for chief executive officers (CEOs). Topics discussed include the level and structure of CEO pay (including detailed analyses of annual bonus plans, executive stock options, and option valuation), international pay differences, the pay-setting process, the relation between CEO pay and firm performance (“pay-performance sensitivities”), the relation between sensitivities and subsequent firm performance, relative performance evaluation, executive turnover, and the politics of CEO pay. |
3A1831632713.jsonld | Chapter 81 Experimental Evidence on the Existence of Hypothetical Bias in Value Elicitation Methods | There seems to be little doubt that the presumptive absence of hypothetical bias in CVM surveys is invalid. It is invalid as a general proposition, since the experiments surveyed here provide special cases when it is demonstrably false. The importance of these experimental results is that they change the tenor of the debate on the validity of the CVM. The variety of elicitation formats, the variety of subject pools, and the variety of private and public goods all serve to show that one cannot ignore the problem. Of course, it is possible that hypothetical bias may be absent or swamped by other biases in particular settings. But one cannot make sweeping and unqualified claims as to its absence, as has been common in the CVM literature. There is some experimental evidence that comparing simple yes responses in real settings to definitely yes responses in hypothetical settings indicates less hypothetical bias than when simple yes responses in hypothetical settings are used. |
3A730012565.jsonld | Competition Policy in Subsidies and State Aid | Many sectors of OECD economies are strongly influenced by government policies, which provide financial support, assistance or aid to individual firms in an industry. Subsidies like regulations maybe either beneficial or harmful, either promoting welfare or distorting competition, depending on the circumstances. A roundtable discussion held in the Competition Committee in February 2001 focused on subsidies which arise whenever an enterprise or a consumer receives a benefit whose cost is wholly or partly, directly or indirectly, paid by the state. The roundtable discussed notably the different forms of control, and how they distinguish legitimate from illegitimate subsidies; it explored as well the nature of these controls, and in particular to what extent they are part of a broader system of ... |
3A1831653443.jsonld | Chapter 2. Trust, Growth, and Well-Being: New Evidence and Policy Implications | This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions, and economic development. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms that explain the influence of trust on economic performance and the methods employed to identify the causal impact of trust on economic performance are reviewed. We document the mechanisms of interactions between trust and economic development in the realms of finance, innovation, the organization of firms, the labor market, and the product market. The last part reviews recent progress to identify how institutions and policies can affect trust. |
3A1831648199.jsonld | Chapter 38 Computation and multiplicity of equilibria | In recent years the Walrasian general equilibrium model has become an important tool for applied work in such fields as development economics, international trade, macroeconomics, and public finance. This chapter discusses that economic equilibria are usually solutions to fixed point problems rather than solutions to convex optimization problems. This leads to two difficulties that are closely related: first, equilibria may be difficult to compute; second, a model economy may have more than one equilibria. The chapter explores these two issues for a number of stylized economies and analyzes economies with infinite numbers of goods, economies in which time and uncertainty play important roles. Studying economies of this sort is interesting not only for its own sake but also because of the insights it provides into the properties of economies with large but finite numbers of goods. Finally, the chapter extends an analysis to economies that include distortionary taxes and externalities. |
3A183164262X.jsonld | Chapter 24 Design of regulatory mechanisms and institutions | This chapter focuses on the design of regulatory policies that take into account the opportunities for strategic behavior provided by incomplete information and limited observability on the part of the regulator. The design of regulatory mechanisms is straightforward, albeit complex, in such a case where the regulator or mechanism designer has the same information as the regulated firm, observes the actions taken by the firm and has the authority to exercise control. The chapter presents the design of regulatory mechanisms and institutions in settings in which the regulator has incomplete information and limited ability to observe the actions of the firms under its jurisdiction. Incomplete information and limited observability create opportunities for strategic behavior on the part of both the regulator and the regulated. The mechanisms considered are reflections of that strategic behavior and are characterized as equilibria of a game whose structure corresponds to the authority granted to the regulator. Regulatory policies are, thus, viewed as endogenous responses to informational asymmetries and limited observability rather than as exogenously specified mechanisms descriptive of actual regulatory arrangements. Although the mechanisms are weak in their descriptive power, they reflect the incentives present in regulatory relationships and take into account the way the parties involved respond to those incentives. |
3A1831651807.jsonld | Chapter 10. Behavioral Game Theory Experiments and Modeling | This chapter reviews recent experimental data testing game theory and behavioral models that have been inspired to explain those data. The models fall into four groups: in cognitive hierarchy or level- k models, the assumption of equilibrium is relaxed by assuming agents have beliefs about other agents who do less reasoning (i.e., some are non-strategic, and others are more strategic and understand they are playing non-strategic players). A different approach, quantal response equilibrium, retains equilibrium expectations but adds stochastic response (of which players are aware). Learning theories explain choices in games played repeatedly as a result of past actions and payoffs that were received (as in classical reinforcement) or foregone payoffs (model-directed learning). Finally, many studies reject the joint hypothesis of equilibrium expectations and optimization, along with self-interest in valuing outcomes. Social preference models have emerged to explain these data, capturing concepts like inequity-aversion, reciprocity, and social image. |
3A1831648326.jsonld | Chapter 8. Extrinsic Rewards and Intrinsic Motives: Standard and Behavioral Approaches to Agency and Labor Markets | Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly stylized assumptions regarding human motivation, e.g., that employees seek to earn as much money as possible with minimal effort. In this essay, we explore the consequences of introducing behavioral complexity and realism into models of agency within organizations. Specifically, we assess the insights gained by allowing employees to be guided by such motivations as the desire to compare favorably to others, the aspiration to contribute to intrinsically worthwhile goals, and the inclination to reciprocate generosity or exact retribution for perceived wrongs. More provocatively, from the standpoint of standard economics, we also consider the possibility that people are driven, in ways that may be opaque even to themselves, by the desire to earn social esteem or to shape and reinforce identity. |
3A1831647273.jsonld | Chapter 17 Stabilization policies in open economies | This chapter discusses that the modern open economy is not the one found in most macroeconomic textbooks, an economy that occasionally imports Bordeaux wine but which produces most of what it consumes at prices determined domestically. It is rather an economy integrated with those abroad through commodity and financial linkages that limit the scope for national stabilization policy. The progressive modifications are classified into three categories: capital mobility; wage and price flexibility; and rational expectations and the natural rate hypothesis. The chapter examines standard propositions about policy using rational expectations and a stochastic supply function. The same model is used to re-examine the choice between exchange rate regimes and the insulating properties of flexible rates. The chapter focuses on a single national economy. This economy is assumed to produce its own good and to issue its own interest-bearing bond. In limiting cases commodity arbitrage pegs the price of the good at purchasing power parity and financial arbitrage pegs the interest rate at interest parity. |
3A1831654350.jsonld | Chapter 4. Preferences for Redistribution | This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General Social Survey, and for a large set of countries, using the World Values Survey. The paper reviews previously found results and provides several new ones. We emphasize, in particular, the role of historical experiences, cultural factors and personal history as determinants of preferences for equality or tolerance for inequality. |
3A1831648962.jsonld | Chapter 9. Open User Innovation | Almost 30 years ago, researchers began a systematic study of innovation by end users and user firms. At that time, the phenomenon was generally regarded as a minor oddity. Today, it is clear that innovation by users, generally openly shared, is a very powerful and general phenomenon. It is rapidly growing due to continuing advances in computing and communication technologies. It is becoming both an important rival to and an important feedstock for producer-centered innovation in many fields. In this chapter, I provide an overview of what the international research community now understands about this phenomenon. |
3A1831634317.jsonld | Chapter 14 School Resources | Although there is intense policy interest in improving educational outcomes around the world, there is much greater uncertainty about how to accomplish this. The primary governmental decisions often relate to the resources that are devoted to schooling, but the research indicates little consistent relationship between resources to schools and student achievement. Much of the research considers how resources affect student achievement as measured by standardized test scores. These scores are strongly related to individual incomes and to national economic performance, making them a good proxy for longer run economic impacts. But, the evidence – whether from aggregate school outcomes, econometric investigations, or a variety of experimental or quasiexperimental approaches – suggests that pure resource policies that do not change incentives are unlikely to be effective. Importantly, the results appear similar across both developed and developing countries. |
3A730018474.jsonld | Price Transparency : Will a Greater Degree of Price Transparency Help or Harm Buyers? | Although enhanced price transparency will generally increase competition to the benefit of consumers, this paper argues that it can have the opposite effect in some special situations. A negative impact is especially likely in markets already prone to anti-competitive coordination. In such markets, competition authorities should be suspicious of competitors exchanging price data, or engaging in any other practice that could help focus anti-competitive arrangements or help competitors more than customers to react to price changes. They should also be wary of exchanges of non-binding future prices. The paper identifies a number of key factors to consider in assessing whether increased price transparency might raise the probability of anticompetitive co-ordination. That includes having a look at meeting competition and most favored nation clauses, and the practice of base point pricing. The paper also examines price transparency as regards information exchanges within trade associations, price advertisements, and mandatory price transparency in public procurement markets. It closes with a short list of questions competition authorities might wish to keep in mind when investigating the effects of price transparency. This OECD Competition Roundtable was held in June 2001. |
3A730009998.jsonld | Critical Reflections on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons | The announcement by American President G.W. Bush and Indian Prime Minister Singh on 18 July 2005 of an agreement on civil nuclear co-operation marked a fundamental change in three decades of American policy on trade in nuclear equipment and applied technology which brooked no exceptions. |
3A1831649764.jsonld | Chapter 6. Merger Policy and Regulation in Media Industries | The aim of this chapter is to survey the media economics literature on mergers. In particular, we try to accentuate where the effects of mergers differ between conventional one-sided markets and two-sided media markets (though not all media mergers are within two-sided markets). We focus on price effects in the first part of the chapter, and in the second part we discuss how mergers affect competing media platforms’ choice of genre. In the third part, we discuss how to take on merger control in two-sided media markets. Motivated by some actual merger cases, we also discuss how antitrust authorities might err if they use the conventional one-sided approach to evaluate mergers within media markets (even if a case-by-case assessment is undertaken). |
3A1831651742.jsonld | Chapter 16. Game Theory and Distributed Control | Game theory has been employed traditionally as a modeling tool for describing and influencing behavior in societal systems. Recently, game theory has emerged as a valuable tool for controlling or prescribing behavior in distributed engineered systems. The rationale for this new perspective stems from the parallels between the underlying decision-making architectures in both societal systems and distributed engineered systems. In particular, both settings involve an interconnection of decision-making elements whose collective behavior depends on a compilation of local decisions that are based on partial information about each other and the state of the world. Accordingly, there is extensive work in game theory that is relevant to the engineering agenda. Similarities notwithstanding, there remain important differences between the constraints and objectives in societal and engineered systems that require looking at game-theoretic methods from a new perspective. This chapter provides an overview of selected recent developments of game-theoretic methods in this role as a framework for distributed control in engineered systems. |
3A1831636034.jsonld | Chapter 3. The nature of natural capital and ecosystem income | The natural capital concept is generating broad interest that extends well beyond economists. Economics has a long history of applying capital theory to natural resources. However, measurement of the value of ecosystems has mostly focused on income flows rather than valuing stocks of natural assets. While, the two concepts are interconnected, measuring the value of natural capital is important for improving social benefit-cost analysis and to allow nature to be more fully included in sustainability-focused wealth accounts. Typical bookend assumptions of the social planner optimally managing natural capital versus open access driving its marginal value to zero are insufficient to capture the actual spectrum of imperfect institutions. This chapter develops theory and techniques for measuring natural capital shadow prices or asset values in real world situations. |
3A1831631687.jsonld | Chapter 8. Retirement Incentives and Labor Supply | In this chapter, we review the evidence on retirement and study the role of incentives in the retirement decision. The key patterns of withdrawal from the labor market are presented and some of the factors that might explain the large and discrete drops in hours of work at the point of “retirement” are presented. We study the main retirement incentives that individuals face and place these financial and other incentives in the context of a structural approach to modeling retirement. We use this approach to frame issues of how government and private pension schemes affect retirement behavior. Noting that the typical household nearing retirement today in most developed economies is one in which both husband and wife work, we examine the theory and evidence on modeling incentives in couples and for joint decision-making. We conclude with a discussion of some of the gaps in our understanding of the employment of the elderly and raise some central questions that should be addressed by future research. |
3A1831636026.jsonld | Chapter 10. Uncertainty and ambiguity in environmental economics: conceptual issues | Uncertainty is ubiquitous in environmental economics: the field studies interactions between socio-economic and biogeochemical systems and neither is fully understood. So our grasp of their interactions is necessarily limited. We argue that this pervasive uncertainty is best modeled as ambiguity rather than risk, as a set of situations where multiple prior probability distributions arise naturally and must be considered by the decision maker. We review briefly how this insight can affect our understanding of two iconic issues in environmental economics, climate change and biodiversity loss. |
3A730010155.jsonld | Case Law | Canada – R. v Bruce Power Inc. (2009) European Union – Judgement of the European Court of Justice in the Case Land Oberosterreich v CEZ (2009) United States – Judgement of a U.S. Court of Appeals on the design basis threat security rule (2009) Judgement of a U.S. Court of Appeals on consideration of the environmental impacts of terrorist attacks on nuclear facilities (2009) Judgement of a U.S. District Court on interstate compacts�f authority to restrict private disposal of foreign low-level radioactive waste (2009) |
3A1831642107.jsonld | Chapter 53 The shapley value | This chapter surveys some of the literature in game theory that has emerged from Shapley's seminal paper on the Value. The survey includes both contributions which offer different interpretations of the Shapley value as well as several different ways to characterize the value axiomatically. The chapter also surveys some of the literature that generalizes the notion of the value to situations in which a priori cooperation structure exists, as well as a different literature that discusses the relation between the Shapley value and models of non-cooperative bargaining. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the applied side of the Shapley value, primarily in the context of cost allocation and voting. |
3A1831632810.jsonld | Chapter 71 Procurement Contracting | Purchases by government agencies from private sector firms are often initiated by solicitation of bids to supply the desired items. Payment to the firm that is awarded the supply contract may be determined by (a) the bid price or (b) bid price plus a share of the difference between observable production cost and the bid price or (c) observable production cost plus an additional fee that may be a function of costs. Interest in the theory and behavior of procurement contracting stems mainly from two features of the political economy: (a) government may have multiple, possibility-conflicting objectives in procurement; and (b) there may be an asymmetry in knowledge of some components of firms' production costs. One objective that government is likely to have in procurement contracting is minimization of the budgetary cost of making the purchases. Another objective that the government may have in conducting its economic activities, including procurement, may be the promotion of allocative efficiency. As we shall see, budgetary cost minimization and economic efficiency maximization can be conflicting objectives when there is a cost information asymmetry. |
3A1831638851.jsonld | Chapter 33 Economic epidemiology and infectious diseases | Infectious diseases are is currently the main cause of mortality in the world and have been even more important historically. This paper reviews recent research in economic epidemiology. Specifically, it discusses the occurrence of infectious diseases and the effects of public health interventions designed to control them. Several key points include: differences in the predictions regarding short- and long-run disease occurrence between rational and epidemiological epidemics, the nonstandard effects of interventions when epidemics are rational, the desirability and possibility of eradicating infectious diseases, as well as the components of the welfare loss induced by infectious diseases. |
3A1831653834.jsonld | Contributors | This chapter lists the names of the people who have contributed to the book Handbook of Economics in Education , such as Julian R. Betts, Sandra E. Black, David Figlio, and others. For reference to the reader, their names have been mentioned along with their address. |
3A1831653532.jsonld | Chapter 24. Implementation of Monetary Policy : How Do Central Banks Set Interest Rates? | Central banks no longer set the short-term interest rates that they use for monetary policy purposes by manipulating the supply of banking system reserves, as in conventional economics textbooks; this process normally involves little or no variation in the supply of central bank liabilities. In effect, the announcement effect has displaced the liquidity effect as the fulcrum of monetary policy implementation. The chapter begins with an exposition of the traditional view of the implementation of monetary policy, and an assessment of the relationship between the quantity of reserves, appropriately defined, and the level of short-term interest rates. Event studies show no relationship between the two for the United States, the Euro-system, or Japan. Structural estimates of banks' reserve demand, at a frequency corresponding to the required reserve maintenance period, show no interest elasticity for the U.S. or the Euro-system (but some elasticity for Japan). The chapter next develops a model of the overnight interest rate setting process incorporating several key features of current monetary policy practice, including in particular reserve averaging procedures and a commitment, either explicit or implicit, by the central bank to lend or absorb reserves in response to differences between the policy interest rate and the corresponding target. A key implication is that if reserve demand depends on the difference between current and expected future interest rates, but not on the current level per se, then the central bank can alter the market-clearing interest rate with no change in reserve supply. This implication is borne out in structural estimates of daily reserve demand and supply in the U.S.: expected future interest rates shift banks' reserve demand, while changes in the interest rate target are associated with no discernable change in reserve supply. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implementation of monetary policy during the recent financial crisis, and the conditions under which the interest rate and the size of the central bank's balance sheet could function as two independent policy instruments. |
3A1831640252.jsonld | Chapter 21 Long-term consequences of population growth: Technological change, natural resources, and the environment | This chapter explores the long-term implications of population growth and its interaction with technological change, resources utilization, and the environment. The interaction among economic growth, population dynamics, and resource use is complex and the jointly endogenous outcome of the whole process of evolution and development of the economic and social system. While, in the long run, population size and growth may not be a key issue in the process of development, it may be an important issue in the short run. This is so because most of the costs are in short run, while the benefits are enjoyed over longer time scales. As such, population policy may be useful in allowing any benefits to accrue. The theoretical literature on fertility and population growth also needs to be extended to allow for more disaggregated models of household decision-making and for a better integration with the social environment. Most environmental disasters are because of the same types of problems that themselves impede developmentinefficient policies, the failure to enforce property rights, or inefficient structures of incentives. It is the interaction of population growth with these that causes it to have its worst effects. |
3A183163547X.jsonld | Chapter 5 Implementation theory | The implementation problem is the problem of designing a mechanism (game form) such that the equilibrium outcomes satisfy a criterion of social optimality embodied in a social choice rule. If a mechanism has the property that, in each possible state of the world, the set of equilibrium outcomes equals the set of optimal outcomes identified by the social choice rule, then the social choice rule is said to be implemented by this mechanism. Whether or not a social choice rule is implementable may depend on which game-theoretic solution concept is used. The most demanding requirement is that each agent should always have a dominant strategy, but mainly negative results are obtained in this case. More positive results are obtained using less demanding solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium. Any Nash-implementable social choice rule must satisfy a condition of “monotonicity”. Conversely, any social choice rule which satisfies monotonicity and “no veto power” can be Nash-implemented. Even non-monotonic social choice rules can be implemented using Nash equilibrium refinements. The implementation problem can be made more challenging by imposing additional requirements on the mechanisms, such as robustness to renegotiation and collusion. If the agents are incompletely informed about the state of the world, then the concept of Nash equilibrium is replaced by Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Incentive compatibility is a necessary condition for Bayesian Nash implementation, but in other respects the results closely mimic those that obtain with complete information. |
3A1831637936.jsonld | Chapter 44 Agricultural Extension | In this chapter we analyze the considerations that lead policy makers to undertake extension investments as a key public responsibility, as well as the complex set of factors and intra-agency incentives that explain why different extension systems' performance varies. Accordingly, the chapter provides a conceptual framework outlining farmers' demand for information, the welfare economic characterizations of extension services, and the organizational and political attributes that govern the performance of extension systems. The framework is used to examine several extension modalities and to analyze their likely and actual effectiveness. Specifically, the modalities reviewed include “training and visit” extension, decentralized systems, “fee-for-service” and privatized extension, and farmer-field-schools. The chapter also provides a discussion of methodological issues pertaining to the assessment of extension outcomes, and a review of some of the recent empirical literature on extension impact. The chapter emphasizes the efficiency gains that can come from locally decentralized delivery systems with incentive structures based on largely private provision that in most countries will still be publicly funded. In wealthier countries, and for particular higher income farmer groups, extension systems will likely evolve into fee-for-service organizations. |
3A1831641283.jsonld | Author index | This chapter is an index to the names of the authors who have contributed towards this publication titled Handbook of Defense economics, volume 1. The chapter also highlights the page numbers where author's names appear in the text. |
3A1831651343.jsonld | Chapter 10. Investment in Visual Art: Evidence from International Transactions | This study uses international trade data to discern whether fine art is, on average, more an investment or a consumption good. Using a battery of novel measures, the chapter demonstrates that the flows of services embodied by visual artworks most closely resemble consumption services. A stylized prediction of the permanent income hypothesis is that consumption demand increases with rises in permanent income and the demand for investment increases with rises in temporary income. We find that international shipments of art are strongly correlated with trade in consumer goods, with the income of destination countries, and specifically with the permanent component of income changes. In contrast, there is little indication that art demand responds to temporary income shocks or that it even moves in tandem with other investments, implying that the investment motive for purchasing art is relatively weak. |
3A1831650851.jsonld | Chapter 22. The Behavior of Individual Investors | We provide an overview of research on the stock trading behavior of individual investors. This research documents that individual investors (1) underperform standard benchmarks (e.g. a low-cost index fund), (2) sell winning investments while holding losing investments (the “disposition effect”), (3) are heavily influenced by limited attention and past return performance in their purchase decisions, (4) engage in naïve reinforcement learning by repeating past behaviors that coincided with pleasure while avoiding past behaviors that generated pain, and (5) tend to hold undiversified stock portfolios. These behaviors deleteriously affect the financial well being of individual investors. |
3A729992098.jsonld | The Independence of the Nuclear Regulator : Notes from the Canadian Experience | The firing of Linda Keen as President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission provoked considerable debate within Canada and internationally about the independence of the Canadian nuclear regulator. Ms. Keen was dismissed from her position at the height of the crisis over a world-wide shortage of medical isotopes caused by the shut-down of the research reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. Under the terms of its licence, the reactor was required to have two cooling pumps connected to an emergency power supply as a backup in case of a power outage caused by an event such as an earthquake. In November 2007, after it was discovered that the pumps were not connected, the reactor was shut down. As panic over the shortage of medical isotopes grew, the government took three extraordinary measures: first, it issued a directive; second, it introduced emergency legislation in Parliament; and finally, it fired Linda Keen as President of the Commission. This paper examines those three measures and whether they constituted an unwarranted interference with the independence of the Canadian nuclear regulator. |
3A1831635313.jsonld | Chapter 7 The Economic Analysis of Art Law | This paper surveys from an economic standpoint a number of important legal issues that influence the market for art, which include the creation, sale, valuation, maintenance and, in some instances, the destruction of works of art. We show that the important legal doctrines that bear on the visual arts can best be understood as rough efforts to promote efficiency in the art market. The paper focuses on U.S. legal doctrines and only occasionally mentions foreign law. Among the legal topics we consider are the following: copyright and trademark issues; moral rights which cover the right of an artist to prevent the mutilation and destruction of his work: resale royalties; rules governing ownership disputes between innocent parties such as a good faith purchaser and an earlier owner of the work of art; disputes over the authenticity of a work of art which cause material changes in the market value of the work; and the valuation of art-rich estates. |
3A1831633663.jsonld | Chapter 17 The Economics of Migrants' Remittances | This chapter reviews the recent theoretical and empirical economic literature on migrants' remittances. It is divided between a microeconomic section on the determinants of remittances and a macroeconomic section on their growth effects. At the micro level we first present in a fully harmonized framework the various motivations to remit described so far in the literature. We show that models based on different motives share many common predictions, making it difficult to implement truly discriminative tests in the absence of sufficiently detailed data on migrants and receiving households' characteristics and on the timing of remittances. The results from selected empirical studies show that a mixture of individualistic (e.g., altruism, exchange) and familial (e.g., investment, insurance) motives explain the likelihood and size of remittances; some studies also find evidence of moral hazard on the recipients' side and of the use of inheritance prospects to monitor the migrants' behavior. At the macro level we first briefly review the standard (Keynesian) and the trade-theoretic literature on the short-run impact of remittances. We then use an endogenous growth framework to describe the growth potential of remittances and present the evidence for different growth channels. There is considerable evidence that remittances (in the form of savings repatriated by return migrants) promote access to self-employment and raise investment in small businesses, and there is also evidence that remittances contribute to raise educational attainments of children in households with migrant members. Investigation of the effects of remittances on outcomes such as children's education and health raise identification issues, however, as we explain below. Finally, the relationship between remittances and inequality appears to be non-monotonic: remittances seem to decrease economic inequality in communities with a long migration tradition but to increase inequality within communities at the beginning of the migration process. This is consistent with different theoretical arguments regarding the role of migration networks and/or the dynamics of wealth transmission between successive generations. |
3A1831651602.jsonld | Chapter 21. Immigration : What About the Children and Grandchildren? | Intergenerational immigrant integration is central to the economic growth and social development of many countries whose populations comprise a substantial share of the children and grandchildren of immigrants. In addition to basic demographics, relevant economic theories and institutional features are surveyed to assist in understanding these phenomena. Building on this foundation, educational and labor market success across the immigrant generations are reviewed, and then studies on the evolution of social outcomes across those same generations are discussed. Overall, substantial cross-national heterogeneity in outcomes is observed as various sources of immigration interact with distinct national labor markets and educational/social contexts that have diverse approaches to integrating immigrants. |
3A1831644738.jsonld | Chapter 13 The economic analysis of labor market discrimination: A survey | The chapter presents a survey on the economics of labor market discrimination, motivated by two fundamental problems associated with income and wage differences among groups classified by sex, race, ethnicity, and other characteristics. The first is the inequity of long-lasting differences in economic well-being among the groups; in particular, differences in household or family income. The second is the inequity of long-lasting differences in the average wage rates among groups of workers classified by these demographic traits, when the groups may be presumed to be either equally productive or to have equal productive capacity. The second problem also raises the question of whether a labor market that pays unequal wages to equally productive workers is inefficient. Economic discrimination is defined in terms of income differences among families and wage differences among workers. The chapter discusses these definitions and presents data from the United States on the income and earnings differences of blacks, Hispanics, whites, women, and men. The chapter surveys theories of economic discrimination in the labor market. The theories are classified into competitive and monopolistic neoclassical models with (essentially) complete information, competitive neoclassical models with imperfect information-leading to statistical discrimination, and institutional theories. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the economic research on discrimination. |
3A1831642352.jsonld | Chapter 17 The macroeconomics of government finance | This chapter is a critical survey of literature on the implications of government financial policy for economic activity. The central question is whether the mode of financing of a given path of real government purchases — by taxes, non-monetary debt issue, or money creation — has real effects, in particular real effects of macroeconomic consequence. In Section 1, the Introduction, we define the issues with greater detail and precision. We briefly review economists' views, over the past fifty years, of the burden of public debt and the neutrality of money. Section 2 is a review of the 1960s vintage mainstream macroeconomics of fiscal and monetary policies, often called the “neoclassical synthesis”. We review its implications for both short-run fluctuations and long-run trends. We include this review because the earlier tradition covers some problems and issues now neglected, because its analyses and results may still have some validity, and because they did set the stage for — one might say they provoked or inspired — the recent literature surveyed in Sections 4–6. The earlier tradition and the recent literature differ in methodology, and in Section 3 we discuss the “microfoundations” methodology that dominates contemporary macroeconomics. Sections 4–6 are a selective critical survey of recent contributions, theoretical and empirical, designed to summarize the current state of play on the central issues: Section 4, the debt neutrality hypothesis of Robert Barro; Section 5, the effects of financing government expenditures by printing money rather than taxing, monetary superneutrality, and the “Fisher effect” of inflation on interest rates; Section 6, open market operations, and shifts between bond- and money-financing of government expenditures induced by the adoption of financial policies which are unsustainable over the longer run. In each section we first set forth the neutrality theorems purporting to show the irrelevance of the financing choice. Then we discuss articles elaborating or criticizing the theorems. In each case we conclude with a review and evaluation of some empirical tests. We conclude in Section 7 with short summary remarks. |
3A72999676X.jsonld | Are ICT Users More Innovative? : an Analysis of ICT-Enabled Innovation in OECD Firms | The aim of this study is to assess the effects of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on firms’ capabilities to innovate in a selection of OECD countries. Our findings support the hypothesis that ICTs act as an enabler of innovation, particularly for product and marketing innovation, in both manufacturing and services. However, we did not find any evidence that ICT use increases the capability of a firm to co-operate, to develop innovation in-house or to introduce products new to the market. These results suggest that ICTs enable firms to adopt innovation but they do not increase their “inventive” capabilities. |
3A1831632179.jsonld | Chapter 2 Liability for Accidents | This is a survey of legal liability for accidents. Three general aspects of accident liability are addressed. The first is the effect of liability on incentives, both whether to engage in activities (for instance, whether to drive) and how much care to exercise (at what speed to travel) to reduce risk when so doing. The second general aspect concerns risk-bearing and insurance, for the liability system acts as an implicit insurer for accident victims and it imposes risk on potential injurers (because they may have to pay judgments to victims). In this regard, victims' accident insurance and injurers' liability insurance are taken into account. The third general aspect of accident liability is its administrative expense, comprising the cost of legal services, the value of litigants' time, and the operating cost of the courts. A range of subtopics is considered, including product liability, causation, punitive damages, the judgment-proof problem, vicarious liability, and nonpecuniary harm. Liability is also compared to other methods of controlling harmful activities, notably, to corrective taxation and to regulation. |
3A1831640473.jsonld | Chapter 9 Neural networks for encoding and adapting in dynamic economies | This chapter describes feedforward neural networks as approximators and relates them to statistical discriminant functions, and explains the ways in which neural nets of varying complexity can represent equilibria in two repeated games and one dynamic economic model. Because linear strategies are simple to implement, a large class of equilibrium outcomes can be represented with simple perceptions. However, in the presence of imperfect monitoring, the linear proxies can overestimate the hidden variables. The chapter presents bounded rationality as a constraint on computational capabilities. Thus, the main exercise is to construct equilibria sustained by simple neural networks, and to study the ways in which the restriction on strategies reduces the set of equilibrium outcomes. The approach of Rubinstein (1986) presumes that players have access to finite automata that encode transition and outcome functions. It is believed that neural networks are useful tools to study the strategic implications of complexity cost, especially when, the feasible computing machines may have infinite states, and the computing machine can adapt itself as the game progresses. |
3A1831650738.jsonld | Chapter 7. Long-Run Trends in the Distribution of Income and Wealth | This chapter reviews the long-run developments in the distribution of personal income and wealth. It also discusses suggested explanations for the observed patterns. We try to answer questions such as: What do we know, and how do we know, about the distribution of income and wealth over time? Are there common trends across countries or over the path of development? How do the facts relate to proposed theories about changes in inequality? We present the main inequality trends, in some cases starting as early as in the late eighteenth century, combining previous research with recent findings in the so-called top income literature and new evidence on wealth concentration. The picture that emerges shows that inequality was historically high almost everywhere at the beginning of the twentieth century. In some countries this situation was preceded by increasing concentration, but in most cases inequality seems to have been relatively constant at a high level in the nineteenth century. Over the twentieth century inequality decreased almost everywhere for the first 80 years, largely due to decreasing wealth concentration and decreasing capital incomes in the top of the distribution. Thereafter trends became more divergent across countries and also different across income and wealth distributions. Econometric evidence over the long run suggests that top shares increase in periods of above-average growth, whereas democracy and high marginal tax rates are associated with lower top shares. |
3A1831638517.jsonld | Chapter 3 Expectations, information and dynamics | The role of expectations in the empirical analysis of agricultural supply is examined under the assumption of separation of expectations and constraints in dynamic decision making. Extrapolative, adaptive, implicit, rational and quasi-rational, and futures-based models of expectation formation are discussed. Empirical and experimental evidence for and against various models of expectation is summarized. |
3A1831643650.jsonld | Chapter 2 The roots of development theory | This chapter presents an investigation on the availability of the current development theory, in the writings of the 18th century. The theory of economic development established itself in Britain in the century and a half running from about 1650 to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. The chapter concentrates on the writings of the three superstars of the eighteenth century, Hume, Steuart, and Adam Smith. The eighteenth century economists did not find the precise distinction between tradeable and non-tradeable goods and services. They were also conscious of the difficulties of exporting imposed constraints on the growth of the economy. If they were obsessed with the balance of payments, it may also be said that mid-twentieth-century economists underestimated the importance of this constraint, and paid the penalty in almost continual international currency crises from 1913 to the time of writing (1985). The Quantity Theory of money was well known to economists throughout the eighteenth century, because of its formulation by John Locke. About the short-term effects on wages of an increase in the demand for labor, the long-run effects were disputed by at least three groups: those who believed in increasing returns, those who saw an infinitely elastic supply of labor, and a third group that expected diminishing returns. Economic institutions were different then from now, and this is reflected in the shape of development theory. The eighteenth century could not contribute spectacularly to the monetary theory of the twentieth century, because the institutional background differed so greatly as between the two periods. This is an age of paper moneybanknotes checks and so onwhereas theirs was still an age of precious metals circulating as money. |
3A72999662X.jsonld | Case Law | European Union – Judgement of the European Court of Justice on failure of a Member State to fulfil obligations under Directive 96/29/Euratom (2007) Germany – Judgement of the Federal Administration Court on the standing of third parties regarding attacks at interim storage facilities (2008) United States – Judgement of the US Court of Appeals on licensing of the LES Uranium Enrichment Facility (2007) |
3A1831635097.jsonld | Chapter 29 The Economics of Museums | Museums fulfill many important functions in the art world and visits to museums are becoming an important leisure and holiday activity. This chapter surveys research about the functioning of museums from an economic point of view. Museum services are shaped by demand and supply factors and by the institutional setting constraining the decision makers in a museum. This chapter argues that the institutional factors, e.g., whether a museum is private or public, influence greatly how the museum is run with respect to the management of the collection, price setting, or the focus on commercial activities. Two current trends, the evolution of superstar museums and the growing importance of special exhibitions, are analysed from an economic point of view. |
3A730032086.jsonld | Reform of the Railway Sector in Russia | The rail industry in Russia is one of the largest in the world. Russia’s vast distances, relatively under-developed road infrastructure, and high reliance on bulk commodities imply that the rail industry has a unique and key role in the transportation infrastructure of Russia. At present the industry is organised as a fully-integrated entity, operated by the Ministry of Railways. At a seminar in Moscow in December 2000, OECD experts and Russian officials discussed how this industry could be restructured to promote competition, enhance efficiency and to ensure that this industry best meets the needs of the growing Russian economy. The following summary sets out the key ideas and conclusions to emerge from that seminar. Three main topics are discussed: policies to establish a sound commercial environment for railway operators, structural options for competition and managing the transition to a competitive structure. A key issue is whether it would be possible to enhance competition by dividing the Russian rail industry into a number of verticaly-integrated railways, competing for the provision of rail services along the key rail transport corridors. |
3A730020371.jsonld | Between Shadow and Light: The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Forty Years On | “Despite its flaws and weaknesses, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) remains an invaluable instrument for international security… There is no alternative but to support and strengthen the NPT…” Foreign Affairs, Defence and Armed Forces Committee of the French Senate |
3A1831654156.jsonld | Chapter 1. The Mechanism-Design Approach to Monetary Theory | The mechanism-design approach to monetary theory is the search for fruitful settings in which money is necessary for the achievement of some desirable allocations. Fruitfulness means that the settings provide insights about puzzling observations and policy questions. Settings with three frictions are considered: imperfect monitoring, costly connections among people, and imperfect recognizability of assets. An illustrative model with those frictions is used to explain as an optimum the following features of actual economies: currency is a uniform object, currency is (usually) dominated in rate of return, some transactions are accomplished using currency and others are accomplished in other ways. |
3A1831647389.jsonld | Chapter 10 Testing trade theories and predicting trade flows | The major obstacle to the testing of trade theories has been the difficulty of constructing tests that is theoretically sound. The intuitive content of most trade theories is quite simple and straightforward. But empirical tests of the theories are often faulted on the grounds that they test propositions that do not derive rigorously from the theories. The problem seems to lie in the theories themselves, which are seldom stated in forms that are compatible with the real world complexities that empirical research cannot escape. This chapter discusses the problems that arise in testing trade theories independent of the theory being tested. To the extent that many of the specific explanations of trade have a common foundation in the theory of comparative advantage, they also share some of the same empirical complications, and it is useful to look at these before becoming immersed in the particular problems that arise from specific theories. The chapter reviews the empirical tests and implementations of the Ricardian theory, the HeckscherOhlin theory, and the technology theory. The chapter also reviews an assortment of other approaches to trade. These include both recently articulated theories that have not yet been tested, such as the monopolistic competition model, and empirical tests that have been done without benefit of theory, such as the so-called gravity models. |
3A729990559.jsonld | Environmental policy, management and R&D | The authors would like to thank Chris Heady (OECD Directorate for Financial and Enterprise Affairs) and Dirk Pilat (OECD Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry) for valuable comments on an earlier draft of the paper. In addition, the contributions from all of our colleagues on the OECD Project on “Environmental Policy and Firm-Level Management” are gratefully acknowledged. (See Johnstone 2006 for a full list of contributors and other outputs from the project.) In particular the insights of Toshi Arimura (Department of Economics, Sophia University, Japan) in the area of research and development have been extremely valuable. |
3A729973883.jsonld | National Legislative and Regulatory Activities | CANADACriminal Court decision respecting attempted export of nuclear-related dual use items to Iran: Her Majesty the Queen vs Yadegari (2010) CZECH REPUBLIC Supreme Administrative Court on the legal status of ÈEZ (2010) National Legislative and Regulatory Activities BULGARIA Amendment to the Act on the Safe Use of Nuclear Energy (2010) FRANCE Law on the new organisation of the electricity market (2010) GERMANY Amendment to the Atomic Energy Act extending the operating lifetime of nuclear power plants (2010) Amendment to the Reliability Assessment Ordinance (2010)Amendment to the Ordinance on Persons Responsible for Nuclear Safety and on Reportable Events (2010) Amendment to the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (2010) GREECE Decree transposing European Council Directive 2006/117/Euratom (2010) INDIA Civil Nuclear Liability Act (2010) ROMANIA Amendment to Article 35 of Law 111/1996 regarding new tasks of CNCAN (2010)Order approving norms regarding the radiological monitoring or recyclable metal materials (2010) SERBIA Establishment of the Agency for Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety (2009) SLOVENIA Rules on operational safety of radiation and nuclear facilities (2009) Rules on radiation and nuclear safety factors (2009) Act on Liability for Nuclear Damage (2010) SWEDEN Abolishment of the Act on phasing out of nuclear energy (2010) Act on Liability and Compensation for Nuclear Damage (2010) UNITED STATES Final rule on the independent storage of spent nuclear fuel (2010) Status of the high-level waste repository programme (2010) Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability and Divestment Act (2010) Final rule on the export and import of nuclear equipment and material (2010) |
3A1831649004.jsonld | Chapter 5. The Economics of Science | This chapter examines the contributions that economists have made to the study of science and the types of contributions the profession is positioned to make in the future. Special emphasis is placed on the public nature of knowledge and characteristics of the reward structure that encourage the production and sharing of knowledge. The role that cognitive and noncognitive resources play in discovery is discussed as well as the costs of resources used in research. Different models for the funding of research are presented. The chapter also discusses scientific labor markets and the extreme difficulty encountered in forecasting the demand for and supply of scientists. The chapter closes with a discussion of the relationship of scientific research to economic growth and suggestions for future research. |
3A1831639149.jsonld | Chapter 9 Macroeconomics of distribution and growth | This chapter reviews various interactions between the distribution of income across individuals and factors of production on the one hand, and aggregate savings, investment, and macroeconomic growth on the other. Tractable models necessarily focus on specific causal channels within this complex web of interactions, and the survey is organized around a few relevant methodological insights. In a “neoclassical” economy where all intra- and intertemporal markets exist and clear competitively, all distributional issues should be resolved before market interactions address the economic problem of allocating scarce resources efficiently, and the dynamics of income and consumption distribution have no welfare implications. Other models, recognizing that market interactions need not maximize a hypothetical representative individual's welfare, let accumulated and nonaccumulated factors of production be owned by individuals with exogenously or endogenously different saving propensities, and feature interactions between the personal and functional distribution of resources and macroeconomic accumulation. Furthermore, rates of return to savings and investments are generally heterogeneous when they are only partially (if at all) interconnected by financial markets, as is the case in overlapping generation economies, in models with binding self-financing constraints, and in models where financial market imperfections let individual consumption flows be affected by idiosyncratic uncertainty. The chapter also reviews models where distributional tensions, far from being resolved ex ante, work their way through distortionary policies and market interactions to bear directly on both macroeconomic dynamics and income distribution. Finally, it relates theoretical insights to recent empirical work on cross-country growth dynamics and on relationships between within-country inequality and macroeconomic performance. |
3A1831638339.jsonld | Chapter 16 Marketing margins: Empirical analysis | The marketing margin, characterized as some function of the difference between retail and farm price of a given farm product, is intended to measure the cost of providiing marketing services. The margin is influenced primarily by shifts in retail demand, farm supply, and marketing input prices. But other factors also can be important, including time lags in supply and demand, market power, risk, technical change, quality, and spatial considerations. Topics for future research include improved specifications for margins and demand and supply shifters, retail-to-farm price transmission of retail demand changes, and impacts of vertical integration and policy interventions. |
3A1831638533.jsonld | Chapter 1 Production and supply | The work of more than 50 years aimed at gaining empirical insight into the production structure of agriculture and the related modes of farmers' behavior is reviewed, and orders of magnitude of the various parameters of interest are quoted. The review follows the lines of the evolution of the pertinent research, and it builds on it in forming a general framework for empirical work. This approach broadens the scope of producers' decisions to include the choice of the implemented technology and it also overcomes statistical problems that have accompanied the relevant research for a long time. |
3A1831649446.jsonld | Chapter 6. Teacher Pensions | Most educators in the United States receive retirement compensation via a subnational defined-benefit pension plan. These plans exert strong “pull” and “push” incentives over the course of the career and concentrate teacher retirements at relatively early ages compared to other professions. They also impose sharp penalties on geographically mobile teachers. Teacher pensions are a large and growing cost of public education. There are several reasons for the rising costs, but the biggest reason is that the unfunded liabilities of most plans are growing. The growth in unfunded liabilities is facilitated by the decoupling of contributions and benefits at the individual level, and represents a shift of wealth from young to older teachers in the United States. In response to fiscal pressures, some states are changing their plans, primarily for new teachers. |
3A1831644177.jsonld | Chapter 46 Labor market institutions and economic performance | Barely a day goes by without some expert telling us how the continental European economies are about to disintegrate unless their labor markets become more flexible. Basically, we are told, Europe has the wrong sort of labor market institutions for the modern global economy. These outdated institutions both raise unemployment and lower growth rates. The truth of propositions such as these depends on which labor market institutions really are bad for unemployment and growth, and which are not. Our purpose in this chapter is to set out what we know about this question. Our conclusions indicate that the labor market institutions on which policy should be focussed are unions and social security systems. Encouraging product market competition is a key policy to eliminate the negative effects of unions. For social security the key policies are benefit reform linked to active labor market policies to move people from welfare to work. By comparison, time spent worrying about strict labor market regulations, employment protection and minimum wages is probably time largely wasted. |
3A1831637871.jsonld | Chapter 50 Plant Biotechnology for Developing Countries | This paper reviews the tools applied in plant biotechnology and explores the prospects for biotechnology to generate benefits for developing countries. Possible near-term applications are identified. Needed capability in biological research, intellectual property management and biosafety are outlined. The experience of the Rockefeller Foundation in helping to build capacity to use the tools in developing countries is described. Plant biotechnology includes four primary sets of techniques that enhance the capacity of scientists to modify the genetic composition of plants – plant tissue culture, marker assisted breeding, genomics and genetic engineering. These complement other techniques that have long been used by plant breeders and before them farmers to develop crop varieties. Genetic engineering has attracted critical attention because it enables the transfer and functioning of DNA from one species to another, even from bacteria or animals to plants; and although most biological scientists hold there is no significance to the origin of DNA, this possibility has embroiled biotechnology in controversy. The concentration of variety development, seed production and seed sales in less than half a dozen multinational companies, another development that critics find troubling, is an important consequence of extending patenting to plants. |
3A183163421X.jsonld | Chapter 23 Public Intervention in Post-Secondary Education | This chapter provides an overview of the nature of state and federal subsidies to higher education and the empirical evidence on the impacts on students' college enrollment decisions. The discussion includes a brief discussion of the incentives created by federal and state subsidies for institutions and for students, a summary of trends in enrollment rates by race and income, a survey of the empirical evidence on the impacts of financial aid policies, and a discussion of the possible role supply constraints may have played on the rise in the payoff to schooling over the last two decades. |
3A1831644509.jsonld | Chapter 27. Labor Supply: A Review of Alternative Approaches | This chapter surveys existing approaches to modeling labor supply and identifies important gaps in the literature that could be addressed in future research. The discussion begins with a look at recent policy reforms and labor market facts that motivate the study of labor supply. The analysis then presents a unifying framework that allows alternative empirical formulations of the labor supply model to be compared and their resulting elasticities to be interpreted. This is followed by critical reviews of alternative approaches to labor-supply modeling. The first review assesses the difference-in-differences approach and its relationship to natural experiments. The second analyzes estimation with non-linear budget constraints and welfare-program participation. The third appraises developments of family labor-supply models including both the standard unitary and collective labor-supply formulations. The fourth briefly explores dynamic extensions of the labor supply model, characterizing how participation decisions, learning-by-doing, human capital accumulation and habit formation affect the analysis of the lifecycle model. At the end of each of the four broad reviews, we summarize a selection of the recent empirical findings. The concluding section asks whether the developments reviewed in this chapter place us in a better position to answer the policy-reform questions and to interpret the trends in participation and hours with which we began this review. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. |
3A1831649292.jsonld | Chapter 16. Media Capture and Media Power | This chapter studies situations where media sources deliberately deviate from truthful reporting in order to manipulate electoral outcomes. Media capture occurs when the government actively attempts to influence the media industry. We instead speak of media power when news organizations engage in biased reporting for political reasons. Existing theories identify factors that make these phenomena more likely to occur, suggest ways of measuring them, and study their welfare effect and policy implications. |
3A1831632020.jsonld | Preface | This chapter presents a brief preview for this book Handbook of Law and Economics Volume 1 . The book provides economists with a systematic introduction and survey of research in the field of law and economics. The book contains 22 chapters and is organized into three main parts. Part I deals with the building blocks of the legal system: property law, contract law, accident law (torts), litigation (including aspects of civil procedure), and public enforcement of law (including criminal law). Part II treats other prominent areas of law: corporate law, bankruptcy law, antitrust law, regulation (of externalities, natural monopolies, and network industries), employment and labor law, antidiscrimination law, intellectual property law, environmental law, and international law. Part III addresses three additional topics: norms and the law, the experimental study of law, and political economy and the law. Most of the chapters are theoretically-oriented, but many mention relevant empirical work and three focus on empirical research (on civil law, public law enforcement, and corporate law). |
3A183165086X.jsonld | Chapter 21. Household Finance: An Emerging Field | Household finance—the normative and positive study of how households use financial markets to achieve their objectives—has gained a lot of attention over the past decade and has become a field with its own identity, style, and agenda. In this chapter we review its evolution and most recent developments. |
3A1831635976.jsonld | Chapter 8. Environmental macroeconomics: The case of climate change | We describe the construction of an integrated assessment model of the economy and the climate. The framework is quantitatively oriented—it is constructed to account for the main global macroeconomic and climate facts—and its structure is a dynamic, stochastic general-equilibrium model. It is designed, in particular, for policy evaluation and long-term predictions of joint economy-climate outcomes. The chapter begins with a detailed description of stylized long-run macroeconomic facts and the core framework for replicating them, along with an extension to include an energy sector. Then a climate and a carbon-cycle module are added and economic damages from climate change are explicitly described and included in the model. Methods for solving the model are then discussed and a core setting, allowing a particularly convenient solution, is developed, calibrated, and used. Extensions to endogenous technology choice and multi-regional analysis are briefly discussed as well. |
3A1831643480.jsonld | Introduction to part 2 | This chapter presents an introduction to the handbook on development economics, Part 2. Development economics has evolved through the interaction between theoretical inquiry and empirical studies. Two areas of interactionone macro and the other microhave proven quite fruitful, and have led to continuing programs of research. The first involves the study of changes in economic structure that typically accompany growth during a given period or within a particular set of countries. The central features of what has been termed structural transformation are such economy-wide phenomena as industrialization, agricultural transformation, migration, and urbanization. All of these processes involve reciprocal interactions between rising income and changing proportions of demand and supply, and all are affected by macroeconomic and sectoral policies. The second empirical research program focuses more narrowly on behavior of individuals, households, and institutions as well as the various markets in which they are involved. In this micro or household approach, prices and markets play a central role and the neo-classical model provides a logical point of departure. |
3A1831637839.jsonld | Chapter 54 Agricultural Mechanization: Adoption Patterns and Economic Impact | Over the past half a century developing regions, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, have seen labor-saving technologies adopted at unprecedented levels. Intensification of production systems created power bottlenecks around the land preparation, harvesting and threshing operations. Alleviating the power bottlenecks with the adoption of mechanical technologies helped enhance agricultural productivity and lowered the unit cost of crop production even in the densely populated countries of Asia. Economic growth and the commercialization of agricultural systems is leading to further mechanization of agricultural systems in Asia and Latin America. Sub-Saharan Africa continues to have very low levels of mechanization and available data indicate declining rather than increasing levels of adoption, even among the countries that were the early trendsetters, such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. This chapter documents the trends and sequential patterns in the adoption of mechanical technology, assesses the evidence on the productivity and equity impact of mechanization, and discusses the implication for mechanization policy. |
3A1831653281.jsonld | Chapter 4. Regional Growth and Regional Decline | Since the early 1990s, there has been a renaissance in the study of regional growth, spurred by new models, methods, and data. We survey a range of modeling traditions, and some formal approaches to the hard problem of regional economics; namely, the joint consideration of agglomeration and growth. We also review empirical methods and findings based on natural experiments, spatial discontinuity designs, and structural models. Throughout, we give considerable attention to regional growth in developing countries. Finally, we highlight the potential importance of processes that are specific to regional decline, and which deserve greater research attention. |
3A729996344.jsonld | Bilateral and Multilateral Agreements | This article presents a list of Bilateral and Multilateral Agreements on nuclear law concluded during the second half of 2009. |
3A1767146051.jsonld | Second-order finite automata: expressive power and simple proofs using automatic structures | Second-order finite automata, introduced recently by Andrade de Melo and de Oliveira Oliveira, represent classes of languages. Since their semantics is defined by a synchronized rational relation, they can be studied using the theory of automatic structures. We exploit this connection to uniformly reprove and strengthen known and new results regarding closure and decidability properties concerning these automata. We then proceed to characterize their expressive power in terms of automatic classes of languages studied by Jain, Luo, and Stephan. |
3A1831633817.jsonld | Chapter 7 The Formation of Social Preferences: Some Lessons from Psychology and Biology | The goal of this paper is to draw some lessons for economic theory from research in psychology, social psychology and, more briefly, in biology, which purports to explain the formation of social preferences. We elicit the basic mechanisms whereby a variety of social preferences are determined in a variety of social contexts. Biological mechanisms, cultural transmission, learning, and the formation of cognitive and emotional capacities shape social preferences in the long or very long run. In the short run, the built-in capacities are utilized by individuals to construct their own context-dependent social preferences. The full development of social preferences requires consciousness of the individual's similarities and differences with others, and therefore knowledge of self and others. A wide variety of context-dependent social preferences can be generated by just three cognitive processes: identification of self with known others, projection of known self onto partially unknown others, and categorization of others by similarity with self. The self can project onto similar others but is unable to do so onto dissimilar others. The more can the self identify with, or project onto, an other the more generous she will be. Thus the self will find it easier to internalize and predict the behavior of an in-group than an out-group and will generally like to interact more with the former than with the latter. The main social motivations can be simply organized by reference to social norms of justice or fairness that lead to reciprocal behavior, some kind of self-anchored altruism that provokes in-group favoritism, and social drives which determine an immediate emotional response to an experienced event like hurting a norm's violator or helping an other in need. |
3A1831653095.jsonld | Chapter Fourteen. Medical Workforce | The medical workforce is important based merely on its size and takes on even greater importance given the influence physicians, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists have on patient treatment. On the supply side, most governments regulate health professions to assure that the inputs into the health production function are of sufficiently high quality. But such regulation can also cause harm. This chapter examines the supply and demand for medical labor and the effects of the market failure and government intervention. We begin by examining the supply side, describing a medical labor market with no market failures. We enumerate the various market failures that justify government regulation and discuss the implications of regulation on medical labor and consumers. We then examine several possible explanations for the persistent variation in medical labor productivity across markets and organization forms, including government regulation, differences in reimbursement incentives, politics, the effect of incentives to manage people within organizations, human resources management, and motivated agents. We end by suggesting some potential areas for future research. |
3A1831641895.jsonld | Chapter 7 Noncooperative models of bargaining | This chapter focuses on the noncooperative models of bargaining. John Nash's (1950) path- breaking paper introduces the bargaining problem, and his pioneering work on noncooperative bargaining theory was taken up again and developed by numerous authors. The target of such a noncooperative theory of bargaining is to find theoretical predictions of what agreement, if any, will be reached by the bargainers, thereby to explain the manner in which the bargaining outcome depends on the parameters of the bargaining problem and to shed light on the meaning of some of the verbal concepts that are used when bargaining is discussed in ordinary language. Three directions in which progress has been particularly fruitful are (1) sequential models have been introduced in studying specific bargaining procedures, (2) refinements of Nash equilibrium have been applied, and (3) bargaining models have been embedded in market situations to provide insights into markets with decentralized trading. In spite of this progress, important challenges are still ahead. The most pressing is that of establishing a properly founded theory of bargaining under incomplete information. A resolution of this difficulty must presumably await a major breakthrough in the general theory of games of incomplete information. From the perspective of economic theory in general, the main challenge remains the modeling of trading institutions (with the nature of money as the most obvious target). |
3A1831654725.jsonld | Chapter 66. International Migration and the Developing World | In this chapter, I discuss the recent academic research on international migration, focusing on the causes and consequences of emigration from developing countries and the motivations behind the restrictions imposed by the developed countries on immigration. My aim is to identify facts about international migration relevant to those concerned about why labor moves between countries, how these movements affect the countries that send these laborers, and why the receiving countries are so selective about the immigrants that they admit. |
3A1743761929.jsonld | Strategies for smart service prototypes - implications for the requirements elicitation in the early development stages | The purpose of this paper is to investigate how can prototypes contribute to the requirements elicitation for smart services in the early development stages. Smart services are delivered to or via intelligent objects and are characterized by context awareness, connectivity, and data-driven value creation. Smart services and prototyping are emerging topics in requirements elicitation and pose challenges to existing approaches. This article creates a fundamental understanding for the requirements elicitation by characterizing smart services in a layer model that illustrates the structure, processes, and interaction of the networked components. Based on this, the strategies outline ways how prototypes for smart services can be composed in a result-oriented way and applied in requirements elicitation. The models are based on the results of a comprehensive literature review and demonstrate their relevance using case studies from the mobility sector. |
3A1831638436.jsonld | Chapter 11 Economic impacts of agricultural research and extension | Agricultural research and extension programs have been built in most of the world's economies. A substantial number of economic impact studies evaluating the contributions of research and extension programs to increased farm productivity and farm incomes and to consumer welfare have been undertaken in recent years. This chapter reviews these studies using estimated rates of return on investment to index economic impacts. In almost all categories of studies, median (social) estimated rates of return are high, (often exceeding 40 percent) but the range of estimates was also high. The chapter concludes that most of the estimates were consistent with actual economic growth experiences. |
3A1831634937.jsonld | Chapter 3 Horizontal Innovation in the Theory of Growth and Development | We analyze recent contributions to growth theory based on the model of expanding variety of Romer [Romer, P. (1990). “Endogenous technological change”. Journal of Political Economy 98, 71–102]. In the first part, we present different versions of the benchmark linear model with imperfect competition. These include the “lab-equipment” model, “labor-for-intermediates” and “directed technical change”. We review applications of the expanding variety framework to the analysis of international technology diffusion, trade, cross-country productivity differences, financial development and fluctuations. In many such applications, a key role is played by complementarities in the process of innovation. |
3A1771591269.jsonld | Reconfigurable planar quadrilateral linkages based on the tensegrity principle | A feasible possibility to develop planar reconfigurable mechanisms is introduced in this work. Applying the tensegrity principle to common four-bar linkages allows a controllable change between two configurations of the mechanism. These two states correspond to different working spaces which vary regarding to the kinematic and mechanical properties. Therefore, the reconfiguration of the mechanism enables two different operation modes. Hence, this kind of mechanism enables the advantageous properties of conventional linkages with an additional enhanced adaptability of the kinematic and mechanic behavior. Beside the conceptual design of such tensegrity-based mechanisms, a reconfigurable four-bar parallel linkage is considered exemplarily. Numerical simulations are evaluated focusing on the kinematic behavior and the structural mechanics of this mechanism. Especially the reconfiguration of the mechanism by changing between two different working spaces is considered. The simulation results clarify the benefit of utilizing the tensegrity principle in mechanism theory. Adding only a few members to the original linkage enables a reconfigurable mechanism with comparable complexity. |
3A1831641801.jsonld | Chapter 16 Two-sided matching | This chapter discusses the games that are two-sided matching markets. The phrase two-sided refers to the fact that agents in such markets belong, from the outset, to one of two disjoint sets-e.g, firms or workers. The term matching refers to the bilateral nature of exchange in these markets. The game-theoretic analysis of these markets has proved useful in various empirically oriented studies. This chapter describes some of the phenomena the theory should be able to explain, and concludes by returning to consider how the theory addresses the empirical questions raised at the beginning. The chapter focuses on both the core of the game and the dominant and equilibrium strategies under various rules about how the game might be played. The distinction between cooperative and noncooperative game theory is often somewhat artificial because the tools of both kinds of theory can be used to study the same phenomena. |
3A1831635763.jsonld | Chapter 9. Market Microstructure | Market microstructure deals with the purest form of financial intermediation – the trading of a financial asset, such as a stock or a bond. In a trading market, assets are not transformed but are simply transferred from one investor to another. The field of market microstructure studies the cost of trading securities and the impact of trading costs on the short-run behavior of securities prices. Costs are reflected in the bid-ask spread (and related measures) and in commissions. The focus of this chapter is on the determinants of the spread rather than on commissions. After an introduction to markets, traders and the trading process, I review the theory of the bid–ask spread in Section 3 and examine the implications of the spread for the short-run behavior of prices in Section 4. In Section 5, the empirical evidence on the magnitude and nature of trading costs is summarized, and inferences are drawn about the importance of various sources of the spread. Price impacts of trading from block trades, from herding or from other sources, are considered in Section 6. Issues in the design of a trading market, such as the functioning of call versus continuous markets and of dealer versus auction markets, are examined in Section 7. Even casual observers of markets have undoubtedly noted the surprising pace at which new trading markets are being established even as others merge. Section 8 briefly surveys recent developments in securities markets in the USA and considers the forces leading to centralization of trading in a single market versus the forces leading to multiple markets. Most of this chapter deals with the microstructure of equities markets. In Section 9, the microstructure of other markets is considered. Section 10 provides a brief discussion of the implications of microstructure for asset pricing. Section 11 concludes. |
3A1831644371.jsonld | Chapter 32 Minimum wages, employment, and the distribution of income | After nearly a decade of relative quiet, the increases in the US minimum wage that began in 1990 have coincided with a renewed interest in its effects. Recent work suggests that a relative consensus on the effects of the minimum wage on employment came undone; on balance, however, the recent estimates seem if anything smaller than those suggested by the earlier literature, and the puzzle of why they are relatively small remains. Effects of the minimum wage on the wage distribution became clearer with the declining real minimum wage in the 1980s; nevertheless, the ability of minimum wages to equalize the distribution of family incomes remains quite limited. |
3A1831651904.jsonld | Chapter 1. Rationality | This chapter is a very compressed review of the neoclassical orthodoxy on the nature of rationality on economic theory. It defends the orthodoxy both against the behavioral criticism that it assumes too much and the revisionist view that it assumes too little. In places, especially on the subject of Bayesianism, the paper criticizes current practice on the grounds that it has gone astray in departing from the principles of its founding fathers. Elsewhere, especially on the modeling of knowledge, some new proposals are made. In particular, it is argued that interpreting counterfactuals is not part of the function of a definition of rationality. |
3A1831645521.jsonld | Chapter 4 Taxes and labor supply | This chapter discusses taxes and labor supply. The effect of taxes on labor supply introduces interesting questions in economic theory, econometrics, and public finance. Since the greatest share of federal tax revenue, approximately 50 in 1980, is raised by the individual income tax. The federal income tax is based on the notion of ability to pay, and its progressive structure has received wide acceptance. To measure empirically the effect of taxes on labor supply, problems in economic theory and econometrics need to be treated. First, the effect of progressive taxation is to create a convex, non-linear budget set where the net, after-tax wage depends on hours worked. Since most of consumer theory is based on constant market prices which are independent of quantity purchased, theoretical notions such as the Slutsky equation need to be modified to assess the effect of a change in the tax rate. The other important aspect of the taxation of labor supply is the effect on economic welfare. |
3A1831644304.jsonld | Chapter 39 New developments in models of search in the labor market | Equilibrium models of labor markets characterized by search and recruiting friction and by the need to reallocate workers from time to time across alternative productive activities represent the segment of the research frontier explored in this chapter. In this literature, unemployment spell and job spell durations as well as wage offers are treated as endogenous outcomes of forward looking job creation and job destruction decisions made by the workers and employers who populate the models. The solutions studied are dynamic stochastic equilibria in the sense that time and uncertainty are explicitly modeled, expectations are rational, private gains from trade are exploited, and the actions taken by all agents are mutually consistent. We argue that the framework provides a useful setting in which to study the effects of alternative wage setting institutions and different labor market policy regimes. |
3A1831653249.jsonld | Chapter 8. Growth from Globalization? A View from the Very Long Run | What is the connection between different forms of globalization, economic growth, and welfare? International trade, cross-border capital flows, and labor movements are three areas in which economic historians have focused their research. I critically summarize various measures of international integration in each of these spheres. I then move on to discuss and evaluate the ongoing and active debate about whether globalization is significantly associated with growth in the past. I pay particular attention to the role of globalization in the Great Divergence, the tariff-trade-growth debate, and the globalization of capital markets in the 19th century. |
3A730031101.jsonld | Intergovernmental organisation activities | European Atomic Energy Community Adopted legislative instruments Reports Meetings International Atomic Energy Agency IAEA Action Plan on Nuclear Safety Non-binding instrument on the transboundary movement of scrap metal 55th IAEA General Conference Basic Safety Standards Nuclear Law Institute OECD Nuclear Energy Agency Basic Safety Standards International Nuclear Law Essentials International School of Nuclear Law New members Russian Federation request for membership |
3A1831643146.jsonld | Chapter 43 Human and physical infrastructure: Public investment and pricing policies in developing countries | This chapter focuses on what has traditionally been considered as the core infrastructure sectors, which enhance the productivity of physical capital and land (mainly transportation and power). It discusses human infrastructure- or those services that raise the productivity of labor (health, education, nutrition). Public investment will be defined broadly to include all government spending in these sectors, rather than just capital expenditures as traditionally defined in official statistics. This is to ensure that the economic issues regarding recurrent as well as capital spending are covered in the chapter. The chapter emphasizes on recent policy debates without presenting the basic theoretical concepts underlying them in detail. The chapter on stresses common cross-sectoral themes regarding the pricing of and investment in infrastructure services in developing countries, rather than detailed issues within sectors. |
3A183164973X.jsonld | Chapter 9. Newspapers and Magazines | We review the Economics literature on newspapers and magazines. Our emphasis is on the newspaper industry, especially in the United States, given that this has been the focus of existing research. We first discuss the structure of print media markets, describing the rise in the number of daily newspapers during the early twentieth century and then the steady decline since the 1940s. We discuss print media in the context of two-sided markets, noting that empirical papers on the newspaper industry were some of the earliest studies to use the techniques of two-sided market estimation. We then review the research on advertising in print media, particularly the question of whether readers value print advertising as a good or a bad thing. We summarize the research on antitrust-related issues in newspaper markets, including mergers, joint operating agreements, and vertical price restrictions. We then review recent research on how print media have been affected by the growth of the Internet. Finally, we offer suggestions for future research and provide thoughts on the future of this industry. |
3A1831630559.jsonld | Chapter 9. How price promotions work: A review of practice and theory | In many markets, price promotions are a primary mechanism by which prices are adjusted. This chapter presents an overview of how retail price promotions work in theory and in practice. While there is a heavy emphasis on fast moving consumer goods (e.g., items sold in grocery stores or CPG), we discuss price promotions more broadly. We show that financial flows that support price promotions are typically larger than advertising expenditures and dwarf spending on R&D. We find that both theoretical and empirical models often fail to recognize that price promotions are the result of a long-term , planned, negotiated process in a vertical channel. Finally, the chapter bridges practice and academia by identifying opportunities for future research. |
3A1831639211.jsonld | Chapter 2 Measurement of inequality | The analysis of inequality is placed in the context of recent developments in economics and statistics. |
3A1831637375.jsonld | Chapter 13 Regional labor market analysis | This chapter focuses on regional labor market analysis. Regional labor market analysis entails a synthesis of economic and demographic modeling. Migration alters population levels, and thus together with labor force participation rates determines labor supply. Population change also affects demand for goods and services within the region, thereby affecting the demand for labor. Together labor supply and demand determine wage, unemployment, and employment levels, which, in turn, have an effect on migration. Given these interdependencies and the spatial context of regional growth, regional labor market analysis draws on concepts and approaches from applied econometrics, macroeconomics, labor economics, and quantitative geography, as well as regional economics and demography. Functional labor market regions are usually preferred on theoretical grounds, although there are several drawbacks with this concept in practical modeling situations. The chapter provides discusses the theoretical foundations and modeling approaches involved in studying labor force supply, labor force demand, and wage determination. It also presents concluding observations regarding the proper treatment of labor market conditions within economic models intended for policy analysis. |
3A1831641550.jsonld | Chapter 37 Coalition structures | The study of stable coalition structures, or more generally of coalition formation, was conducted mainly within the framework of games in coalitional form. The most commonly used stability concept is the coalition-structure core, which extends individual stability to group stability. The best-known example of social environments whose associated games have a coalition-structure core is the central assignment game (in particular the marriage game). The basic result is that the game describing the following situation has a coalition-structure core: the set of players is partitioned into two disjoint groups. Each member of one group has to be matched with one member (or more) of the second. The fact that such games have a coalition structure core implies that it is possible to pair the players in such a way that there are no two players that prefer to be together over their current partners. Like firms and local jurisdictions, political parties can also be regarded as coalitions: each party (which is characterized by its political position) is identified with the set of voters supporting it. Multiparty equilibrium is, then, a stable partition of the set of voters among the different parties. |
3A1831641372.jsonld | Chapter 12 Incentive models of the defense procurement process | Economic theorists have devoted considerable attention to analyzing models of closely related incentive contracting problems that arise in the study of public procurement, private procurement, regulation, the theory of the firm, the theory of organizations, and managerial compensation. The purpose of this chapter is to provide an introduction to the incentive models literature as it applies to defense procurement. |
3A1831634856.jsonld | Chapter 11 Externalities and Growth | Externalities play a central role in most theories of economic growth. We argue that international externalities, in particular, are essential for explaining a number of empirical regularities about growth and development. Foremost among these is that many countries appear to share a common long run growth rate despite persistently different rates of investment in physical capital, human capital, and research. With this motivation, we construct a hybrid of some prominent growth models that have international knowledge externalities. When calibrated, the hybrid model does a surprisingly good job of generating realistic dispersion of income levels with modest barriers to technology adoption. Human capital and physical capital contribute to income differences both directly (as usual), and indirectly by boosting resources devoted to technology adoption. The model implies that most of income above subsistence is made possible by international diffusion of knowledge. |
3A1831651432.jsonld | Chapter 2. Creative Genius in Literature, Music, and the Visual Arts | This chapter examines creative genius in the three most prominent domains of artistic achievement: literature, music, and the visual arts. Treatment begins with the definition of artistic genius in terms of achieved eminence, with special attention to the measurement issues (i.e. magnitude of consensus and degree of temporal stability). From there discussion turns to the personal attributes of eminent artistic creators in the three domains, with an emphasis on how writers, composers, and artists differ from each other as well as from eminent scientific creators. The next issue concerns the developmental factors involved in the emergence and manifestation of artistic genius. These factors include both early developmental antecedents and adulthood career trajectories (especially the location of career peaks). The final topic pertains to the sociocultural contexts underlying outstanding artistic achievement. These contexts include both internal factors, such as artistic styles, as well as external factors, such as the political and economic milieu. |
3A1831643855.jsonld | Chapter 56 The Impact of Child Health and Nutrition on Education in Less Developed Countries | Hundreds of millions of children in less developed countries suffer from poor health and nutrition. Children in most less developed countries also complete far fewer years of schooling, and learn less per year of schooling, than do children in developed countries. Recent research has shown that poor health and nutrition among children reduces their time in school and their learning during that time. This implies that programs or policies that increase children's health status could also improve their education outcomes. Given the importance of education for economic development, this link could be a key mechanism to improve the quality of life in less developed countries. Many researchers have attempted to estimate the impact of child health on education outcomes, but there are formidable obstacles to obtaining credible estimates. Data are often scarce, although much less scarce than in previous decades. Even more importantly, there are many possible sources of bias when attempting to estimate relationships between child health and education. This Chapter provides an overview of what has been learned thus far. Although significant progress has been made, much more research is still needed – especially in estimating the long term impact of child health status on living standards. The chapter first reviews some basic facts about child health and education in less developed countries. It then provides a framework for analyzing the impact of health and nutrition on education, describes estimation problems and potential solutions, and summarizes recent empirical evidence, including both non-experimental and experimental studies. It concludes with suggestions for future research directions. |
3A1831649780.jsonld | Chapter 4. Advertising in Markets | This chapter proposes an analysis of the role of advertising in the transmission of information in markets. It also describes how the economic analysis of informative advertising provides a satisfactory account of advertising practices and discusses the extent to which resorting to alternative approaches to advertising might be fruitful. In doing so, it provides an overview of what has been identified in the literature as the main incentives of firms to resort to advertising as well as the main arguments pertaining to the welfare economics of advertising. The chapter provides some simplified expositions of the various theories and describes some related empirical literature. The exposition starts with a presentation of the analysis of informative advertising. It is first explained how the informative role of advertising can be understood from the theory of search with particular attention to price advertising. Advertising that contains direct product information is then considered, looking at the nature and the amount of such information provided by advertisers and including some considerations on legal restraints on misleading advertising. Finally, the argument that advertising may provide indirect information in the form of quality signaling or as a coordination device is described and discussed. The chapter then moves on to an analysis of the technology through which advertising conveys information to consumers, considering in turn advertising costs, targeting, and information congestion. The perspective is expanded in the final part of the chapter by allowing advertising to have some role other than the transmission of information. In doing so, the welfare implications of advertising are reconsidered while accounting for a potentially persuasive role of advertising or viewing advertising as a good that complements the advertised product in the consumer's preferences. The strict consumer rationality assumption is also relaxed. The exposition ends with the dynamics of advertising resulting from its role in the accumulation of goodwill for a product or a brand. |
3A1831653222.jsonld | Chapter One. Health Care Spending Growth | This chapter provides a conceptual and empirical examination of health care spending growth (as opposed to the level of health care spending). Given that an equilibrium spending level exists, spending growth requires some variable to change. A one-time change in such a variable (or a one-time policy intervention) will generate a new equilibrium spending level, though the length of the transition period will depend on switching costs and information lags. After the new equilibrium is established, spending growth will cease. Yet we observe persistent spending growth. This implies at least one continually changing variable and the variable most commonly identified as continually changing is medical technology, broadly defined. We review theoretical models related to spending growth, including some that treat technology as exogenous and others that treat technology as endogenous. We then review the empirical literature related to spending growth and medical technology. |
3A1831643030.jsonld | Chapter 32 An Empirical Perspective on Auctions | We describe the economics literature on auction markets, with an emphasis on the connection between theory, empirical practice, and public policy, and a discussion of outstanding issues. We describe some basic concepts, to highlight some strengths and weaknesses of the literature, and so indicate where further research may be warranted. We discuss identification and estimation issues, with an emphasis on the connection between theory and empirical practice. We also discuss both structural and reduced form empirical approaches. |
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