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3A183165475X.jsonld | Chapter 64. Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies | To the extent that they exert a critical influence on the macroeconomic environment, monetary and exchange rate policies (MERP) are relevant for development. However, the analytical economic literature often sees nominal variables as being irrelevant for the real economy, while the multiplicity of channels examined by the empirical literature complicates the task of deriving usable policy implications. Specifically, this chapter attempts to answer the following question: What exchange rate regime and monetary policy framework is more conducive to achieving development policy objectives in a particular country today, and why? We map the direct and indirect links from MERP to key development objectives, and discuss the main findings and how it relates with the empirical evidence to provide an up-to-date perspective of the policy debate and derive criteria for policy choices. |
3A183163922X.jsonld | Chapter 1 Social justice and the distribution of income | This chapter reviews the bearing of theories of social justice on the analysis and evaluation of income distribution and related features of economic inequality. The assessment of income distribution involves both descriptive and prescriptive issues and the ideas of the way social justice influence both. The connection is immediate in the case of normative analysis, because the concepts of social justice can be central to ethical norms for assessing the optimality or acceptability of the distributions of income. But the connections with descriptive and predictive issues can be, ultimately, no less important. People's attitudes toward, or reactions to, actual income distributions can be significantly influenced by the correspondenceor the lack thereofbetween (1) their ideas of what is normatively tolerable and (2) what they actually see in the society around them. The ideas of social justice can sway actual behavior and actions. In assessing the likelihood of discontent or protest or disapproval or the political feasibility of particular policies, which are primarily descriptive and predictive issues (rather than prescriptive ones), it can be useful, indeed crucial, to have some understanding of the ideas of justice that command respect in the society in question. A complete theory of justice need not insist on a complete ranking of all possible alternatives. The resilient presence of competing grounds of justice has strong implications on the discipline of inequality evaluation in general and of the assessment of income distribution in particular. |
3A1831646773.jsonld | Chapter 64 Structural Econometric Modeling: Rationales and Examples from Industrial Organization | This chapter explains the logic of structural econometric models and compares them to other types of econometric models. We provide a framework researchers can use to develop and evaluate structural econometric models. This framework pays particular attention to describing different sources of unobservables in structural models. We use our framework to evaluate several literatures in industrial organization economics, including the literatures dealing with market power, product differentiation, auctions, regulation and entry. |
3A1831641003.jsonld | Chapter 22 Social Dynamics: TheorY AND Applications | Agent-based models typically involve large numbers of interacting individuals with widely differing characteristics, rules of behavior, and sources of information. The dynamics of such systems can be extremely complex due to their high dimensionality. This chapter discusses a general method for rigorously analyzing the long-run behavior of such systems using the theory of large deviations in Markov chains. The theory highlights certain qualitative features that distinguish agent-based models from more conventional types of equilibrium analysis. Among these distinguishing features are: local conformity versus global diversity, punctuated equilibrium, and the persistence of particular states in the presence of random shocks. These ideas are illustrated through a variety of examples, including competition between technologies, models of sorting and segregation, and the evolution of contractual customs. |
3A1831651300.jsonld | Chapter 14. Media Ownership: Diversity Versus Efficiency in a Changing Technological Environment | The role of media – whether television, newspapers, radio, or the Internet – in supplying the ideas that shape our viewpoints and cultures is such that the dangers that may accompany concentrations of ownership in this sector are well recognized. Ownership patterns affect not only pluralism, but also how well the media industry is able to manage its resources and so, in turn, the efficiency and economic strength of this sector. Everywhere they take place, public policy debates around which configurations and what level of ownership of media ought to be permissible are a site for conflicting viewpoints. Some suggest that the greater choice made possible by advances in digital technology and changing patterns of consumption obviate the need for restrictive interventions. However, despite digitization and the growth of the Internet, gravitation towards monopoly remains a marked feature of the industry and, as explained in this chapter, the need for diverse ownership of predominant traditional media remains a concern. A new era of consolidation and cross-platform expansion by established and emergent media players presents regulators with complex and difficult challenges. In examining the economic motives that drive strategies of expansion in the media, this chapter highlights the tension between, on the one hand, sociocultural concerns associated with media empire-building and, on the other hand, economic and industrial policy priorities surrounding media ownership. |
3A1831642662.jsonld | Chapter 20 Industrial organization and international trade | The monopolistic competition model of trade began with an empirical observation. The most influential of trade models is the HeckscherOhlinSamuelson model, which tells that trade reflects an interaction between the characteristics of countries and the characteristics of the production technology of different goods. Specifically, countries will export goods whose production is intensive in the factors with which they are abundantly endowedfor example, countries with a high capitallabor ratio will export capitalintensive goods. The monopolistic competition model has had a major impact on research into international trade. By showing that increasing returns and imperfect competition can make a fundamental difference to the way people think about trade, this approach has been crucial in making work that applies industrial organization (IO) concepts to trade respectable. In effect, the monopolistic competition model has been the thin end of the IO/trade wedge. |
3A183163600X.jsonld | Chapter 5. The farmer's climate change adaptation challenge in least developed countries | Climate change poses many new risks to people in the developing world. Unlike in standard choice under uncertainty problems, the risks from climate change are both ambiguous and non-stationary. We examine climate projections concerning what scenarios are most likely to unfold. We explore how individual farmers in the developing world are likely to respond to these challenges. This analysis points out data gaps and valuable future research paths. Urbanization offers one possible adaptation channel. We explore the opportunities and challenges posed by climate change induced accelerated Least Developed Country (LDC) urbanization. |
3A1831653818.jsonld | Index | This chapter lists the terms that have contributed to the book Handbook of Economics in Education , such as accountability, achievement gap, adoption, and others. For the ease of the reader, these terms have been mentioned along with the page numbers in which they have appeared in the book. |
3A1831640198.jsonld | Chapter 2 A survey of theories of the family | This chapter provides an overview of the theories of the family, and discusses the household technology and utility possibility frontiers, decision-making in the family, theories of the marriage and household membership, and interdependent preferences within families. An important conceptual building block for economic theories of marriage is the utility possibility frontier that any couple would face, if they were to marry each other. It is a consequence of the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics that if preferences are convex and there are no consumption externalities, then any household that allocates marketable private goods among its members will act as if each household member is given a personal income and is allowed to spend it as he or she wishes. Although the problem of benefitcost analysis of household public goods in benevolent families seems interesting and important, it does not seem to have received much attention in the literature. |
3A1831651122.jsonld | Chapter 4. Trade Theory with Numbers: Quantifying the Consequences of Globalization | We review a recent body of theoretical work that aims to put numbers on the consequences of globalization. A unifying theme of our survey is methodological. We rely on gravity models and demonstrate how they can be used for counterfactual analysis. We highlight how various economic considerations—market structure, firm-level heterogeneity, multiple sectors, intermediate goods, and multiple factors of production—affect the magnitude of the gains from trade liberalization. We conclude by discussing a number of outstanding issues in the literature as well as alternative approaches for quantifying the consequences of globalization. |
3A72999578X.jsonld | Personal Transport Choice | There are basically four means by which to reduce the negative environmental consequences of personal transport: by replacing personal vehicles with more environmentally-friendly ones; by replacing car journeys with public transport, walking or cycling and by car-sharing rather than solo driving; by making fewer journeys (e.g. telecommuting, internet shopping); and by travelling shorter distances. |
3A183164424X.jsonld | Subject index | This chapter highlights the terms and methods that have been used and explained in this publication titled Handbook of Labor Economics, volume 3B. The chapter also highlights the page numbers where these have been used. |
3A1831634414.jsonld | Chapter 10 Education and Nonmarket Outcomes | This chapter explores the effects of education on nonmarket outcomes from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Examples of outcomes considered include general consumption patterns at a moment in time, savings and the rate of growth of consumption over time, own (adult) health and inputs into the production of own health, fertility, and child quality or well-being reflected by their health and cognitive development. They are distinguished from the labor market outcomes of education in terms of higher earnings and wage rates. The focus is on identifying causal effects of education and on mechanisms via which these effects operate. The chapter pays a good deal of attention to the effects of education on health for a variety of reasons. They are the two most important sources of human capital: knowledge capital and health capital. They interact in their levels and in the ways they affect the cost and usefulness of the other. There is a large literature addressing the nature of their complementarities. While each affects the production and usefulness of the other, there are important dynamics of their interaction, seen in the age-structure of the net and gross production of the two. This sequencing also affects their optimal amounts. In the conceptual foundation section, models in which education has productive efficiency and allocative efficiency effects are considered. These frameworks are then modified to allow for the endogenous nature of schooling decisions, so that observed schooling effects can be traced in part to omitted third variables such as an orientation towards the future. An additional complication is that schooling may contribute to a future orientation in models with endogenous preferences. The empirical review provides a good deal of evidence for the proposition that the education effects are causal but is less conclusive with regard to the identification of specific mechanisms. |
3A1831651858.jsonld | Chapter 6. Stochastic Evolutionary Game Dynamics | Traditional game theory studies strategic interactions in which the agents make rational decisions. Evolutionary game theory differs in two key respects: the focus is on large populations of individuals who interact at random rather than on small numbers of players; and individuals are assumed to employ simple adaptive rules rather than to engage in perfectly rational behavior. In such a setting, an equilibrium is a rest point of the population-level dynamical process rather than a form of consistency between beliefs and strategies. This chapter shows how the theory of stochastic dynamical systems can be used to characterize the equilibria that are most likely to be selected when the evolutionary process is subject to small persistent perturbations. Such equilibria are said to be stochastically stable. The implications of stochastic stability are discussed in a variety of settings, including 2 × 2 games, bargaining games, public-goods games, potential games, and network games. Stochastic stability often selects equilibria that are familiar from traditional game theory: in 2 × 2 games one obtains the risk-dominant equilibrium, in bargaining games the Nash bargaining solution, and in potential games the potential-maximizing equilibrium. However, the justification for these solution concepts differs between the two approaches. In traditional game theory, equilibria are justified in terms of rationality, common knowledge of the game, and common knowledge of rationality. Evolutionary game theory dispenses with all three of these assumptions; nevertheless, some of the main solution concepts survive in a stochastic evolutionary setting. |
3A1831635178.jsonld | Chapter 21 The Economics of Books | This chapter analyses the tensions between books and book markets as expressions of culture and books as products in profit-making businesses and includes insights from the theory of industrial organisation. Governments intervene in the market for books through laws concerning prices of books, grants for authors and publishers, a lower value-added tax, public libraries and education in order to stimulate the diversity of books on offer, increase the density of retail outlets and promote reading. An overview of the different ways by which countries differ in terms of market structures and government policies is given. Particular attention is paid to retail price maintenance. Due to differences between European countries it is not a good idea to harmonise European book policies. Our analysis suggests that the book market seems quite able to invent solutions to specific problems of the book trade and that, apart from promoting reading, there is little need for government intervention. |
3A1831650231.jsonld | Chapter 21. Cities in Developing Countries : Fueled by Rural–Urban Migration, Lacking in Tenure Security, and Short of Affordable Housing | This chapter surveys and synthesizes existing research on urbanization and housing in developing countries. The goal is to provide a unified overview of the principal urban issues that arise in developing countries, painting a coherent picture that can provide a starting point for policy analysis. The chapter covers empirical work on rural–urban migration, theoretical research on migration and city-size determination, theoretical and empirical work on tenure security and squatting, and the issue of housing affordability. |
3A1831647311.jsonld | Chapter 13 Macroeconomic theory and policy: How the closed economy was opened | This chapter discusses history of international transactions and relationships that were introduced into macroeconomic models and policy in the twenty-five years following the Second World War. Modern models of exchange-rate determination focus sharply on money and bond markets. The chapter discusses the Marshall–Lerner–Robinson that was developed to show how a change in the exchange rate affects the current-account balance. The Keynesian multiplier has been used to show how changes in domestic activity affect the balance of payments and to trace the propagation of business fluctuations. The chapter focuses on the aims and instruments of economic policy. It discusses fixed and flexible exchange rates that are dealt mainly with the best technique for altering rates promptly. The ways in which exchange-rate changes can influence wages and prices, nominal rates of return on financial instruments, or the demand for real balances are also discussed in the chapter. Finally, it reviews that the actors within any economic model base their own decisions on experience. The ways in which households, firms, and governments respond to information are conditioned by earlier successes and mistakes. They may be maximizing something or other, but their strategies are almost always based on imperfect information and imperfect methods for collecting and assessing it. The institutional framework within which they operate is itself a product of experience. Economists design their own models to fit certain sets of facts, frequently subsets of “stylized facts” distilled from recollection and observation by methods that lead to build models that fit the recent facts most closely. |
3A1831631938.jsonld | Chapter 20 Norms and the Law | Everyone realizes the importance of social norms as guides to behavior and substitutes for law, but coming up with a paradigm for analyzing norms has been surprisingly difficult, as has systematic empirical study. In this chapter we survey the topic. |
3A1831649055.jsonld | List of Contributors | This chapter lists the names of the people who have contributed to the book Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare , such as Kenneth Arrow, Amartya Sen, Kaushik Basu, and others. Their names have been mentioned with the chapter number in which they contributed in the book along with their addressfor reference to the reader. |
3A1831652064.jsonld | Chapter 10. Selective Out-Migration and the Estimation of Immigrants’ Earnings Profiles | This chapter begins by documenting that temporary migrations are not only very common, but that out-migration of immigrants is selective both in terms of migrants’ individual characteristics and their economic outcomes. We then examine the problems that arise when estimating immigrants’ earnings profiles when out-migration is selective, and discuss the identifying assumptions needed to answer three different questions on immigrants’ earnings careers. We show how better data can help to relax these assumptions, suggest appropriate estimators, and provide an illustration using simulated data. We finally provide an overview of existing papers that use different types of data to address selective out-migration when estimating immigrants’ earnings profiles. |
3A183165184X.jsonld | Chapter 7. Advances in Auctions | As a selling mechanism, auctions have acquired a central position in the free market economy all over the globe. This development has deepened, broadened, and expanded the theory of auctions in new directions. This chapter is intended as a selective update of some of the developments and applications of auction theory in the two decades since Wilson (1992) wrote the previous Handbook chapter on this topic. |
3A1831650223.jsonld | Chapter 22. The Geography of Development Within Countries | This chapter describes how the spatial distribution of economic activity changes as economies develop and grow. We start with the relation between development and rural–urban migration. Moving beyond the coarse rural–urban distinction, we then focus on the continuum of locations in an economy and describe how the patterns of convergence and divergence change with development. As we discuss, these spatial dynamics often mask important differences across sectors. We then turn our attention to the right tail of the distribution, the urban sector. We analyze how the urban hierarchy has changed over time in developed countries and more recently in developing countries. The chapter reviews both the empirical evidence and the theoretical models that can account for what we observe in the data. When discussing the stylized facts on geography and development, we draw on empirical evidence from both the historical evolution of today's developed economies and comparisons between today's developed and developing economies. |
3A183163886X.jsonld | Chapter 32 The measurement of health-related quality of life for use in resource allocation decisions in health care | An important consideration when establishing priorities in health care is the likely effect that alternative allocations will have on the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of the relevant population. This chapter considers some of the important issues surrounding the description and valuation of HRQoL. It discusses six main questions that need to be addressed when measuring HRQoL: What is to be valued?; How is it to be described?; How is it to be valued?; Who is to value it?; How are values for all health states to be generated?; and How are valuations to be aggregated? Since it is difficult to answer many of these questions on theoretical grounds alone, the chapter considers whether the existing empirical evidence can provide more definitive answers. Many important yet unresolved issues emerge and directions for future research are suggested. It is argued that this research agenda should have the gathering and analysis of qualitative data at its forefront. |
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