Contributions to Economic Analysis - Böcker

In March 1998 professional colleagues and students of T.N. Srinivasan joined together at the Festschrift Conference at Yale to honor his work. The book contains nineteen of the contributions which were presented, reflecting the four closely related dimensions of trade and development. Part I deals with the various dimensions of the issue of growth with particular emphasis on technology choice as well as saving and fertility behavior in Ramsey-type models. Part II moves into the more applied issues of International trade, including the impact of North-South trade on Northern wages, the reasons for the failure of pegged exchange rates in the South, as well as the pros and cons of regional vs. multilateral trading arrangements. Part III presents a variety of theoretical and applied approaches to analyze Indian planning and development experience. The final section, Part IV, addresses the general topic of market failures and economic structure. This book contains papers by an array of eminent economists and contains a good blend of theory and applied work. Professional economists, policy makers in developing and donor countries and personnel of international organizations will find this a useful tool.

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in index number and aggregation theory, since the two previously divergent fields have been successfully unified. The underlying aggregator functions which are weakly separable subfunctions of utility and production functions, are the building blocks of economic theory, and the derivation of index numbers based upon their ability to track those building blocks is now called the "economic theory of index numbers." William Barnett, the coeditor of this volume, introduced modern economic index number theory into monetary economics. His merger of economic index number theory, with monetary theory was based upon the use of Diewert's approach to producing "superlative" nonparametric approximations to the theoretically exact aggregator functions.This book comprises a focussed and unified collection of Barnett's most important publications in this area. The papers in the book have been organized into logical sections, with unifying introductions and overviews. The result is a systematic development of the state-of-the-art in monetary and financial aggregation theory. The sections cover the origin of the user cost price of monetary services. Exact aggregation of monetary assets on the demand side for consumers and firms, and on the supply side for financial intermediaries, general equilibrium of all economic agents' demands and supplies, dynamic solution of the exact system, and extension to monetary aggregation under risk. The extension of index number theory to the case of risk is completely general, and can be applied to tracking any exact economic aggregator under risk. In all cases, the criterion used for evaluation is the tracking ability of the approximation to the exact aggregator function of economic theory. Many of the empirical and policy puzzles in monetary economics disappear when simple sum monetary aggregates are replaced by index numbers that are coherent with theory. Simple sum monetary aggregates became incoherent with theory, when monetary assets began paying interest and therefore could no longer be viewed as perfect substitutes. This is a useful tool to those associated with economics departments within universities, business schools, central banks and federal governments, financial institutions including underwriters, bankers and stockbrokers.

This book consists of a selected subset of papers presented at the International Symposium of Linked Employer-Employee Data, held in Washington DC, in May 1998 - to address the creation and analysis of such matched data in an environment that safeguards respondent confidentiality. The conference brought together a wide range of social scientists and statisticians from more than 20 countries. Three broad themes are highlighted: the analysis of linked employer-employee data (The basic finding of this and the next section is that the firm matters a good deal in explaining the differences in earnings, productivity, and work experiences of individual workers. Linked data allow the researcher to disentangle the firm effects from the worker effects). It also highlights the themes: econometric issues involved with the analysis of such data (Creating and analyzing employer-employee matched data sets presents a number of new econometric problems that are not present in standard micro-data sets containing just workers or just employers. However, these data also offer us a unique opportunity to examine the effects of some of the econometric problems involved in using the other data sources. The chapters in this section address both of these issues. The first two chapters examine new econometric issues involved in the creation and use of matched data sets, while the second two chapters use matched data to examine possible problems with cross-sectional or panel data on workers. The results from each of these chapters will be valuable to all empirical researchers, regardless of whether they are using employer-employee matched data or more standard cross-sectional or panel data sets). It also highlights the theme: ongoing efforts aimed at creating large-scale linked employer-employee data (The last section of this book describes four recent efforts at creating linked employer-employee data through surveys of firms and individuals).The first two chapters describe an "employers first" methodology of creating linked employer-employee data, and the last two chapters describe an "employees first" methodology. The two "employees first" surveys described here are, as far as known, the only two large-scale surveys in production that follow this design. Each of the four chapters in this section describes details about the design and field operation of the survey that will be indispensable to others who might want to create or analyze linked employer-employee survey data. The 23 chapters in this book provide a glimpse into the future of labor economics and industrial organization. It can be said that labor economics and public policy around the world has been dominated over the past several decades by quantitative analyses based upon public-use US micro-data. In the future, it is very likely that economics and social policy in the United States and elsewhere will depend on quantitative analysis based on linked employer-employee micro-data currently residing in all continents of the world.

Panel Data and Structural Labour Market Models" is the latest volume in a series of four, reporting on the original work of an international group of scholars with research interests in the performance of the labour markets that condition the dynamic labour market experiences of individual workers. The book contains papers focusing on theoretical and empirical modelling of the labour market covering both wage equilibrium models and models for labour market transition. Contributions range from the theoretical or econometric through empirical structural methods and exploratory data analysis based on employer and employee level data. Academic libraries, labour economists, labour and industrial relations research institutes and statistical agencies will find this a particularly useful piece of work.

Environmental Taxation and the Double Dividend" explores the welfare effects of environmental taxes in a second-best framework. It starts from a benchmark model which reveals that environmental taxes typically exacerbate pre-existing tax distortions, even if the revenues are used to cut other distortionary taxes. Subsequent chapters extend the benchmark model by introducing capital, terms of trade effects, transfers, involuntary unemployment, or environmental feedbacks. Thus, the book reveals several channels through which a double-dividend can be obtained. However, it also shows the trade-offs they induce. Simulations with the models illustrate the importance of these trade-offs for European economies. This book is a useful tool for graduates, post graduates, researchers and staff of universities with fiscal and environmental departments. International organizations such as the IMF, OECD and the World Bank, and policy makers within governments: Ministries of Finance/Economics/Environment. Research Institutes, both private and public will also benefit from this piece of work.

This book contains contributions from friends of Ben Stevens, remembering and celebrating his life and his work. Following his untimely death, a set of special sessions were organized for the program of the November 1998 meetings of the Regional Science Association International, held in Sante Fe, New Mexico. In all 41 papers were presented in 11 of these sessions. Those invited to participate included former colleagues and students from Ben's days on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania as well as friends and collaborators from the economics and regional science community at large - academic, private and government. It is the intention of the editors to make available with this book a selection of current work in regional economics and regional science. Some of the papers reflect on aspects of Ben's legacy, suggesting how his early work (in the 1960s) served as a basis for subsequent theoretical advances or applied developments - for example, in residential choice theory, in land-use and transportation modeling and in regional econometric modeling in general and regional input-output analysis in particular (which remained one of Ben's primary interests throughout his life). The variety of topics covered by the papers in this volume is a testament to the breadth and depth of Ben's active curiosity.

Europe's notoriously high level of unemployment is one of the big puzzles of empirical macroeconomics. In recent years, the unemployment rate has fallen in The Netherlands, but the overall level in OECD Europe remains high. An investigation into why Dutch economic policy has been relatively effective could be useful for the unemployment debate in Europe. This book contributes to this investigation with its empirical analysis covering three important topics. The first part of the book investigates whether (macro) economic policies could be effective in reducing unemployment in the short run. This depends on the cause of unemployment: is it due to lack of demand for goods, or is it due to a shortage of capacity. Another question is whether macroeconomic policies can be directed to one side of the market. The high rate of unemployment among low-skilled workers is the topic of the second part of this book. How important is the impact of wage inflexibility at the lower tail of the income distribution due to institutional factors? To what extent is it caused by skill-biased technological change? A central issue is, again, how economic policy could contribute to reducing unemployment among low-skilled workers? The persistence of unemployment is investigated in the third part. Since the early eighties, Dutch policymakers have employed wage moderation as a remedy for unemployment in The Netherlands. Substantial cutbacks were made in the social security programme. This had a moderating effect on wages, which is thought to have contributed to employment growth. However, unemployment remained rather high up to 1997. Why didn't unemployment fall more quickly? To answer these questions, economists have developed different structural macroeconometric models. The Netherlands has a rich tradition in using macroeconomic models for policy analysis. This tradition originates in the work of Jan Tinbergen, Nobel laureate in economics, and the first director of CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. This book, which builds on CPB's broad experience with macroeconomic modelling, makes an important contribution to this fine Dutch tradition.

Optimal Growth Economics" is concerned with the investigation of the contemporary issues in general economics, and growth economics and in the formulation of optimal growth programs, especially the issue of the sustainability of growth. This book proposes the development of optimal growth economics as a distinct, coherent and practical discipline useful for social choice by using the techniques of mathematical modelling and computing to address a wide range of emerging and enduring issues in economics. A considerable number of optimal economic growth models have been developed in the book to address the crucial issues of different branches in economics, including growth and development economics, economic planning, welfare economics, environmental economics, human capital development, political economy, natural resources and the economics of uncertainty.

Economic theory defines and constrains admissible functional form and functional structure throughout the economy. Constraints on behavioral functions of individual economic agents and on the recursive nesting of those behavioral functions often are derived directly from economic theory. Theoretically implied constraints on the properties of equilibrium stochastic solution paths also are common, although are less directly derived. In both cases, the restrictions on relevant function spaces have implications for econometric modeling and for the choice of hypotheses to be tested and potentially imposed. This book contains state-of-the-art cumulative research and results on functional structure, approximation, and estimation: for (1) individual economic agents, (2) aggregation over those agents, and (3) equilibrium solution stochastic processes. A: Functional Structure Modeling, Aggregation, and Estimation. Over the past 25 years, William Barnett, who is a coeditor of this volume, has advanced the state of the art of this subject in many directions. He has contributed many new modeling and inference approaches, such as the Laurent series flexible functional form approach, the Muntz-Szatz series seminonparametric approach, the generalized hypocycloidal utility tree approach, and an aggregated convergence approach within the space of stochastic differential equations. Many of Barnett's innovations contain the earlier Taylor series and CES approaches as nested special cases. He also has contributed extensively to the literature on aggregation over approximating specifications in econometrics, as well as to aggregation over economic agents and goods in economic theory. In addition, his work in those areas has motivated new approaches by others, such as the generalized symmetric Barnett approach originated by Diewert and Wales (1987). Part 1 of this book contains Barnett's contributions to functional structure modeling and estimation for consumers, while Part 2 contains his contributions on those subjects for firms. B: Statistical Theory. Barnett's contributions to statistical theory provide much of the asymptotic statistical theory needed to apply econometric inference procedures to the literature on economic functional structure and approximation. His contributions to the relevant statistical theory include discovery of the measure theoretic foundations for confidence regions in sampling theoretic statistics and the derivation of the asymptotic theory for joint maximum likelihood inference with closed-form systemwide models. He originated a multivariate extension of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to permit testing the disturbances of an equation system for multivariate normality. Part 3 contains relevant results in statistical theory. C: Nonlinear Time Series. Analogous approximation and function space problems arise in time series approaches. A Volterra expansion in the time domain with a finite number of terms cannot span the space of possible time-series solution processes from the state space structures of economic theory. Hence when sample size is finite, all structural and time-series approximating specifications, whether dynamic or static, drive an unavoidable wedge between econometrics and economic theory. No easy solution exists to this inherently deep problem in econometric modeling and testing. In the time series literature, Barnett has designed and run a competition among tests for nonlinear and chaotic structure. The purpose was to investigate paradoxes that arose in that literature following his publication of findings of nonlinearity and chaos in some economic time series. The literature on modeling and filtering out linear structure from time series is now highly advanced. But many unsolved problems remain in the literature on modeling or filtering out various forms of nonlinear structure from time series. The results of Barnett's competition have cast much needed light on those problems and the relative properties of the various available competing approaches. Contributions to time series modeling and inference in the time domain and the frequency domain are provided in Part 4.

In the Netherlands, CPB often adopts the MIMIC model to explore the structural labour market implications of changes in the tax and social-insurance system. This applied general-equilibrium model combines microeconomic theory with a rich institutional detail and a firm empirical basis. This book describes the structure of MIMIC and discusses a large number of policy measures that have been proposed during the last five years. Moreover, it elaborates on proposals that are currently in discussion, such as the flat tax. To ease the understanding of the model, we also present a core version with only a few equations.

This volume contains a large selection of the invited papers given at the Twelfth Conference of the Association of Cultural Economics International held in Rotterdam in 2002. Two sessions were devoted to what came to be called the cultural industries (movies, television, media, etc.). Two dealt with the history of art and music markets. The last two were more policy oriented. One was devoted to the management of built heritage which becomes larger every year, and will be in need of more and more public funding. The invited speakers in the last session had spent, or are still spending, some or most of their time in the "real world," and try to discuss how cultural economists can contribute to alleviate the hard life of those who have to manage culture. Choices necessarily meant that many fields in which active research is alive were not dealt with, in particular, the contemporary functioning of art markets, artists' labor markets, museums and their management, aesthetic choices and tastes, the meaning of quality in the arts, etc. In this volume, the papers given in the six sessions are reshuffled and grouped into three parts: the cultural industries, historical aspects, and policy issues including the management heritage.

Trade theories predict and explain the consequences of economic integration. Generally, they show that freer international trade leads to specialisation, technological convergence and faster economic growth. This study compares the conclusions of the trade theories with empirical observations of economic changes in the European Union. These empirical analyses show that the main conclusions also hold empirically. However, many detailed empirical observations often contrast the theoretical expectation. Hence, although the trade theories do predict the general changes correctly, they are not capable of predicting the more specific empirical outcomes. The empirical analyses use intercountry input-output tables in constant prices with 6 EU countries (Germany, France, Italy, The Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark) of the years 1970, 1975, 1980 and 1985.These data prove to be a valuable contribution to analysing the economic effects of international integration, since they provide a consistent database that can be used to analyse many economic aspects, such as technology, specialisation, intra-industry trade, economic growth, sectoral distribution, and direct and indirect effects. This book will be especially useful to Regional Economists and Economists specialising in international trade, input-output analysis or European integration.

Dedicated to the measurement and definition of market power across a broad array of industries, this text should provide economists and lawyers with an insight into how anti-trust economists actually go about measuring market power in a given industry. The "Contributions to Economic Analysis" series consists of a number of previously unpublished studies. The term economic analysis is used because it covers the activities of the theoretical economist and the research worker.

"Technological Change and the Dynamics of Industries" focuses on variances in the structural and dynamic properties of manufacturing industries. By exploring the theoretical and empirical literature in industrial economics, by using a longitudinal firm-level database, and by developing and simulating a model on industrial dynamics, the following results are shown. Empirically, both the technological regime framework as well as the product or industry life cycle approach can explain differences between industries. Theoretically, it is shown that the differences in the timing and frequency of new technology adoptions provide an additional explanation for the structural and dynamic differences between industries.

This book is concerned with the methods by which the dynamics of endogenous economic growth systems may be analysed and numerically computed, and with the validation of such numerical computations through qualitative economic reasoning. The methods comprise linearization, phase-space analysis and a variety of numerical integration techniques. In particular, the book provides a detailed examination of the transitional dynamics (the movement from some current state towards a steady-state equilibrium) of the influential endogenous growth model from Paul Romer's 1990 Journal of Political Economy article: "Endogenous Technological Change".

The "Contributions to Economic Analysis" series consists of a number of previously unpublished studies. The term economic analysis is used because it covers the activities of the theoretical economist and the research worker.

This title is concerned with the investigation of the contemporary financial issues of the e-commerce market.

This book examines sequential coalition formation in oligopolies. Coalitions refer to mergers and acquisitions, cartels, and associations. The principal aim is the prediction and explanation of the coalition structure - whether an industry will emerge as a monopoly, say, or as a collection of sub-coalitions. In environments where decisions to form coalitions are made sequentially, the prediction and explanation of the equilibrium coalition structure can differ dramatically from the textbook simultaneous-move model. This difference derives from the knowledge effect, which is unique to the sequential-move models.

The volume aims to produce an updated collection of advanced theories and methods in the field of urban policies, and highlights modern urban policies that stem from them. Contributions stress the limits of previous theories and methods, and emphasize the new directions that are developed in the field, and barriers that are overcome, providing in this way a dynamic perspective on theoretical and methodological knowledge in the field of urban economics. Urban policies, as well as practical problems envisaged in our modern cities, that take advantage from this theoretical development are stressed.

These studies are based on information on time use in nine countries. Such studies will become more common as more governments fund time-budget surveys and as economists realize the benefits of using this type of data. Each does something that either could not have been accomplished at all, or that could have been done much less convincingly on the data that one typically obtains from households. Part I deals with the "when?" and "with whom?" questions describing human behavior. These questions have been essentially ignored by social scientists generally, and have been completely ignored by economists. So long as we believe that people have preferences over the timing and the context of their activities, we should be able to apply economic analysis usefully to their decisions. Part II deals with "what is done?" questions of the quantities and determinants of economic activities.While many of these questions have been addressed using readily available retrospective data, time-diary data allow both recording them more accurately and the kind of disaggregation by type that is not possible with other kinds of data. Part III deals with children's issues - the determination of time spent at home with children and its impacts on the parents and on the children themselves. Here we have economic analyses using detailed time-diary data and special survey questions that have not heretofore been used to address these topics. Part IV consists of a single study focussed on the issues involved in the creation of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), which began full-scale operations in January 2003.

This book studies the relationships between economic growth and social welfare and the policy implications of these relationships for development. Understanding the relationships between economic growth and social welfare is an enduring issue within contemporary development economics and welfare economics. These relationships are analysed in this book by operationalising normative social choice theory. Normative social choice theory is an appropriate approach as it explicitly incorporates society's preferences, values and choices in determining how social welfare should be defined and measured. Two approaches, aggregate and hierarchical, are developed and empirically applied to Thailand for a twenty-five year period 1975-1999. This book concludes that in terms of social welfare, economic growth cannot always be assumed desirable. What is needed is social welfare enhancing economic growth. A review of the policy implications of this finding is also undertaken.

The monograph concentrates on recent developments in modelling economic processes on macro level. Namely there are two main areas of interest: co-integration analysis and the use of high frequency time series. Special emphasis is put on testing, application of VEqCM models to I(1) as well as I(2) variables and structuralization of VAR. Volatility is analysed within traditional and Bayesian approach.

The main purpose of this book is to enhance the understanding of differences in productivity performance between countries and sectors and to improve our insight in the drivers of productivity levels and its growth. Due to demographics the speed-up of productivity growth will be of increasing importance to secure GDP growth in the future, since the other source of GDP growth (employment growth) will be limited in most Western Countries. A better insight in the patterns and drivers of productivity performance is therefore not simply a matter of academic interest, however valuable that in itself can be. Improving our knowledge of the drivers of productivity will enable us to determine which are the 'switches' policy makers have to use. The book takes the Netherlands as a case, but is hardly a book on productivity in the Low Countries alone. The different contributors focus on the drivers of productivity that prevail in every modern economy, using the Netherlands' experience as an example, which makes this book relevant for the analysis of productivity in other countries. Moreover, the book contains international comparisons between EU and OECD countries, in particular with regard to productivity performance. The book focuses on productivity in the business sector, leaving public sector productivity aside.

The goal of this edited volume is to take a hard, objective look at the many different aspects of taxing the hard-to-tax, as well as the many different approaches that have been employed around the world. In the developed and developing world, taxing certain kinds of activities, sectors, or individuals - the so-called "hard-to-tax" - is a challenge for governments. In the past, the practical side of this issue has received some attention, mainly from those working in the trenches of tax administration. There has also been some analytical work on such things as "presumptive" taxation, as well as some empirical work on measuring the hard-to-tax. However, the lessons from all of this work have been very unevenly disseminated, and there are clearly many unresolved issues. With the steady advance of such things as globalization, internet commerce, and tax shelters, the issues in taxing the hard-to-tax will become even more pressing.

Volume 265 of the Contributions to Economic Analysis book series covers, among others, subject areas such as Tourism and Trade; A Two-Sector General Equilibrium Model of a Small Open Economy; Non-Traded Goods and Tourism in the Pure Theory of Trade; Tourism, Taxes and Immiserization in a Two-Country Trade Model; Price Discrimination, Tourism and Welfare; Guest Workers and Resident Immiserization; Terms of Trade and Resident Welfare; Tourism in the Generalized Harris-Todaro Model and Regional Immiserization; and Growth in a Dynamic Model of Trade.

This book examines the intricate relationship among trade and investment policies, as well as environmental regulations, especially for developing economies. Trade liberalization via tariff reduction and market reforms has contributed significantly to the growth of the world economy. Nonetheless, one may wonder if free trade can continue to be a key factor sustaining economic growth and improving environmental quality. Under free trade, capital-abundant developed countries that produce capital intensive goods tend to emit more pollutants. This is the thrust of the so-called factor-endowment hypothesis of pollution. However, the costs of abating pollution are mounting in environmentally conscious nations due to the adoption of tougher environmental standards. The increased production costs have prompted firms in the developed nations to relocate to developing countries (the pollution haven hypothesis). Households in developing economies are mainly concerned with meeting basic needs and thus attach greater importance to issues about jobs and income. This book contributes toward understanding these issues. The impacts of pollution taxes and environmental standards on employment and social welfare are examined, the design and coordination of optimal trade, investment and environmental policies are analyzed, and their policy implications, such as aid-nature swap and backward incidence of pollution control, are provided. Finally, optimal trade and pollution policies are investigated and compared under certain and uncertain situations.

Pension systems in most industrialised countries are unfunded, i.e. they are pay-as-you-go financed and thus depend on a well-balanced ratio (old) recipients to (young) contributors. This so-called dependency ratio will worsen significantly in the next few decades due to two developments: ageing of the population and increased labour mobility. This book analyses the viability of unfunded pension systems in the presence of the projected demographic evolution. The analysis focuses on questions concerning: efficiency considerations and the possibility of welfare improvements; political economy aspects and the feasibility of reforms, and; the process of European integration and its influence on national pension systems. The theoretical analysis is complemented in numerous ways by quantitative parts and institutional details. The consequences of the demographic crisis for the distribution of the pension burden within and across generations and in an international context are illustrated with respect to the specific situation in Germany and other European countries. It is shown for different settings of political power distribution and for different degrees of mobility what would happen without any reforms and what could and should be done to guarantee the survival of old-age security based on a fair sharing of the pension burden. Neither explosion nor erosion is the inevitable fate of unfunded pension systems. But to avoid either happening, fundamental reforms are necessary as soon as possible which loosen at least partially the intergenerational dependencies and thus reduce the pressure from the changing population structure on old-age security.

This volume collects the papers from a conference in honor of J. Michael Finger on the occasion of his retirement from the World Bank. The papers cover a number of important issues in the analysis of policy reform and the political economy of policy reform. In particular, papers focus on the political economy of trade liberalization, the role of international agencies in policy reform, policy learning, and the application of economic analysis in policy reform.

The importance of country risk is underscored by the existence of several prominent country risk rating agencies. These agencies combine information regarding alternative measures of economic, financial and political risk into associated composite risk ratings. As the accuracy of such country risk measures is open to question, it is necessary to analyse the agency rating systems to enable an evaluation of the importance and relevance of agency risk ratings. The book focuses on the rating system of the international country risk guide. "Time" series data permit a comparative assessment of risk ratings for 120 countries, and highlight the importance of economic, financial and political risk ratings as components of a composite risk rating. The book analyses various univariate and multivariate risk returns and corresponding symmetric and asymmetric models of conditional volatility, as well as conditional correlations.