The establishment of the danish windmill industry—Was it worthwhile?

The paper examines the welfare effects of the Danish subsidies granted for the electricity production from wind power. This policy has induced a remarkable development of the Danish windmill industry resulting in a dominant position on the world market. The article demonstrates a strong learning-by-doing productivity growth in the Danish windmill industry and it analyzes the costs and benefits of this infant industry case. The costs consist of the efficiency loss from diverting electricity production from using fossil fuels to utilizing wind power. Benefits are the reductions in the environmental damage of using fossil fuels, however, the main benefits are related to the emergence of a new export sector. As the value of the windmill firms at the stock exchange by far exceeds that of the accumulated distorted losses in electricity production, this case demonstrates a successful infant industry strategy. JEL no. D2, L5, L6     

Expanding the Division of Labour: Trade Costs and Supply Chains in the Global Economy

In the pre-1914 globalisation reduction in trade costs allowed finer specialisation. The quantitative evidence is strong for some components of trade costs, but less so for aggregate trade costs. In the second globalisation, international supply chains have become an important element of the global economy, and we have better data to examine the links between trade costs and supply chains. After a brief review of the standard account of the evolution of supply chains, the article examines the quantitative evidence; regional value chains (RVCs) are especially strong, but the origins and nature of RVCs differ in Europe, the Americas and Asia. The paper then presents evidence on trade costs, focusing on the years since 1990 when both data and computing facilities became more comprehensive, and analyses the relationship between trade costs and supply chains.     

An Illustrated Case for Active Learning

Educational psychologists and instructional specialists agree that students should be actively involved in the educational process. Despite evidence that students learn better and are more committed to learning when they work with course material, chalk-and-talk remains the dominant pedagogy in economics instruction. This article provides a rationale for active learning in undergraduate economic courses based on the literature and on the author's experience. It provides examples of active learning exercises, explains why students and teachers benefit from active learning, and concludes that the benefits of active learning outweigh the costs. The exercises in this article focus on the concept of present value. A companion Web site provides exercises useful for teaching other financial market concepts.     

Financial analysis of the electrification programme

This article presents results from a financial analysis of the national electrification programme. The study benefitedfrom the inclusion of detailed capital cost modelling and data describing trends in the growth of consumption since the inception of the programme. The analysis calculated nett present value and accumulated debt, and quantified the level of subsidies required to ensure that the programme is financially viable. The effect of these subsidies on existing surpluses, possible price increases, and financial transfers between regions is investigated. Financial results are determined largely by capital costs, which are likely to be higher than estimated in previous studies. Electrification results in large losses, with revenues inadequate to cover even operating costs not related to financing, and the required subsidies are about Rl,6 billion per year, equivalent to an average 8 per cent general tariff increase. It is concluded that important questions relating to the source and distribution of subsidies, as well as the inclusion of off‐grid technologies, will have to be resolved if electrification is to be sustained beyond the year 2000.     

基于社会交换与价值理论的顾客定制动机研究

与厂商定制成本一样,顾客定制动机也是厂商成功实施大量定制的重要影响因素。然而现有的大多文献只从某些方面对顾客定制动机进行阐述。本文基于霍曼斯社会交换理论与顾客感知价值理论,结合当前定制管理的研究成果,提出了顾客定制动机理论方程。之后深入分析了牺牲缺口与顾客敏感程度,并在此基础上绘制出顾客定制动机曲线。     

The theory of optimum currency areas,trade adjustment,and trade

This article seeks to provide a closer integration of the theory of optimum currency areas with the theory of international trade. A currency area is treated as a continuous variable ranging from zero to one: zero if there is no enlargement, and some positive value otherwise, corresponding exactly to the percentge of trade in the enlarged area. The benefits of widening a currency area are then regarded, in terms of conventional trade theory, as equivalent to a reduction in transportation cost. The costs of widening a currency area are seen, instead, with reference to open economy macroeconomics, as a drop in the speed of adjustment of the terms of trade to their long-run equilibrium level. On this basis, it is shown that the marginal benefits of enlarging a currency area fall, the marginal costs rise, and an optimum size arises. But this size depends heavily on the optimal composition of the members.CEPR     

所有权结构、代理成本与公司价值－来自中国上市公司的经验证据

本文从理论上分析了股权结构与公司价值间的关系,并通过实证研究考察上市公司所有权结构及由此而产生的代理成本与其市场价值之间的关系。检验结果与理论分析相一致：（1）上市公司存在控股股东,会使公司市场价值折价。（2）上市公司存在股权制衡,能够有效的减少公司代理成本,提升公司价值。（3）不同性质的控股股东所产生的代理成本不同,国家股东的非人格化使得公司的代理成本高于非国有股东。本文得出结论：我国的上市公司普遍存在控股股东,由此产生的代理成本减低了企业的价值,国有股东的代理问题尤为严重,股权制衡的模式能够在一定程度上缓解代理问题。     

价值链视角下农产品物流成本控制与产业发展模式

目前,农产品成本不断增加是影响农民收入的主要问题。而农产品在物流环节缺乏必要的成本控制措施是导致其成本上升的重要原因。为了解决这一问题,文章提出了农产品价值链这一概念,分析了其特点以及对农产品运输环节成本控制的重要作用。通过这一理论,可以降低农产品运输过程的资源浪费,降低运输成本,减少中间环节,是农产品成本控制的重要手段。同时,传统的农产品经营模式也不利于其可持续发展。因此文章基于价值链理论,提出了农产品经营的新模式,即"品牌+标准+规模"的经营模式,以提高农民收入,促进我国农业的发展。     

Does poverty constrain migration in South Africa? Evidence,explanations and implications

There are indications that poor people may face obstacles to their rural–urban migration. This article pursues the question of whether this is the case in the South African context. It argues for the importance of longitudinal data, which are not available at present, to answer this question conclusively. Levels of education can be used as a proxy for income levels, and the article examines recently published multivariate data in this regard. However, using education as a proxy for income is problematic, because education has an independent effect on migration rates through its selection of those with the skill levels demanded by the labour market. The article develops an argument about the constraining effects of the costs of migration and the role of social networks in migration and ends by demonstrating how the costs of migration can solve a number of puzzles presented by empirical research on migration.     

Economic efficiency and the common law

Do legal rules based on the common law in the U.S. result in economically efficient outcomes? Beginning with Posner and Rubin, a substantial amount of literature supports the hypothesis that there is a natural tendency for common law to evolve over time so as to yield economically efficient court rulings. According to this view, disputants will litigate whenever the existing rules are inefficient. If the rules are efficient then no such incentive exists, in which case the legal rules are affirmed. By respectifying the Rubin model as a two-person, non-cooperative, simultaneous-move game, the analysis presented in this paper appears to support the arguments put forth by Landes, Gould, Tullock, and others that there is a general tendency for the disputants to pursue an out-of-court settlement. The analysis also suggests that it may also be in the litigant's best interest to negotiate an out-of-court settlement when the legal rules are efficient if the expected net present value of accident and avoidance costs is less than the litigants' court costs. Finally, it may pay to litigate even when the legal rules are efficient if the expected net present value of accident and avoidance costs is greater than the sum of the litigants' court costs.     

Vertical Integration and Exclusivity Contracts when Consumers Have Switching Costs

This article extends the literature on switching costs by considering what happens when retailers and manufacturers are separate entities and some customers are locked in with retailers. This separation introduces a dynamic inconsistency problem as manufacturers face the problem of extracting too much surplus from the retailer in which case the retailer has no incentive to build a subscriber base. It is shown that different trading relationships arise according to the nature and magnitude of switching costs. When switching costs are high, then integrated structures are always predicted (or exclusive dealerships in case vertical integration is banned). Vertical integration should be allowed as it provides high-powered incentives to acquire market shares.     

非股权离岸服务贸易产生的原因分析

本文考察非股权离岸服务贸易市场的离岸外包与承包之间均衡的决定,分析了最终服务生产商是否外包、外包多少以及服务承包商是否承包标准化的中间服务这一问题。本文的分析表明,这一均衡状态由生产标准化的中间服务的服务外包商和承包商的生产成本、交易成本、管理成本、两国的劳动力价格以及服务外包商的垄断定价能力等决定。     

Why do trade costs vary?

As tariffs have fallen, it is apparent that trade costs are a significant obstacle to international trade and that they vary from country to country. The gap between the cif and fob value of a trade flow is a useful measure of aggregate trade costs, but only if the measure is based on a consistent volume of trade; mirror statistics are unsuitable. Using high quality Australian import data disaggregated at the HS 6-digit level, we find large country-by-country variations in trade costs. Distance, weight and size account for part of the variation in trade costs. Indicators of institutional quality pick up some of the variation in trade costs, but the relationship is not uniform across mode of transport and commodities; exporting countries’ institutional quality is more strongly related to trade costs for air freight than sea freight, and the relationship is commodity-specific and strongest for manufactured goods. Country-specific characteristics influencing trade costs provide a link between institutions and economic development.     

Globalization and labour-market adjustment: how fast and at what cost?

In this paper we argue that the flexibility of an economy'slabour market plays a role in determining the gains from tradeliberalization, the level of short-run adjustment costs, andthe relative value of these two measures. To do so, we describethe model introduced in Davidson and Matusz (2000) which allowsus to solve for adjustment costs when workers vary accordingto ability and jobs differ in terms of the skills that theyrequire. We then report results based on simulations of thismodel. We find that economies with sluggish labour markets havethe least to gain from liberalization. The reason is that whilethe removal of trade barriers creates large benefits, they arealmost completely offset by large short-run adjustment costs.In contrast, we find that with either very flexible or veryslothful labour market gains from liberalization are alwayssignificantly larger than the short-run adjustment costs.     

The price of improvements: agrarian contracts and agrarian development in nineteenth‐century eastern Spain1

Fixed‐rent contracts do not free landlords from the need to supervise the land if it is of high value and fragile fertility, nor do they free them from the costs of monitoring farmers if they are poor peasants prone to fall into arrears. In such cases, however, compensation for improvements will encourage tenants to farm with care and act as a bond against non‐payment of rent. This article studies the repercussions of these kinds of situations by analysing what happened in nineteenth‐century Valencia, where being the owners of the improvements led to tenants eventually becoming the owners of the land.     

An Examination of Entry and Competitive Performance in Rural Banking Markets

This article explores the change in the level of competition in rural banking markets after the deregulation that occurred following passage of the Riegle‐Neal Act of 1994. Using an empirical model that utilizes both the number of banks and the value of deposits in a cross‐section of 278 rural markets, we decompose the impact of the entry of new banks into resulting changes in per capita demand and the costs/profits of local banks in 1994 and 2004. The results support the view that local banking markets have become more competitive since the mid‐1990s.     

Anglo‐American trade costs during the first era of globalization: the contribution of a bilateral tariff series†

Previous scholarship has suggested that British trade was generally unaffected by foreign tariffs during the period from 1870 to 1913. This article focuses specifically on Anglo‐American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole intertemporal determinant of Anglo‐American trade costs. However, the determinacy of tariffs for Anglo‐American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which this article reconstructs. The article concludes by claiming that Anglo‐American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth‐century Britain.     

The Implicit Costs of Motherhood over the Lifecycle: Cross-Cohort Evidence from Administrative Longitudinal Data

It is well known that the explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this article, we are the first to examine the evolution of the implicit costs of motherhood over the lifecycle and across generations using high quality administrative data. We estimate that the lifetime labor market income gap between mothers and women who never have children (never-mothers) decreases from around $350,000 to $280,000 between women born in the late 1940s and late 1960s. Gaps tend to increase monotonically over the lifecycle, and decrease monotonically between cohorts. Our evidence suggests that changes in the gaps are caused by changing labor force participation rates.     

Economic calculation and transaction costs: The case of the airline oversales auction system

According to Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps (2013, p. 123), Mises's critique of economic calculation under socialism renders him the originator of the economic analysis of property rights. This paper also suggests that implicit to Mises's impossibility theorem was also the origins of the theory of transaction costs. This raises the following question: what is the relationship, if any, between the process of economic calculation and the concept of transaction costs? Filtered through a Misesian lens, we argue that transaction costs are the costs of engaging in economic calculation. We illustrate our theoretical point utilizing the case of airline oversales auction system first proposed by Julian Simon (1968). In doing so, we reframe the problem of airline oversales from a transaction-cost approach, one in which property rights in airline seats are initially poorly defined. By doing so, we illustrate that resources expended to discover the valuable attributes of a good (in this case airline seats), the terms of exchange between potential trading partners, as well as enforcing the terms of an exchange, all of which are transaction costs, are also, by definition, the costs of calculating the exchange value of goods. Thus, the airlines oversales auction system is illustrative of an institutional solution to the problem of economic calculation via a reduction of transaction costs.