Thunder on the left?

In the view of some critics, Donna E. Shalala is a bleeding-heart liberal, turned loose in the biggest domestic federal agency. But the new Health and Human Services Secretary has a strong pragmatic streak. And the President seems to have hired her less as an architect of social policy than as a general contractor.     

Does Leaving the Eurozone Mean Leaving the Euro?

Events in the Eurozone have raised the possibility that a Eurozone member departs the currency union. We devise a simulation to examine whether trading firms in the departed country will continue to invoice their product in the Euro or elect another currency denomination strategy. Because trading firms have flexibility in choosing their invoicing currency, they make an excellent case for studying the currency usage patterns of other economic actors that may emerge after Eurozone departure. Results suggest that greater price discrimination leads to more use of the buyer’s currency while firms that set only one price will tend to denominate that price in the U.S. dollar. Low exchange rate volatility between the exiting country’s new currency and the Euro leads to more Euro usage.     

Who are the members of the international club?

This article proposes pragmatic methods that incorporate recent contributions to public good theory to identify the members of the international club and how they select new members. This article also suggests simple applications to the recent problems in international clubs such as the euro and NATO.     

Did the AFL equalization policy achieve the evenness of the league?

In this article, we investigate whether the Australian Football League intervention policies coincided with a more even-playing field in the league, as captured by individual match margins. We find that only two out of the eight major policies implemented over the last hundred years are correlated with lower margin.     

Will the skill-premium in the Netherlands rise in the next decades?

While the skill-premium has been rising sharply in the US and the UK for 20 years, the Dutch skill-premium decreased for much of that period and only started to rise in the early 90s. In this article, we investigate whether the Dutch skill-premium will rise in the next decades. To answer this question, we forecast the skill-premium using the Katz and Murphy (1992 Katz, L and Murphy, K. 1992. Changes in relative wages, 1963–1987: supply and demand factors. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 107: 35–78. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and the Krusell et al. (2000 Krusell, P, Ohanian, L, Ríos-Rull, J-V and Violante, G. 2000. Capital-skill complementarity and inequality: a macroeconomic analysis. Econometrica, 68: 1029–53. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) models. The Katz and Murphy model (KM) explains demand shifts by skill-biased technological change in unobservable variables captured by a time trend. In contrast, the Krusell et al. model (KORV) explains demand shifts by (observable) changes in the capital stock under a capital-skill complementarity technology. The results show that while the KM model predicts that the skill-premium will have increased by 30% in 2020, based on realistic predictions of the stock of capital, the KORV model predicts that the skill-premium will remain between ?5 and +5% of its 1996 level.     

The tragedy of the commons?

Summary We provide a complete characterization of the set of Markov-Perfect Equilibria (MPE) of dynamic common-property resource games a la Levhari and Mirman (1980). We find that all MPE of such games exhibit remarkably regular dynamic behavior. Surprisingly, however, and despite their memoryless nature, MPE need not result in a tragedy of the commons, i.e., overexploitation of the resource relative to the first-best solutions. We show through an example that MPE could, in fact, lead to the reverse phenomenon of underexploitation of the resource. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that, in pay off space, MPE are always suboptimal.The first version of this paper was written when Sundaram was a graduate student at Cornell University; the current version was completed when he was visiting the California Institute of Technology. We are grateful to many people for their advice, and would like to thank, in particular, Mukul Majumdar, Andreu Mas-Colell, Tapan Mitra, Debraj Ray, Aldo Rustichini, and Karl Shell. We also benefitted from the comments of participants at presentations in Columbia University (Fall 1988) and Caltech (Spring 1990), and at various conferences. Partial support for this project was provided by the NSF under Grant 86-06944 (principal investigator: Karl Shell).     

Does privatization improve the environment? Revisiting the monopoly case

This note shows that the argument of Beladi and Chao (2006) [Beladi, H., Chao, C., 2006. Does privatization improve the environment? Economics Letters 93, 343-347] that privatization can harm the environment by inducing lower pollution tax is incorrect. It then modifies the model to restore their claim.     

Where are the rent seekers?

In a remarkably simple and yet one of the most original and insightful observations of 20th century economics, Gordon Tullock pointed out that there are efficiency losses when public policies and political behavior create contestable rents. Tullock also observed that social losses from contesting rents appeared smaller than might be expected, so raising the question ‘where are the rent seekers?’ Tullock proposed that political accountability and ‘free-riding’ incentives in interest groups limit social losses from rent seeking. We affirm Tullock’s explanations, which apply differently under different political institutions. We compare Tullock with Gary Becker, who focused on deadweight losses from redistribution and concluded, in contrast to Tullock, that political redistribution is efficient. The comparison with Becker highlights the significance of the recognition of Tullock’s concept of rent seeking. By excluding rent-seeking losses from the social costs of redistribution, Becker could arrive at a conclusion more favorable than Tullock to an ideology that sees merit in extensive redistribution. Tullock’s model, although more encompassing of actual social costs of redistribution, would have been less welcome in the social democratic welfare state.     

Does the NDC scheme mimic the French point system?

After the implementation of the notional defined contribution (NDC) pension scheme in Italy and Sweden in the ‘90s, some authors argued that its design merely replicates the functioning of the points-based pension schemes already in place in France and Germany. The aim of this article is to assess the soundness of this proposition by comparing the properties of the French points-based pension system (FPS) with those of the NDC scheme, which refrains from intra-cohort redistributions by ensuring substantial uniformity of individual rates of return. In order to assess to what extent the FPS also avoids intra-cohort redistributions, we run several simulations for different career patterns. The results of the simulations show that the discretionary adjustments embedded in the FPS are responsible for random, regressive redistributions. Finally, the article identifies the theoretical ‘equivalence condition’ showing that full correspondence between the two schemes would require replacing the discretionary mechanisms of the FPS with an automatic adjustment of point values.     

Is the Sky the Limit? Can Japanese Government Bonds Continue to Defy Gravity?

This paper presents a simulation model based on the growth rate, the inflation rate, and the consumption tax rate in the future. Future tax revenues and fiscal expenditures are projected using regression models estimated from past data. The fiscal situation is called unsustainable if the outstanding amount of Japanese government bonds (JGBs) becomes higher than the level of private sector financial assets. We focus on the general account of the central government, which is the source of JGB issues. We find that the higher the economic growth, the more likely it is that the fiscal situation is sustainable. When a larger portion of interest income is reinvested in JGBs, the chance is higher that the fiscal situation is sustainable. Most importantly, raising the consumption tax to 20% guarantees fiscal sustainability in most cases. Our analysis shows that without a consumption tax hike beyond the 10% rate, a fiscal crisis will be almost a certainty, even with a real economic growth rate of 2% despite a shrinking labor force. A reasonably quick hike of the consumption tax, namely a hike by 1% a year, up to 20%, combined with high or moderate economic growth rates, seems to keep the economy out of a fiscal crisis, where a moderate growth rate is defined to be generated by a productivity increase per working‐age population of 1.9%, which was the average during the Koizumi years.     

Turning the page? EU fiscal consolidation in the wake of the crisis

The fiscal cost of the financial and economic crisis in Europe is huge. The paper provides provisional estimates of this cost and looks at its implications for the sustainability of public finances, taking into account also the impact of aging populations. The historical experience suggests that economic growth is persistently lowered in the aftermath of financial crisis, making fiscal consolidation more difficult yet all the more essential. Meanwhile the timing of the exit from fiscal stimulus and subsequent fiscal consolidation must reconcile sustainability and stabilisation goals—a delicate balancing act. The paper will argue in favour of structural reform to boost the economic growth potential alongside fiscal consolidation. The fiscal coordination framework in the EU, together with the Europe 2020 strategy, is seen to underpin this approach.