Estimates and Determinants of Armington Elasticities for the U.S. Food Industry

This paper provides estimates of elasticities of substitution between domestic and imported goods for 40 4-digit S.I.C. food manufacturing industries and explains the inter-industry differences among these coefficients in terms of industry sectoral characteristics. The results show that there is a wide range of variation among such elasticities and that the intensity of each industrys percentage of output sold to final consumers, foreign direct investment, expenditures on advertising and the existence of import quotas affect the degree of substitutability between domestic and foreign goods in the face of a relative price change.     

On the Dynamics of Recycling and Natural Resources

We study the dynamic impact of recycling through its effect on the production set of the economy and its relationship with natural resources. The contribution of renewable and recyclable resources for sustainability is studied. Although in the short run recycling may alleviate resource scarcity, in the long run it is not enough to compensate for the exhaustibility of non-renewable resources and the possibility of obtaining non-decreasing output paths crucially depends on the extent to which production rests on renewable resources. Furthermore, recycling interacts with natural resource growth, surprisingly not always favoring sustainability. The Production and Recycling Function is a generalization of the traditional production function, providing an integrated view of regular production and recycling and representing the production set of the economy when a recycling technology is available.     

A kernel-based method for nonparametric estimation of variograms

Variogram estimation plays an important role in many areas of spatial statistics. Potential areas of application include biology, ecology, economics and meteorology. However, it is common that, for example under highly correlated patterns, traditional estimators can not reflect all the spatial features or dependencies. In this paper, we present an alternative distribution-free estimator based on nearest-neighbour estimation with a non-constant smoothing field that is better able to adapt to spatially varying features of the data pattern. We present a simulation study to compare our new estimator to a nearest-neighbour estimator built with a constant smoothing parameter and to the classical variogram estimator. We apply our method to analyze two ecological data sets.     

Exploring different views of exchange rate regime choice

The empirical distinction between de facto and de jure exchange rate regimes raises a number of interesting questions. Which factors may induce a de facto peg? Why do countries enforce a peg but do not announce it? Why do countries “break their promises”? We show that a stable socio-political environment and an efficient political decision-making process are a necessary prerequisite for choosing a peg and sticking to it, challenging the view that sees the exchange rate as a commitment device. Policymakers seem rather concerned with regime sustainability in the face of adverse economic and socio-political fundamentals.     

Bank shareholding and lending: Complementarity or substitution? Some evidence from a panel of large Italian firms

The paper studies the motivations behind banks’ shareholding of non-financial firms using a panel of large Italian companies in the period 1994–2000. Empirical evidence shows that banks are shareholders of companies that are less profitable, have experienced slower growth, are more indebted, are endowed with collateral and have hard time to repay their debt out of current income. Banks are more likely to hold shares in companies they lend to. Overall the evidence suggests that there is complementarity between bank equity holding and lending. A plausible explanation is the shareholder–debtholder conflict, the evidence is weakly compatible with governance and information hypotheses.     

Voluntary Provision of Public Goods and Technology

This paper highlights issues in the theory of voluntary provision of public goods, building on the investigation by Peacock in connection with the contributions by Coase and Buchanan. Our goal is twofold. We first draw attention to the early literature investigating the provision of public goods and to the successive theoretical analysis. We then focus on the impact of technology on supply and demand. Examples of different types of public goods are provided, with special attention to the cultural sector, to investigate whether and how technology affects the efficiency and the effectiveness of the related public goods provision. The implementation and exploitation of technological advancements are investigated in view of the role of different actors (public, private) at different levels of government.     

Environmental Impact,Export Intensity,and Productivity Interactions: An Empirical Index Analysis of the Agri‐Food Industry in Spain

Recent studies have focused on how exports affect environmental performance or vice versa, while others have concentrated on the productivity of export‐oriented firms. The objective of the present paper is to provide a simultaneous analysis on the aforementioned relationships. The approach followed is a composite equation model in which export performance and productivity components, including an environmental indicator, are endogenously determined, taking as reference exporting firms of the food industry in Southeast Spain, for the period 1994–2006. The results show positive interactions among export intensity, firm efficiency, and environmental productivity, also suggesting that the consideration of endogeneity may enhance the findings of analyses on these issues. Des études récentes se sont concentrées sur les effets des exportations sur la performance environnementale ou vice‐versa, tandis que d’autres se sont concentrées sur la productivité des entreprises à vocation exportatrice. Le présent article vise à fournir une analyse simultanée des liens précités. Nous avons utilisé un modèle àéquations multiples dans lequel les éléments liés à la performance des exportations et à la productivité, y compris un indicateur environnemental, sont déterminés de façon endogène, en prenant comme référence des entreprises agroalimentaires à vocation exportatrice situées dans le sud‐est de l’Espagne, durant la période de 1994 à 2006. Les résultats montrent des interactions positives entre l’intensité des exportations, l’efficacité des entreprises et la productivité environnementale, ce qui autorise à penser que l’endogénéité pourrait améliorer les résultats des analyses sur ces points.     

Dependent self-employment as a way to evade employment protection legislation

This paper examines whether the strictness of employment protection legislation encourages employers to contract out work to their own paid employees by the formula of dependent self-employment, while making transitions to independent self-employment less likely by altering the relative valuation of risk between salaried work and self-employment in favour of the former. In conducting this analysis, discrete choice models are applied to data drawn from the European Community Household Panel from 1994 to 2001. To test the hypotheses, a tentative individual measure of the potential severance payment that a worker would receive in the case of dismissal is included as well as aggregated variables that try to capture differences in labour market institutions and macroeconomic conditions. Evidence for a positive impact of the strictness of employment protection legislation and the potential severance payment on transitions to dependent self-employment is found. The opposite effects, however, are detected for individuals becoming independent self-employed.     

On Ramsey's conjecture: efficient allocations in the neoclassical growth model with private information

In his seminal paper of 1928, Ramsey conjectured that if agents discounted the future differently, in the long run all agents except the most patient would live at the subsistence level. The validity of this conjecture was investigated in different environments. In particular, it has been confirmed in the neoclassical growth model with dynamically complete markets. This paper studies this conjecture in a version of this model that includes private information and heterogeneous agents. A version of Bayesian implementation is introduced and a recursive formulation of the original allocation problem is established. Efficient allocations are renegotiation-proof and the expected utility of any agent cannot go to zero with positive probability if the economy does not collapse. If the economy collapses all agents will get zero consumption forever. Thus, including any degree of private information in the neoclassical growth model will deny Ramsey's conjecture, if efficient allocations are considered.     

The Impact of Second Homes on Local Taxes*

A methodology to estimate the influence of second homes on municipal taxes is developed in this paper. Assuming that a larger floating population implies an increase in public expenditure, our aim is to develop a model of the relationship between the local taxes paid and the number of second dwellings in a village. As an applied example, the results for two of the most touristy regions of the Mediterranean – the Costa del Sol and the Costa Blanca, in Spain – are shown in this paper. As we will see, there are only three different levels of local taxes, regardless of the number of second homes. The main factors behind high local tax burdens are seaside location and the presence of foreign owners.