Intergroup Economic Inequality Across Countries: An lntroductory Essay

The article identifies, neutrally, several factors together making for world governance, by whatever name. These are a desire by people to participate in the making of decisions that affect them in important ways and the growth of international political externalities. The analysis is conducted with consideration given to the nature and scope of governance, vis-à-vis government, the role and significance of international organizations, and the logic of representative democracy. The result amounts to a political equivalent to the merger solution for externalities.     

The Coasean analysis of lighthouse financing: myths and realities

In ‘The Lighthouse in Economics’ (Coase, R. H. Journalof Law and Economics, vol. 17, no. 2, 357–76, 1974), Coasereached the conclusion that in England there existed a relativelyefficient privately financed lighthouse system, which wouldrefute economists' traditional statements concerning the productionof public goods. The purpose of this paper is to challenge hisconclusion. We first show that, from a methodological and theoreticalperspective, ‘The Lighthouse’ is consistent with‘The Problem of Social Cost’ (Coase, R. H. Journalof Law and Economics, vol. 3, 1–44, 1960). Then, applyingCoase's own method (historical case studies), we attempt tore-examine the respective roles and efficiencies of privateinitiative and government.     

Productivity, indexation and macroeconomic outcomes: The implications of goods market competition and wage bargaining structure

One strand of the macroeconomics literature explores the extent to which the indexation of nominal wages to a variable in addition to the price level can improve macroeconomic performance. The present paper contributes to this literature by developing a model in which the nominal wage is indexed not only to the price level but also to productivity. Two key features of the framework are a monopolistically competitive goods market and a unionized labor market in which wages are determined by a finite number of unions. A significant finding is that the multiparameter indexation scheme generally outperforms full-information wage setting.     

Redistribution through education and other transfer mechanisms

Educational subsidies are frequently justified as a method of altering the income distribution. It is thus natural to compare education to other tax-transfer schemes designed to achieve distributional objectives. While equity-efficiency trade-offs are frequently discussed, they are rarely explicitly treated. This paper creates a general equilibrium model of school attendance, labor supply, wage determination, and aggregate production, which is used to compare alternative redistribution devices in terms of both deadweight loss and distributional outcomes. A wage subsidy generally dominates tuition subsidies across a wide range of fundamental parameters for the economy. Both are generally superior to a negative income tax. With externalities in production, however, there is an unambiguous role for governmental subsidy of education, because it both raises GDP and creates a more equal income distribution.     

Regulation of common property resources under private information about resource externalities

Optimal marginal investment incentives and optimal entry regulations are developed for a case where heterogeneous firms exploit a common property natural resource. The government’s objectives are to correct for resource externalities and to tax away the resource rent. Both individual output and efficiency levels are subject to private information, i.e. it is a model with multi-agency, externalities, and countervailing incentives. There are asymmetric information about the net revenue of the firm and the size of the resource externalities that the firm inflicts on the other firms in the industry. The latter implies that external effects are present both in the firms’ net incomes and in the information rents.     

Optimality of the competitive equilibrium in the Uzawa-Lucas model with sector-specific externalities

Summary. In this paper, we show that the competitive equilibrium is optimal in the Uzawa-Lucas model with sector-specific externalities associated to human capital in the goods sector. Thus, these external effects do not provoke a market failure and do not provide a rationale for government intervention.Received: 1 November 2002, Revised: 3 June 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: E62, H21, O41.I wish to thank Sandra López Calvo and an anonymous referee for their valuable comments. Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology and FEDER through Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica, Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica (I+D+I) Grant SEC2002-03663 is gratefully acknowledged.     

财政体制与区际利益补偿:联结、影响与协调

区际利益补偿,是近年来中央积极推进的治理机制,其建立在区域外部性理论基础之上.通过考察外部性的治理方式可知,"庇古税"模式和"科斯模型"均具有理论可行性.而选择何种模型,往往与一国之财政体制密切相关.我国基于现行财政体制所选择的"纵向转移支付",是一种不完整的"庇古税"模式.这一现实决定了目前所试点的区际利益补偿,只是对既有责任逻辑的另一种加持,导致区际利益补偿存在着补偿动力不足、补偿标准低下、补偿范围狭小等问题,应当回归到权利思维逻辑中.而要构建权利逻辑下的区际利益补偿,需要对财政体制进行改革,包括事权的细化以明确补偿范围;财权(力)的差异化配置以增强补偿能力;转移支付制度的多维度完善以规范补偿体系,最终构建起"中央与地方"之间的三角财政关系.在这一基础之上,区际利益补偿才能调整适应理论界所设计的权利化补偿机制.     

Big data׳s impact on privacy,security and consumer welfare

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the costs, benefits, and externalities associated with organizations׳ use of big data. Specifically, it investigates how various inherent characteristics of big data are related to privacy, security and consumer welfare. The relation between characteristics of big data and privacy, security and consumer welfare issues are examined from the standpoints of data collection, storing, sharing and accessibility. The paper also discusses how privacy, security and welfare effects of big data are likely to vary across consumers of different levels of sophistication, vulnerability and technological savviness.     

The welfare comparison of corrective ad valorem and unit taxes under monopolistic competition

The ad valorem versus unit tax debate has traditionally emphasized tax yield. On this criterion, ad valorem taxes outperform unit taxes in terms of welfare for a wide range of imperfect competition settings including Dixit–Stiglitz monopolistic competition. However, in a number of policy fields such as environmental, health, and trade economics, policy makers use taxes to reduce the production/consumption volume in an industry, i.e., to correct an externality rather than to improve tax yield. This paper compares the two tax instruments with respect to equal corrective effect in a Dixit–Stiglitz setting with love of variety, entry, exit, and redistribution of tax revenues. We find that unit taxes lead to more firms in the industry, less output per firm, less tax revenue, but higher welfare compared to ad valorem taxes.      

Too much of a good thing: Endogenous business cycles generated by bounded technological progress

Following Jones and Williams [Jones, C.I., Williams, J., 2000. Too much of a good thing? The economics of investment in R&D. Journal of Economic Growth vol. 5 (no. 1), 65–85], we assume that R&D is simultaneously subject to positive and to negative external effects (e.g., the non-rival nature of technology conflicts with congestion externalities). This observation allows to conceive an economy where two R&D sectors evolve without departing significantly from each other in terms of their productive results (society tends to penalize imbalances in technical progress, making negative external effects to appear associated to a sector when this outstands relatively to the other sector; the second sector, in turn, will be subject to positive externalities that reflect a catching up effect). The proposed framework, when associated to a growth setup, is able to replicate the existence of endogenous fluctuations and, therefore, it intends to be a contribution to the literature on endogenous business cycles.