WTO Disciplines on Domestic Support and Market Access in Agri‐Food Supply Chains

Multilateral negotiations on agriculture in the WTO are making very little progress as developed economies are reluctant to bind trade‐distorting domestic support and import tariffs at levels acceptable to developing countries. This paper presents the basic Bagwell–Staiger framework as it relates to agricultural trade negotiations. In its basic version, market access commitments are sufficient to achieve efficient trade agreements. We show that vertical linkages between agricultural goods and processed food commodities may prevent countries to reach an efficient trade agreement. We argue that the features of agricultural supply chains hinder the argument that total discretion over domestic policies is appropriate. Les négociations multilatérales de l'OMC sur l'agriculture progressent très lentement étant donné que les pays développés hésitent à maintenir un soutien interne qui fausse les échanges et des barrières tarifaires à des niveaux acceptables pour les pays en développement. Le présent article traite du modèle Bagwell–Staiger dans le contexte des négociations sur le commerce des produits agricoles. Dans sa version de base, les engagements quant à l'accès au marché sont suffisants pour permettre des échanges commerciaux efficaces. Nous montrons que les liens verticaux entre les produits agricoles et les produits alimentaires transformés peuvent empêcher les pays d'atteindre un accord commercial efficace. Nous soutenons que les caractéristiques des chaînes d'approvisionnement agricole entravent l'argument voulant que l'entière discrétion quant aux politiques intérieures soit appropriée.     

Mixed bundling auctions

We study multi-object auctions where agents have private and additive valuations for heterogeneous objects. We focus on the revenue properties of a class of dominant strategy mechanisms where a weight is assigned to each partition of objects. The weights influence the probability with which partitions are chosen in the mechanism. This class contains efficient auctions, pure bundling auctions, mixed bundling auctions, auctions with reserve prices and auctions with pre-packaged bundles. For any number of objects and bidders, both the pure bundling auction and separate, efficient auctions for the single objects are revenue-inferior to an auction that involves mixed bundling.     

Productivity, terms of trade and the ‘home market effect’

This paper analyzes the international transmission and welfare implications of productivity gains and changes in market size when macroeconomic adjustment occurs both along the intensive margin of trade (changes in the relative price of existing varieties of tradable goods) and the extensive margin (creation and destruction of varieties). We draw a distinction between productivity gains that enhance manufacturing efficiency and gains that lower the cost of firms' entry and of product differentiation. Countries with lower manufacturing costs have higher GDP but supply their products at lower international prices. Instead, countries with lower entry costs supply a larger array of goods at improved terms of trade. Output growth driven by demographic expansions, as well as government spending, is associated with an improvement in international relative prices and firms' entry. While trade liberalization may result in a smaller array of goods available to consumers, efficiency gains from deeper economic integration benefit consumers via lower goods prices. The international transmission mechanism and the welfare spillovers vary under different asset market structures, depending on trade costs, the elasticity of labor supply, and consumers' taste for varieties.     

RIP and the shift toward a monetary union: Looking for a “euro effect” by a structural break analysis with panel data

This paper aims to evaluate how the ex ante real interest rates of Euro area countries have been modified by the introduction of the euro. We use cointegration analysis with endogenous breaks in a panel data context. Our results show that the “euro effect” is significant in our sample and that after the introduction of the euro, the real interest parity (RIP) holds. This last conclusion is due to a decrease in the nominal interest rate differentials rather than to a reduction in goods and services price differentials and in the exchange rate volatility.     

Spatial concentration and plant-level productivity in France

This paper analyzes empirically the effect of spatial agglomeration of activities on plant-level productivity, using French firm and plant-level data from 1996 to 2004. We exploit short-run variations of variables by making use of GMM estimation. This allows us to control for endogeneity biases that the estimation of agglomeration economies typically encounters. This means that our paper focuses on a subset of agglomeration economies, the short-run ones. Our results show that French plants benefit from localization economies, but we find very little - if any - evidence of urbanization economies. We also show that those localization benefits are relatively well internalized by firms in their location choice: we find very little difference between the geography that would maximize productivity gains in the short-run and the geography actually observed.     

Fuzzy Pair-wise Dominance and Implications for Technical Efficiency Performance Assessment

Classically, the concept of efficiency measurement is based on the definition of a frontier that envelops the observed production plans. The efficiency score itself is based on the distance of an observed production plan from this frontier. The frontier along with the required technological assumptions (such as convexity) needed for its definition may be replaced with the concept of pair-wise dominance. This concept leads to a classification scheme for all production plans instead of a ranking based on efficiency scores. Also, the traditional assumption of deterministic or crisp production plans may be substituted with the weaker assumption of fuzzy production plans as proposed by fuzzy set theory. This paper merges these two concepts and defines a new classification scheme based on fuzzy dominance.     

Consistency in Mixed Demand Systems: Contingent Valuation and Travel Cost Data

In contrast to previous literature, we propose a consistency test that does not impose any particular common functional form for the preference structure underlying the travel cost (TC) and contingent valuation (CV) models. We derive testable consistency conditions between TC and CV data in the context of mixed demand systems when valuing changes in environmental quality. These conditions are a subset of the rationality conditions. The proposed consistency tests are implemented combining TC and CV data. The empirical results show that it is possible to combine stated TC and CV, but not revealed TC and CV data.     

Wage Inequality and the New Economy

Many economists have argued that the observed increase in wageinequality in developed economies over the past 30 years isdue to skill-biased technical progress. In this paper we putforward a somewhat different technology-based argument, namelythat the increased inequality was caused by technical changelinked to the pervasive innovation wave associated with theNew Economy. This technical change was not skill-biased in theusual sense, but rather raised the reward to adaptability. Thisalternative approach based on the notion of ‘general-purposetechnology’ can shed light on a number of outstandingpuzzles on the evolution of wage inequality both between andwithin educational groups.