The Productivity of US States since 1880

This study uses state-level variation in labor productivity levels at twenty-year intervals between 1880 and 1980 to examine the relative importance of institutional and geographical influences in explaining observed and persistent differences in standards of living over time and across regions. Focusing on fundamental rather than proximate influences, we find that both institutional characteristics and some physical geography characteristics account for a high proportion of the differences in state productivity levels: states with navigable waterways, a large minerals endowment, and no slaves in 1860, on average, had higher labor productivity levels throughout the sample period. However, we find little support for two other influences that have previously received attention—climate and latitude.     

Abstracts

Quality & Quantity -     

The Impact of Land-Use Change on Ecosystem Services,Biodiversity and Returns to Landowners: A Case Study in the State of Minnesota

Land-use change has a significant impact on the world’s ecosystems. Changes in the extent and composition of forests, grasslands, wetlands and other ecosystems have large impacts on the provision of ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation and returns to landowners. While the change in private returns to landowners due to land-use change can often be measured, changes in the supply and value of ecosystem services and the provision of biodiversity conservation have been harder to quantify. In this paper we use a spatially explicit integrated modeling tool (InVEST) to quantify the changes in ecosystem services, habitat for biodiversity, and returns to landowners from land-use change in Minnesota from 1992 to 2001. We evaluate the impact of actual land-use change and a suite of alternative land-use change scenarios. We find a lack of concordance in the ranking of baseline and alternative land-use scenarios in terms of generation of private returns to landowners and net social benefits (private returns plus ecosystem service value). Returns to landowners are highest in a scenario with large-scale agricultural expansion. This scenario, however, generated the lowest net social benefits across all scenarios considered because of large losses in stored carbon and negative impacts on water quality. Further, this scenario resulted in the largest decline in habitat quality for general terrestrial biodiversity and forest songbirds. Our results illustrate the importance of taking ecosystem services into account in land-use and land-management decision-making and linking such decisions to incentives that accurately reflect social returns.     

Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman

This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.     

Consumption-leisure nonseparabilities in asset market participants’ preferences

We use panel data to estimate nonlinear Euler equations for preferences that are nonseparable in consumption and leisure. This approach departs from existing panel data studies that investigate linearizations and/or separable preferences. Intuitively plausible estimates are obtained only when excluding nonassetholders from the sample, which indicates the importance of asset market participation. For market participants, estimated parameter values are intuitively appealing, but differ from existing estimates. They also differ from parameter values commonly used in computational experiments. These findings have implications for the extensive literature in macroeconomics and finance that studies models of intertemporal decision-making, and they confirm the importance of market incompleteness.     

Regulatory Impact Assessment and the Economic Transition to Markets

In most developing and transition economies, far-reaching legal and regulatory reforms are essential for a successful transition to market-led economic development. One of the most important capacities of a market regulator is the ability to assess the market impacts of a regulation before it is adopted. Regulatory impact analysis (RIA) is a tool now used in most developed countries to improve understanding of the economic and social welfare impacts of a law and other forms of regulation. This article argues that institutional reforms aimed at good governance are at the core of the development process, that RIA can contribute to the quality of legal reforms and support other good governance goals, and that RIA can be implemented step-by-step by building on existing practices and investing in skills and training.