Explaining the effect of financial development on the quality of property rights

Empirical evidence suggests that financial development can catalyze property rights reforms. This paper offers a theory of financial markets to explain these facts defining the relationship. The explanation is based on a simple trade‐off between the costs and the benefits of securing property. Securing the right to property at a cost allows agents to post collateral against loans. However, the benefits of collateral vary according to the existing credit market conditions, which we take into account in the tradeoff between the costs and the benefits of securing property rights along the path of financial development to explain the conditions under which financial development can create incentives for better property rights institutions.     

Price Changes and Some Underlying Aspects of Measurement of Poverty

The paper deals with effects of price changes on measurement of poverty. It is shown that there are situations, when prices and nominal incomes change, a higher nutritional intake or an increase in commodity consumption of the poor can be associated with higher poverty gaps and a higher poverty index of the society. A positive relationship of this kind is quite counter-intuitive in the context of poverty measurement. This is caused by the adjustment of the poverty line and/or incomes of one situation by the prices of the other for the purpose of comparison.

     

A direct proof of the existence of pure strategy equilibria in games with a continuum of players

Summary In this note we provide a direct and simple proof of the existence of pure strategy Nash equilibria in large finite action games when the payoffs depend on own action and the average response of others. The result is then extended to the case where the action set of each player is a compact subset of ⁿ.     

Do Macroeconomics Channels Matter for Examining Relationship Between Public Debt and Economic Growth in India?

Inter-state disparity has been a perennial feature of Indian agriculture. The study probes if per capita income from agriculture has converged across states and finds evidence in favour of beta convergence. Spatial econometric techniques used indicate significant spatial dependence in agricultural growth. Infrastructure like roads, irrigation, and electricity, diversification in cropping pattern and quality of human capital are found to aid in growth. However, excessive rainfall tends to decrease growth rate in India. The spill-over across states are found to be primarily driven by roads, irrigation and rural literacy and we also find significant impact of spatial income growth providing evidence in favour of agglomeration effects. Hence, investments in human capital, physical infrastructure specially water management and incentives towards growing crops which yield higher returns will aid agriculture growth in India.

     

A quintessential immigrant niche? The non-case of immigrants in the Dutch construction industry

Students of immigrant entrepreneurship show a distinct preference for ethnic concentrations. They focus on small entrepreneurship in sectors with large concentrations of immigrant businesses or on ethnic commercial precincts. This preference stems from practical and theoretical considerations. It seems that the study of such concentrations, or niches, is essential to the theoretical understanding of the structural determinants of small entrepreneurship and the processes of economic incorporation of immigrants. This paper challenges this orthodoxy. It argues that it is important to assess the factors and processes that positively and negatively affect the formation of niches. This argument is corroborated by an analysis of the construction industry in the Netherlands. According to Waldinger (1995: 577), ‘construction represents the quintessential ethnic niche’, but immigrants in the Netherlands did not carve out a niche. This exceptional situation can be attributed to a sector-specific configuration of social, economic and institutional processes.     

Perfect and Proper Equilibria of Large Games

This paper deals with the existence and other related issues of perfect and proper equilibria of games with a continuum of players. A sufficient condition for the existence of a perfect (proper) equilibrium as an almost everywhere limit of a sequence of ε-perfect (ε-proper) equilibria is given. An example shows that almost everywhere convergence need not obtain if the condition is violated. Extension to the case where the set of actions available to the players can differ is discussed.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C79.     

Wertorientiertes Dialogmarketing: Kampagnencontrolling auf dem Prüfstand

Zusammenfassung  Der wertorientierte Ansatz der Unternehmensführung gewinnt immer mehr an Bedeutung; damit w?chst auch der Rechtfertigungsdruck für Aufwendungen des Dialogmarketing. Um den Ansprüchen der Wertorientierung Rechnung tragen zu k?nnen, muss das Dialogmarketingcontrolling neu ausgerichtet werden. In diesem Beitrag lesen Sie, wie ein Analyse- und Gestaltungsrahmen für ein wertorientiertes Dialogmarketing aussehen und wie Wertorientierung im Dialogmarketingmanagement erfolgen kann. Prof. Dr. Andreas Mann Inhaber des SVI-Stiftungslehrstuhls für Dialogmarketing und Leiter des DMCC — Dialog Marketing Competence Center der Universit?t Kassel Patrick Rath, MBA Mitarbeiter des SVI-Stiftungslehrstuhls für Dialogmarketing der Universit?t Kassel     

Nonminimal product differentiation as a bargaining outcome

It is well known that in a duopoly model of product choice with quadratic transportation cost, the firms locate at the extreme endpoints of the market. Jehiel (1992, Int. J. Ind. Organ, 10, 633–641) has examined this model in an infinite horizon setting where in the initial period the firms choose location and in subsequent periods charge the Nash bargaining solution prices. Then, in the unique equilibrium both firms locate at the center of the market. This paper examines the case when the firms instead charge the prices determined by either the egalitarian bargaining solution or the Kalai–Smorodinski bargaining solution. It is shown that central agglomeration is an equilibrium. Furthermore, there is a continuum of symmetric equilibria in addition where the firms locate apart from each other. So the products are not necessarily minimally differentiated. Thus different bargaining solutions provide quite different outcomes.     

Recent trends in co-authorship in economics: evidence from RePEc

This article investigates the recent trends in co-authorship in economics. Using data from more than 700 000 journal articles we show that the average number of authors per article has increased over the last years. This process is likely to be continued in the future. In a regression analysis, we present evidence how the authorship of papers is related to the number of citations, the JEL classification, the number of journal pages and the length of the title.