Is protection really for sale? A survey and directions for future research

This paper critically and selectively surveys the literature on protection for sale and discusses directions for future research in this area. It suggests that the standard approach needs to be augmented to provide more compelling tests of this model.     

Warranty,Seller Reputation,and Buyer Experience: Evidence From EBAY Used Car Auctions

Using data from the eBay car auction market, we test several predictions regarding warranties, seller reputation and buyer experience in the determination of the final price. We find that the presence of a warranty generates a price premium, but that its magnitude decreases when the seller has a more established reputation. Compared to private sellers, professional dealers, who are ‘repeated‐game players’ in the market, benefit less from a warranty and its substitutability for seller reputation is relatively small. In addition, a buyer with greater experience tends to pay less for a warranty or for a professional dealership.     

Sustainability or Ruin of a Common Resource Economy with Random Jump

We consider a common resource economy in which agents exploit the common resource, and use it to produce goods and consume the goods produced. Also the agents can invest in private and productive capital. The resource extracted from the common resource is non‐renewable and the common pool is under uncertainty in the sense that it could have a sudden increase or decrease in the course of extraction. In this model we shall explore the probability of sustainability or ruin of the economy. We compare and discuss the optimal extraction rules and the probabilities under cooperative and non‐cooperative regimes.     

International Joint Venture And Host-Country Policies

In the presence of international joint ventures, effects of policies like foreign equity cap, trade protection and domestic resource requirement restriction towards equity sharing and welfare are analysed. Foreign equity cap reduces host country's welfare. Trade protection lowers equity share for the local firm. It has a first-order source of welfare gain as the internal efficiency of the firm improves. Also, there is a first-order loss resulting from a leakage effect, since a part of the surplus goes to a foreign firm. A marginal domestic resource requirement restriction enhances the joint surplus of the venture and social welfare.     

Dynamic Microsimulation Modeling for Policy Support: An Application to Belgium and possibilities for Japan

This paper provides an overview of dynamic microsimulation modeling as well as its recent developments. It then discusses in detail a recent trend in microsimulation research, which uses alignment methodologies to simulate microsimulation models in conjunction with macro-economic models. The goal of this ??top down-integrated approach?? is to jointly assess the budgetary costs of demographic ageing and pension reform, as well as their consequences on the adequacy of pensions. This paper then discusses, also in detail, how such an integrated approach using shared demographic and macroeconomic assumptions has been developed in Belgium. It describes the dynamic microsimulation model MIDAS, highlighting how it aligns to the simulation results of the semi-aggregate model MALTESE. Finally, this paper suggests that the joint assessment using the joint application of two similar models might be useful to assess pension reform in the Japanese context.     

Web usage mining approaches to page recommendation and restructuring

As an increasing number of Web sites such as e-businesses consist of an increasing number of pages, users find it more difficult to rapidly reach their own target pages. Ill-structured design of Web sites also prevents the users from rapidly accessing the target pages. In this paper, we describe two complementary approaches to Web usage mining as a key solution to these issues. First, we describe an adaptable recommendation system called the L-R system, which constructs user models by classifying the Web access logs and by extracting access patterns based on the transition probability of page accesses and recommends the relevant pages to the users based on both the user models and the Web structures. We have evaluated the prototype system and have obtained the positive effects. Second, we describe another approach to constructing user models, which clusters Web access logs based on access patterns. The user models also help to discover unexpected access paths corresponding to ill-formed Web site design. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Microsimulation Model for Projections of Japanese Socioeconomic Structure

The Integrated Analytical Model for Household Simulation (INAHSIM) is a microsimulation model for the Japanese population that was first developed in the 1980s as a tool for household simulation. This study attempted to improve the conventional INAHSIM in order to construct a more comprehensive alternative that incorporates a larger number of social and economic elements. It also overcame the problem for simulation—the lack of kinship relations in the initial population—by imputing parent-child relationships between those parents and children who do not live together. This paper provides an overview of INAHSIM and adds certain details of the imputation that is essential for simulating the life event of “adult children resettling to care for their aged parents.” In addition, I will show the importance of the said life event in Japan by comparing the difference in the family type of elderly people between its future distribution with or without this life event. Finally, I will discuss the future possibilities for research on microsimulation models that will play an important role in policy making.     

Cost heterogeneity and the destination of Japanese foreign direct investment: A theoretical and empirical analysis

This paper first of all develops a Cournot oligopolistic model with heterogeneous firms to examine each firm's choice between export-oriented foreign direct investments (FDI) and FDI to serve the host-country market. It is shown that there exist a critical level of efficiency such that all firms below that level choose the former and those above it the latter. The hypothesis is tested using firm-level data on 118,300 Japanese firms covering the entire manufacturing sector. Multinomial logit estimates strongly support our theoretical findings.     

Protection for sale or surge protection?

This paper asks whether the results obtained from using the standard approach to testing the influential Grossman and Helpman “protection for sale” model of political economy might arise from a simpler setting. A model of imports and quotas with protection occurring in response to import surges, but only for organized industries, is simulated and shown to provide parameter estimates consistent with the protection for sale framework. This suggests that the standard approach may be less of a test than previously thought.     

What Determines the Sacrifice Ratio? A Bayesian Model Averaging Approach

Existing empirical studies on the sacrifice ratio (measuring the output cost of disinflation) consider a large number of potential explanatory variables including the length of disinflation, various institutional settings, economic conditions, and the political climate. Some results are robust across different studies, while others are not. We address the presence of model uncertainty by using the Bayesian model averaging method to identify the important determinants of the sacrifice ratio, without relying on ad hoc model selection. Our results show that the length of disinflation is the most important variable. This supports the ‘cold turkey’ argument for faster disinflation.