What is the future of water quality trading?

A comprehensive review of experiences with water quality trading (WQT) programs worldwide is presented, spanning altogether more than 4 decades. A new WQT database is built, extracting data and information from existing review papers, complemented with gray and published literature about individual trading programs. Key aspects that affect trading volumes and program continuation are identified and categorized. No single success or fail factor emerges from this review, typically a mix of factors play a role. There is potential for WQT to evolve further and serve as a cost-effective pollution control instrument, but this requires nudging political will to regulate nonpoint source.     

What is the Message of ‘Understanding the Process of Economic Change’ for Economic Historians?

This paper addresses Douglas North's latest book in the light of his intellectual lifework. North's original insistence upon the role of transaction costs did not require a departure from the neoclassical framework as clear-cut as the one required by North's latest emphasis on the role of intentionality. North's recent interest in the cognitive premises of institutional constraints to rational choice considerably expands the scope of the economic analysis of change. However, North still considers institutions supporting homo oeconomicus to be the most important progressive element in history. The paper argues that North's message goes beyond what he would be willing to transfer into the practice of economic historians. In particular, North's new conceptual framework should open the way to the acknowledgment that a plurality of progress-oriented institutions are possible, and that individualism itself could be seen as a multi-dimensional concept.     

What is the real size of China's economy?

On 20 December 2005, China's National Bureau of Statistics adjusted China's nominal GDP by CNY 2.3 trillion. The bulk of this upward adjustment was attributed to improved coverage of value added by services. The service industry now makes up 40% of GDP. Based on previous studies and other observations, this paper point outs that there is still significant underreporting of the service industry and, hence, China's GDP is likely to be underestimated. We find a plausible share of service industry in GDP to be in the range of at least 45% to 55%.     

Mapping of scientific patenting: toward the development of ‘J-GLOBAL foresight’

The Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) is in the process of building knowledge infrastructure by means of linking accumulated information assets to a variety of databases. It does not aim to develop knowledge data infrastructure based on proprietary format, but on an international standard format. JST is also in the process of creating ‘J-GLOBAL foresight’ [http://foresight.jst.go.jp (accessed June 2012)] in order to match up a variety of data such as results and indices of bibliometric analysis as well as of patent analysis derived from the knowledge infrastructure with applications like Google Maps and facilitate the visualisation of business information. This will contribute to help companies and institutions formulate business strategy based on the information obtained in the future. The former aims to be the bibliographic information version of the Data.gov, which discloses government data from the USA, while the latter seeks to be the Data-gov wiki version, which provides a demonstration by matching up governmental data with applications such as Google Maps.     

What is the long run growth rate of the East Asian Tigers?

New panel data estimates for the four East Asian Tigers show that the contribution of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) to growth is much higher than past estimates. An extended production function with learning by doing implies that TFP is about 3.5% and these countries will grow at this rate in the long-run.     

What is the right profile for getting a job? A stated choice experiment of the recruitment process

We study the recruitment behaviour of Swedish employers using data from a stated choice experiment. In the experiment, the employers are first asked to describe an employee who recently and voluntarily left the firm and then to choose between two hypothetical applicants to invite to a job interview or to hire as a replacement for their previous employee. The two applicants differ with respect to characteristics such as gender, age, education, work experience, ethnicity, religious beliefs, family situation, weight, and health, but otherwise have similar characteristics as the previous employee. Our results show that employers prefer not to recruit applicants who are old, non-European, Muslim, Jewish, obese, have several children, or have a history of sickness absence. We also calculate the reduction in wage costs needed to make employers indifferent between applicants with and without these characteristics, and find that wage costs would have to be reduced by up to 50 % for applicants with some characteristics.     

What is a recession?: A reprise

This paper draws its title from a paper written over 35 years ago by Geoffrey H. Moore (1967). Why the need for a reprise? First, there would appear currently to be somewhat diverging views as to what properly constitutes a recession. Second, largely as a result of this, in many countries other than the US, there does not exist a single, widely accepted business cycle chronology for the country in question. This paper will argue that, in addition to output, there are other important aspects to aggregate economic activity that need to be taken into account in determining the business cycle, viz., income, sales and employment. As such, our perspective would seem to be at odds with the apparent position taken by some other recent commentators on this issue who argue that GDP is all that is needed to represent a country's business cycle. We will also argue against using the currently popular ‘two negative quarterly growth rate’ rule in dating the onset of a recession.     

What is sexual selection? A rent-seeking approach

Natural, artificial, and sexual selection played different roles in Darwin’s theoretical system and his arguments. Natural selection explained adaptation without recourse to teleology. Artificial selection provided a plausibility argument for selection in general. Sexual selection provided a critical test of selection and showed that it may lead to maladaptation. Sexual selection in evolutionary theory resembles rent-seeking in economic theory.     

A hard landing for the ‘New Economy’? Information technology and the United States national system of innovation

This paper discusses the probability of a hard landing for the US economy. It argues that information and communication technology (ICT) has not changed the fundamental nature of the business-cycle and the instability of investment behaviour. It analyses some of the strengths of ICT in the United States, but suggests a resemblance between ICT and previous waves of diffusion of new technologies, notably the boom of the 1920s.     

The future of the Affordable Care Act: will we abandon health care reform?

With obstacles to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) growing, nurses need to continue to educate themselves about the ACA and the issues it is designed to address. While it has many shortcomings, the ACA invests in creating a new infrastructure that holds the potential to improve care quality and contain costs. Health economist Victor Fuchs suggests three areas must change if we are to have a health care system that is quality focused: information, infrastructure, and incentives. The current health care legislation is noble and lays a basis for future structural cost containment. The health care system continues to unravel as our politicians remain polarized over reform efforts. We must engage or we will never find solutions, never see reform.     

What is an ‘endogenous state space’?

Summary. In the literature on choice under unforeseen contingencies, the decision maker behaves as if she aggregates possible instances of future rankings indexed by a set S. The set S is interpreted as a subjective state space even though subsequent rankings need not conform to any one of the aggregated utilities. This paper proposes a definition for a subjective state space under unforeseen contingencies that is topologically unique, derives its existence from preference primitives as opposed to the representation of preferences, and does not commit to an interpretation in which states correspond to future realized rankings. The definition topologically concurs with and extends the identification of the essentially unique subjective state space due to Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini [4].Received: 28 October 2003, Revised: 13 October 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D11, D81, D91.I thank Eddie Dekel, Alan Kraus, Bart Lipman, Chris Shannon, and the referee for some helpful remarks.     

How strong is the global integration of emerging market regions? An empirical assessment

This paper attempts to evaluate the time-varying integration of emerging markets from a regional perspective based on a conditional version of the International Capital Asset Pricing Model (ICAPM) with DCC-GARCH parameters that allows for dynamic changes in the degree of market integration, global market risk premium, regional exchange-rate risk premium, and local market risk premium. Our findings reveal several interesting facts. First, the time-varying degree of integration of four emerging regions under consideration, satisfactorily explained by the regional level of trade openness and the term premium of US interest rates, has recently tended to increase, but these markets still remain substantially segmented from the world market. Second, the local market risk premium is found to explain more than 50% of the total risk premium for emerging market returns. Finally, we show that conditional correlations usually underestimate and overstate the measure of time-varying market integration. The empirical results of this study have some important implications for both global investors and policymakers with respect to dedicated portfolio investments in emerging markets and policy adjustments.     

What determines the value of recommendation change? A preliminary analysis

This article determines the condition under which recommendation changes relative to consensus recommendation and recommendation changes relative to analyst’s previous recommendation are valuable. We show that recommendation upgrades (downgrades) relative to consensus recommendation are followed by significantly positive (negative) short-term returns whenever consensus recommendation represents convergence of analysts’ opinions. We also show that as the standard deviation associated with consensus recommendation increase, the value of recommendation changes reduce significantly. This article also shows that recommendation upgrades (downgrades) relative to analyst’s previous recommendation are followed by significantly positive (negative) short-term returns whenever interval between two consecutive recommendations is relatively short. We also show that, as the interval between two consecutive recommendations increase, the value of recommendation changes reduce significantly. Our results are robust across various subsamples based on size and region.     

Assessment of the effect of the financial crisis on agents’ expectations through symbolic regression

Agents’ perceptions on the state of the economy can be affected during economic crises. Tendency surveys are the main source of agents’ expectations. The main objective of this study is to assess the impact of the 2008 financial crisis on agents’ expectations. With this aim, we evaluate the capacity of survey-based expectations to anticipate economic growth in the United States, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. We propose a symbolic regression (SR) via genetic programming approach to derive mathematical functional forms that link survey-based expectations to GDP growth. By combining the main SR-generated indicators, we generate estimates of the evolution of GDP. Finally, we analyse the effect of the crisis on the formation of expectations, and we find an improvement in the capacity of agents’ expectations to anticipate economic growth after the crisis in all countries except Germany.     

What is the Comparative Advantage of the Service Learning Pedagogy? Insights from Development Economics

We rely on the Kolb learning cycle and the experiences from two development economics class to analyze the comparative advantage of service learning pedagogy. We hypothesize that service learning is uniquely positioned to improve learning outcomes in applied/policy-oriented specializations. We conceptualize learning outcomes from a discipline-specific perspective where service hours are directly linked to the course content. We argue that the sustainability of service learning in applied/policy-oriented disciplines is limited by journal-entry orthodoxy and short-term costs. Emotive journal entries often encourage an “everything goes” response which threatens the credibility of service learning and limits its use in specializations that value objectivity. Service hours imply costs to faculty and students that exceed those of traditional approaches. This can serve as a disincentive for course adaptation, despite the decline in these costs over time, and enrollment. Our analysis encourages instructors to explore alternatives to the widely used journal-entry and to seek opportunities to inform students of the expected long-run benefit/cost tradeoffs. We encourage administrators to support faculty who teach classes that are predisposed to service learning in ways that can reduce short-run costs. With its comparative advantage and the united efforts across the academy, we expect that in the long-run service experiences will routinely be used to complement traditional lectures in applied/policy-oriented classrooms across the academy.     

Should central bankers discount the future? A note

Optimal monetary policy under discretion is analysed in a New Keynesian model with rule of thumb pricing. The paper finds that social welfare increases if the policy maker does not discount the future. The welfare improvement rises with the extent of intrinsic inflation persistence.     

Joining the World Trade Organization: What is the Impact?

Research has called into question the impact of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on trade. This research, however, has been called into question on both modeling grounds for and failing to utilize comprehensive fixed effects. Others have found that when these factors are accounted for, imports rise by significant amounts. This paper seeks to reconcile these findings. I find that the WTO has a larger, though uneven, impact on exports than imports. The results indicate that the WTO frequently causes imports and exports to move in opposite directions negating any increase in overall trade. The regressions with and without fixed country effects generally demonstrate pattern consistency for generalized results that are robust to change. Owing to the finding that imports rise modestly or even fall without country effects while exports rise, the results imply that countries may not be as interested in liberalizing trade as selling to the world.