The Economics of Wine – Introduction

To coincide with the 150th anniversary of the famous Bordeaux Wine Classification of 1855, the Centre for Policy Evaluation at the University of Nottingham sponsored a special session at the 2005 RES Annual Conference on the economics of wine. The 1855 classification was completed as part of the Paris Exhibition of the same year as a temporary means to determine which Bordeaux wines would be exhibited. The classification took hold, and is still in use today. In celebration, this Feature explores how economics can add to an understanding of wine production and wine markets.     

The effects of mega-events on perceived corruption

In recent decades, the media have covered many cases of corruption related to the celebration of mega-events around the globe. In most of these cases, politicians and other high officials are involved. This paper analyses the effect of hosting mega-events on the level of perceived corruption in 34 OECD countries, during 1996–2017. Summer and Winter Olympic Games, FIFA World Cups, and Universal Expositions are considered. Results show that, when we take the year of the celebration of the event as the turning point, there is no robust evidence in favour of a positive impact on perceived corruption. However, when we take the election date of the host country as the threshold, the magnitude of the effect is lasting, reaching its maximum value 1–2 years before the celebration itself, and increasing the perceived level of corruption by about 4%.     

基于传播视角的农事节庆特点分析

随着农业现代化进程的加剧,农事节庆由单纯的纪念庆祝活动发展为促进农业品牌传播推广的有效手段,农事节庆在农业品牌传播方面的特点日益显露。精准的传播时机、灵活的传播场域、明确的传播对象、互动的传播模式、欢乐的传播氛围等构成了良性传播场。消费者在愉悦的传播过程中形成关于农业品牌的立体化认知,深化品牌印象,提升了品牌知名度和美誉度,有效推动了农业品牌化发展。     

Home bias and the persistence of real exchange rates

This paper investigates the half-life of real exchange rates after taking into account the impact of home bias. Empirical results indicate that the half-life of real exchange rates is in the range of 1.5 to 2 years for four out of five countries after controlling the impact of home bias. These results support Obstfeld and Rogoff's (2000, NBER Macroeconomics Annual) view that home bias is crucial in explaining the PPP puzzle.     

公司高管人员薪酬与绩效的相关性研究——基于家族企业与非家族企业的比较分析

家族企业与非家族企业的差异一直是家族企业学研究领域的一个热点问题。现有的研究多是基于资源基础观理论,从家族性角度进行分析。本文则基于委托代理理论和管家理论,从高管薪酬与企业绩效关系的视角对家族企业与非家族企业之间的差异进行深入的研究。论文以2008年年报中的100家家族上市公司与100家非家族上市公司为样本,从高管年薪和高管持股比例这两个方面探讨高管薪酬与企业绩效的相关性。实证研究表明：非家族上市公司与家族上市公司除了在高管年薪上差异不是很大,其余变量皆有显著的差异,其中家族上市公司的高管持股、企业绩效皆高于非家族上市公司。家族上市公司与非家族上市公司高管年薪对公司绩效影响都显著,且都呈正相关,但家族上市公司高管年薪对公司绩效的影响比非家族上市公司大。高管持股比例对公司绩效影响则都不显著。     

The Magnet view: pursuing ANCC Magnet recognition as a system or individual organization

Systems comprising more than one organization at some point think about whether or not to pursue Magnet recognition for each individual organization or as a system. There are several considerations when making this decision in each of the Model Components for the Magnet Recognition Program. Magnet recognition is not a checklist of achievements, but rather an enculturation of values, standards, vision, commitment, and pride. It is important to remember that each organization is different and is at a different place in their development at any one time. Making the decision to pursue system Magnet recognition should consider all important factors since if one organization in the system doesn't make the grade, the system is not Magnet recognized.     

A model of sliding-scale regulation

Price caps, while widely touted, are less commonly implemented. Most incentive schemes involve profit sharing and are, thus, variants of sliding-scale regulation. I show that, relative to price caps, some degree of profit sharing always increases expected welfare. Numerical simulations show that welfare may be enhanced by large amounts of profit sharing and by granting the firm a greater share of gains than of losses. Simulations also suggest profit sharing is most beneficial when the firm's initial cost is high and cost-reducing innovations are difficult to achieve but offer the potential for substantial savings.This paper has benefitted from the comments of Mark Bagnoli, Jim Burgess, Michael Crew, Steve Hackett, Paul Kleindorfer, Michael Riordan, Ted Stefos, Ingo Vogelsang, Dennis Weisman, two anonymous referees, and workshop participants at the First Annual Northeastern Health Economics Conference, the Fourth Annual Health Economics Conference, GTE, Indiana University, the Rutgers Advanced Workshop in Regulation and Public Utility Economics, and the 20th Telecommunications Policy Research Conference. Financial support from the Management Science Group of the Department of Veterans Affairs and from Indiana University is gratefully acknowledged.     

How to Turn an Industry Green: Taxes versus Subsidies

Environmental policies frequently target the ratio of dirty to green output within the same industry. To achieve such targets, the green sector may be subsidized or the dirty sector be taxed. We show that in a monopolistic competition setting, the two policy approaches have different welfare effects, depending on the design of the instrument (ad valorem versus unit instrument) and the initial situation (size of the dirty sector). For a strong green policy (a severe reduction of the dirty sector) a tax is the dominant instrument. If initially the dirty sector is important, then for moderate policy targets a subsidy may be the superior tool. These findings have implications for policies such as the Californian Zero Emission Bill.This paper benefited from the comments of Wilhelm Althammer, Michael Kohlhaas, Michael Pflüger, Thomas Ziesemer, participants at the EEA Annual Congress 2003, Stockholm, at the WEAI Annual Conference 2004, Vancouver, and two anonymous referees. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors.     

Interactions Between Government and Private Outlays: Education in Australia, 1949-50 to 1981-82*

This paper recognizes that government and private final expenditures cannot be modelled in isolation from each other when the expenditure relates to a good such as education which is supplied by both sectors. The inter-relationships in education expenditure are particularly direct in Australia where the private price of private schooling has been lowered substantially by government grants. Annual data are used to quantify the inter-relationships.     

Paper credit and the multi-personae Mr. Henry Thornton

The bicentenary celebration of the publication of Henry Thornton's An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) presents an appropriate time for a reconsideration of this great work on monetary economics. This paper highlights Thornton's criticisms of Adam Smith along with the importance that Thornton attached to the lender of last resort role of the Bank of England. It suggests that there are three Mr. Thorntons who appear in Paper Credit. The first is the concerned anti-inflationist of the first section. The second is the worried anti-inflationist of the second section of the book. Besides these, there may be a third Mr. Thornton. This persona was that of the practical banker who understood the new emerging financial architecture that had resulted in paper credit supplanting metallic money. Thornton understood this new transformation of the monetary system. It is conjectured that the existence of the usury laws, inter alia, may have prevented Thornton from fully investigating the possibility of the UK moving to a specie-less system.     

R&D activity in a dynamic factor demand model

The focus of this paper is an econometric analysis of the determinants of private firms' R&D activities in the context of a general dynamic factor demand model. Besides the traditional production factors we treat technological knowledge, endogenously determined by R&D expenditures, as a further input factor. While labour and materials are assumed to be variable, capital and know-how are considered as quasi-fixed. The dynamic demand equations for labour, capital investment and R&D which are derived from an intertemporal cost minimisation are estimated for a panel data set of small and medium size German firms. The data covers the period between 1978 and 1982 and includes 408 firms. It turns out that R&D activity depends on the underlying production structure as suggested by neoclassical theory. In addition, by introducing firm specific effects, we can show that firm size and market concentration influence innovative behaviour in accordance with the Schumpeterian hypotheses.Paper presented at the Industrial Organization Conference at the Annual Meeting of the Austrian Economic Association, Vienna, June 24–26, 1992, the 7th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association, Dublin, August 29–31, 1992, and the 19th Annual Conference of the EARIE, Stuttgart, September 4–6, 1992. Helpful suggestions and comments were received from participants of these conferences as well as from seminar participants at Temple University, at the University of Augsburg, and at the fourth DFG workshop Marktstruktur und gesamtwirtschaftliche Entwicklung in Munich. We are particularly indebted to an anonymous referee for very helpful specific comments. Finally, we would like to thank Horst Albach for providing us with the panel data set. Financial support of the DFG is gratefully acknowledged.     

Comparing olanzapine and ziprasidone in the treatment of schizophrenia: a case study in modeling

SUMMARY

When a new drug is introduced to the market, the availability of head-to-head data for comparisons of annual cost and health outcomes with other drugs already on the market is usually insufficient. When only limited head-to-head data are available, one alternative is to perform preliminary modeling using data from the best available studies. In this paper, we synthesise data from the most comparable available studies to create a model to compare the annual costs and health outcomes when initiating treatment for schizophrenia with one of two antipsychotic drugs: olanzapine, which was launched in the United States (US) market in September 1996, and ziprasidone, which was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February 2001. Annual treatment costs were determined by response and relapse rates as well as acquisition costs. The results indicate similar annual treatment costs (US$48,676 for olanzapine; US$48,873 for ziprasidone), despite the lower drug acquisition cost for ziprasidone. Annual health outcomes differed between the olanzapine and ziprasidone groups with 23.5% and 25.2% relapsed, 36.7 and 37.4 hospital days, and 60.0 and 60.1 EPS days in the olanzapine and ziprasidone groups respectively. A head-to-head naturalistic trial is needed to validate the results of this modeling exercise.     

Estimating gravity equations: to log or not to log?

In this study we compare the traditional OLS approach applied to the log-linear form of the gravity model with the Poisson Quasi Maximum Likelihood (PQML) estimation procedure applied to the non-linear multiplicative specification of the gravity model. We use the trade flows for all products, for all manufacturing products as well as for manufacturing products broken down by three-digit ISIC Rev.2 categories. We base our conclusions on the gravity model of Bergstrand (Rev Econ Stat 71(1):143--153, 1989) for disaggregate trade flows that allows us to investigate differences in factor-proportions and home-market effects at the industry level. In addition, we compare the effects of other explanatory variables such as exporter and importer total income, distance, preferential trade agreements, common border, historical ties, and common language on the volume of trade. Our main conclusion is that both estimation results as well as results of the regression mis-specification tests provide supporting evidence for the PQML estimation approach over the OLS estimation method. The paper has benefited from comments by an anonymous referee and by the participants at the following conferences: the 4th Nordic Econometrics Meeting, Tartu, Estonia, the 8th Annual Conference of the European Trade Study Group (ETSG), Vienna, Austria, the 21th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association (EEA), Vienna, Austria, the XIth Spring Meeting of Young Economists (SMYE), Sevilla, Spain, and the 5th Annual Conference of the European Economics and Finance Society (EEFS), Heraklion, Greece.     

Lifetime vs Annual Tax-Transfer Incidence: How Much Less Progressive?

Annual fiscal incidence studies have found that income taxes and cash transfers are highly progressive and that their net effect is to redistribute income from rich to poor. Yet many argue Jhat such studies overstate the redistribution achieved by governments and that lifetime analysis is needed New results suggest that both income taxes and cash transfers are progressive on a lifetime basis, although they are much less progressive than annual studies suggest. The Australian tax-transfer system thus generates some lifetime redistribution from rich to poor, while also enforcing intra-personal redistribution across the life cycle of individuals.     

DENG XIAOPING'S GREAT TRANSFORMATION

Editor's Note: The First Annual Arnold C. Harberger Distinguished Lecture, University of California, Los Angeles, November 17, I997     

Beyond the Legacy of Mackinder

For the Geopolitics Lecture at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting 2010, the paper examines the core features of Mackinder's geopolitical imaginary, reviews contemporary challenges to those elements and develops an alternative conception of space for a Progressive Geopolitics.     

Growing Silicon Valley on a landscape: an agent-based approach to high-tech industrial clusters

We propose a Nelson-Winter model with an explicitly defined landscape to study the formation of high-tech industrial clusters such as those in Silicon Valley. The existing literature treats clusters as the result of location choices and focuses on how firms may benefit from locating in a cluster. We deviate from this tradition by emphasizing that high-tech industrial clusters are characterized by concentrated entrepreneurship. We argue that the emergence of clusters can be explained by the social effect through which the appearance of one or a few entrepreneurs inspire many followers locally. Agent-based simulation is employed to show the dynamics of the model. Data from the simulation and the properties of the model are discussed in light of empirical regularities. Variations of the model are simulated to study policies that are favorable to the high-tech economy.JEL Classification: L11, R12This paper has been presented at the 9th International Schumpeter Society Conference in Gainesville, Florida, the Western Economic Associations 77th Annual Conference in Seattle, Washington, the 24th Annual Research Conference of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management in Dallas, Texas, and the Workshop on Industry and Labor Dynamics: The Agent-Based Computational Economics Approach in Turin, Italy. I would like to thank Rob Axtell, Giovanni Dosi, Olav Sorenson, and an anonymous referee for their comments, suggestions, and encouragement. I am grateful to Nikesh Patel for his superb assistance.     

Journey to Magnet: cost vs. benefits

As hospitals and health systems strive to be an "Employer of Choice", one important goal for their nursing leaders has been the decision to embark on their journey of becoming a designated Magnet facility. Approximately 12 months ago, conversations with a few chief nursing executives uncovered a hot topic concerning the achievement/designation of Magnet status and specifically its cost benefits. With more and more hospitals obtaining Magnet status, these nurse leaders did not know how other organizations felt about their journey including outcomes and were very interested in learning more details about their colleagues' experiences.