李嘉图等价定理的协整检验

李嘉图等价定理认为,政府支出是通过发行国债融资还是税收融资没有任何区别,即债务和税收等价.李嘉图等价定理的理论基础是生命周期假说,而且其成立存在诸多前提条件.通过对我国的居民消费、国债余额、国内生产总值的协整分析,认为李嘉图等价定理在我国并不成立.     

Efficient Specialization in Ricardian Production

Abstract. It is well known that the analysis of efficient specialization in Ricardian production with many countries and many commodities cannot be broken down to the simple case of two countries and two commodities. By drawing on some recent results of convex geometry and the theory of cephoids, this paper characterizes efficient specialization in the general case.     

李嘉图等价定理及其在中国的适用性分析

李嘉图等价定理认为,政府的财政收入形式的选择,不会引起人们经济行为的调整。但是,现代经济学家们并非完全同意李嘉图的见解,无论是对其必要条件的检验还是对其结论的检验都存在着争论。而通过实证分析我国1989—2004年的政府发债分别与消费和投资的关系,可以得出结论：从历史数据来看,李嘉图等价定理在我国并不适用。     

Endogenous Land use and the Ricardian Valuation of Climate Change

The Ricardian technique uses cross-sectional variation in the capitalized value of climate in land to infer the agricultural costs or benefits of dynamic climate change. While a practical approach for predicting the consequences of global warming with readily available data, it may yield biased results when land-use decisions depend on the climate attributes being valued and when land has unobserved attributes that differ with the use to which it is put. This paper illustrates the conditions under which such a bias will occur, describes an empirical model that corrects for it, and estimates that model with agricultural census data from Brazil. The approach, moreover, allows constraints on adjustment to be explicitly incorporated into the Ricardian framework, relaxing one of that technique’s most conspicuous assumptions. I would like to thank Patrick Bayer, Steven Berry, Robert Evenson, Michael Hanemann, Robert Mendelsohn, Bill Nordhaus, Kerry Smith, Karl Storchmann, two anonymous referees, and seminar participants at the University of California – Santa Barbara and the Research Triangle Institute for their useful insights and helpful comments. All remaining errors and omissions are my own. Fabiana Tito provided excellent research assistance, and Denisard Alves and Robert Evenson generously supplied the data.     

Ricardian productivity differences and the gains from trade

This paper evaluates the role of sectoral heterogeneity in determining the gains from trade. We first show analytically that in the presence of sectoral Ricardian comparative advantage, a one-sector sufficient statistic formula that uses total trade volumes as a share of total absorption systematically understates the true gains from trade. Greater relative sectoral productivity differences lead to larger disparities between the gains implied by the one-sector formula and the true gains. Using data on overall and sectoral trade shares in a sample of 79 countries and 19 sectors we show that the multi-sector formula implies on average 30% higher gains from trade than the one-sector formula, and as much as 100% higher gains for some countries. We then set up and estimate a quantitative Ricardian–Heckscher–Ohlin model in which no version of the formula applies exactly, and compare a range of sufficient statistic formulas to the true gains in this model. Confirming the earlier results, formulas that do not take into account the sectoral heterogeneity understate the true gains from trade in the model by as much as two-thirds. The one-sector formulas understate the gains by more in countries with greater dispersion in sectoral productivities.     

Ricardian trade and the impact of domestic competition on export performance

Abstract This paper develops and empirically examines a model of relative productivity differences both within and across industries for small open economies. We decompose the effect of industry productivity on export performance into direct effect of own‐firm productivity and an indirect effect of higher peer‐firm productivity. In a sample of Chilean and Colombian plants, we find evidence of both a positive direct effect and a negative indirect effect. The empirical evidence supports our theoretical prediction that industry‐specific factors of production and asymmetric substitutability between domestic and foreign varieties drive the negative indirect effect. JEL classification: F10, F11, F12     

Uncertainty,trade integration and the optimal level of protection in a Ricardian model with a continuum of goods

This paper analyzes the effects of increasing trade integration on individual utility when the international specialization pattern is stochastic, i.e. when the range of goods each country produces depends on the realization of a random variable. Using a Ricardian continuum of goods model it is shown that under uncertainty a trade-off emerges. As in the standard deterministic model, higher trade integration reduces prices and increases expected real income. However, higher trade integration, reducing the number of active sectors in the economy, also increases the displacement cost the worker suffers when the sector she is employed into has to close down because, ex-post, the foreign country's competing sector results to be more efficient. Two are the main results of the model. First, it is shown that, under uncertainty and job specificity, increasing trade integration is not always welfare enhancing. Second, there exists an optimal level of protection that is higher the smaller the price reduction induced by trade integration and the more technologically similar are countries.     

A Ricardian model of climate change in Canada

Abstract A comparative static 'Ricardian' model is used to establish relationships between climate and agricultural land value in Canada. From these relationships, agricultural costs of climate change scenarios are estimated. This study is motivated partly by evidence of potential agricultural benefits of climate change from a similar analysis of the United States by Mendelsohn, Nordhaus and Shaw, and partly by the void of Canadian studies. Furthermore, it extends the analysis to non‐uniform climate change scenarios. Its finding of a slightly positive upper bound on the agricultural benefits from climate change, within a wide margin of error, is motivation for further analysis.
Un modèle ricardien de changement climatique au Canada.  L'auteur utilise un modèle statique ricardien classique pour établir des relations entre le climat et la valeur des terres agricoles au Canada. A partir de ces relations, on calibre les coûts agricoles de divers scénarios de changement climatique. Cette étude a pris forme en partie en réaction aux résultats d'une analyse similaire de Mendelsohn, Nordhaus et Shaw aux Etats‐Unis, et en partie en réponse à un manque d'études de ce genre au Canada. Cet article étend les analyses aux scénarios de changements climatiques non‐uniformes. Les résultats suggèrent qu'il existe une sorte de borne positive supérieure aux avantages agricoles du changement climatique, à l'intérieur d'une marge d'erreur assez vaste. Voilà qui encourage à poursuivre les analyses.     

Elasticity of substitution and growth: normalized CES in the Diamond model

Summary. It is often asserted that the more substitutable capital and labor are in the aggregate production the more rapidly an economy grows. Recently this has been formally confirmed within the Solow model by Klump and de La Grandville (2000). This paper demonstrates that there exists no such monotonic relationship between factor substitutability and growth in the Diamond overlapping-generations model. In particular, we prove that, if capital and labor are relatively substitutable, a country with a greater elasticity of substitution exhibits lower per capita output growth in transit and in steady state. Received: October 27, 2001; revised version: February 25, 2002     

Looking back, looking ahead: Biased technological change, substitution and the wage gap

The implications of ICT on wage inequality are studied by applying a CES production function with skilled and unskilled labour. Skill-biased technological change increases wage inequality. The result is reinforced in a two-sector general equilibrium model if the income elasticity of the demand for high-tech goods and the elasticity of substitution between final goods are larger than one.     

Predicting the pattern of international trade in the neoclassical model: a synthesis

I propose a framework that takes a set of conceivable outcomes as the primitive and a prediction is defined by identifying a subset on the set of conceivable outcomes. This notion of predictability serves as an organizing principle for characterizing pattern of trade predictions in single economy and integrated equilibrium formulations of the neoclassical trade model. I identify allocative efficiency as the unifying subset selection criterion for the different formulations of the neoclassical trade model, ranging from Ricardo’s (in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, reprinted by J. M. Dent, London, in Everyman’s library, 1817) original comparative advantage formulation to the multi-cone Heckscher–Ohlin specification with multiple countries, goods and factors. I am grateful to comments from Jim Anderson, Chris Starmer, Catia Montagna, Peter Neary, two anonymous referees, as well as participants at the June 2007 GEP Conference on ‘New Directions in International Trade Theory’. I am grateful for financial support from NSF research grant SES-0452991 and from Leverhulme Trust Programme grant F114/BF.     

An assessment of the impact of EU funds through productivity boosts using CES functions

The economic effects of European Funds on recipient countries are not without controversy. We propose to study this issue focusing on the productivity coefficients of CES production functions in a multisectoral, interdependent general equilibrium model. We adopt the calibration techniques typically used in computational general equilibrium modelling to estimate a numerical improvement in the productivity coefficients of the CES functions. The array of different funds belongs to two broad categories associated with the two types of primary factors, labour and capital, that determine the output. Once we estimate the change in productivity coefficients in labour and in capital, we introduce them into a computable general equilibrium model and simulate their effects, all else being equal, in order to quantify their likely economy-wide effects.     

Comment on “C.E.S. production functions in the light of the Cambridge critique”

The controversy revived in Bertram Schefold’s paper is based on three common assumptions: (1) the underlying techniques are linear (2) perfect competition obtains (3) the economy operates in a putty-putty context. The consequences of dropping these assumptions are discussed, and the relation between nonlinearity and the error due to the use of an “imprecise” production function is examined.     

Illegal trade in the Iranian economy: Evidence from a structural model

This study investigates the causes and consequences of import and export smuggling and estimates its relative size in Iran from 1970 to 2002. Multiple Indicators–Multiple Causes (MIMIC) modeling and trade misinvoicing are used to compute the latent variable of smuggling. The results indicate that the penalty rate for smuggling and the quality of economic and political institutions reduce smuggling, while tariffs and black market premia increase the incentives for illegal trade. More trade openness is associated with greater illegal trade in the case of Iran. On average, smuggling in Iran has been approximately 13% of total trade.     

文化消费内涵辨析

文化消费是我国消费领域的热点之一,但对其研究却相对滞后。通过对文化消费概念以及其与物质消费、消费文化、文化生产、物质生产等的关系辨析,进一步厘清了文化消费的内涵,以利于对文化消费的深层理解。     

Elasticity of substitution and the stagnation of Italian productivity

The aim of this paper is to investigate the roots of the stagnation in the Italian total factor productivity (TFP). The analysis focuses on the specific pattern of technical progress in determining the dynamics of the TFP. This analysis cannot be done with Cobb-Douglas technology, but requires the employment of a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function that allows distinguishing between the direction and the bias of technical progress. We employ a CES specification embodying both labor- and capital-augmenting technical change, with a σ less than 1. We obtain three main results. (1) There seems to have been a structural break around the mid-1990s in the direction and bias of technological change; (2) The first half of the sample features a labor-augmenting technical change and a capital bias; and (3) In the second part of the sample, both these characteristics seem to disappear, and the evolution of factor endowments assumes a key role. This fact may be seen as one of the potential causes of the stagnation in Italian productivity.     

Ricardian fiscal regimes in the European Union

The prevalence of different fiscal regimes is important both for practical policy reasons and to assess fiscal sustainability, notably for European Union countries. The purpose of this article is to assess, with a panel data set, the empirical evidence concerning the existence of Ricardian fiscal regimes in EU-15 countries. The results give support to the Ricardian fiscal regime hypothesis throughout the sample period, and for sub-samples accounting for the dates of the Maastricht Treaty and for the setting-up of the Stability and Growth Pact. Furthermore, electoral budget cycles also seem to play a relevant role in fiscal behaviour.

Fairness, price stickiness, and history dependence in decentralized trade

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price that serves as a common fairness benchmark. The strategic equilibrium reflects market fundamentals, but it is markedly less sensitive to the buyer–seller ratio near the fair price benchmark. Prices may be sticky around very different reference levels in markets with otherwise identical fundamentals. The implied history dependence turns out to be mitigated rather than exacerbated by friction.     

我国煤炭生产—消费的地区性差异研究

利用1991—2009年中国30个省市的煤炭消费及原煤生产数据建立Panel-Data模型,分析各地区煤炭消费的地区性差异影响,并将30个省域划分为东部、中部和西部三大区域,比较了三大区域煤炭消费的地区性差异。结果表明,河北(与北京和天津)与江苏(与上海)的煤炭消费最强,东部地区的煤炭消费远高于中西部地区。研究认为,东部地区经济的发展要摆脱对煤炭的高度依赖,有必要积极发展低碳经济;同时中西部地区也要调整产业结构,降低原煤开采业在国民经济的比重,提升产业的科技含量,告别资源依赖型经济发展模式,实现可持续发展。