Retirement Pension Financing to Guarantee Older Workers’ Rights

International Advances in Economic Research -     

On re-reading Joan Robinson's ‘On re-reading Marx’

This paper offers some reflections inspired by a re-reading of Joan Robinson's On Re-reading Marx on the 50th anniversary of its initial publication. Robinson wrote the pamphlet in the light of Sraffa's Introduction to Ricardo's Works and Correspondence, which suggested to her that the concept of the rate of profit was essentially the same in Ricardo, Marx, Marshall and Keynes. In addition to the connections among Ricardo, Marx, Marshall and Keynes, Robinson also addresses the issues of equilibrium and time, and the dogmatism of Marxism.     

Gender bias and women’s political performance

We model voters’ gender bias as a prejudice on women’s competence coming from a distorted prior. We analyse the effect of this bias in a two-period two-party election model in which voters care about both policy preference and competence. We find that, if voters (wrongly) believe that women are drawn from a distribution of competences with higher weights on lower values, female politicians are less likely to win office but, when elected, they are on average more competent than male elected officials. As a consequence, female incumbents seek re-election more often.     

Exploring Coase’s world: an introduction

The Nobel Laureate Ronald H. Coase has occupied a central place in the law and economics approach to the analysis of institutions. Many Coasean topics have been discussed and debated over almost a century. Yet, ‘deconstructing’ Professor Coase’s contributions leaves a legacy of further refining the economic meaning of property rights, the predictive role of transaction costs for institutional dynamics, and the nature of governance in the modern firm.     

The Effect of Consumers’ Real-World Choice Sets on Inferences from Stated Preference Surveys

For stated preference (SP) studies, we develop a model that assesses the influence of choice set misspecification arising from the omission of perceived substitutes among real-world alternatives in the same class of goods. This problem is most likely to be present when individuals are allowed to select a “no purchase” option instead of being forced to choose from an explicit set of SP alternatives with hypothetical attribute levels. A convenient feature of our model is that researchers do not need to know exactly which omitted real substitute the individual most prefers, only the set of real substitutes that exists. In our empirical illustration, a comparison of rival models suggests researchers who overlook the presence of perceived real alternatives related to an SP experiment can end up with noticeably biased welfare estimates. Our more-general model suggests that it may be prudent for future SP researchers to anticipate, then test and possibly correct for, distortions in utility parameter estimates that result from this problem.      

On Microfoundations and Keynes’ Economics

Most mainstream economists regard the principles of ‘rational choice’ theory as the only foundation of economics and insist that macroeconomics be based on those principles. These include certainty or certainty-equivalence, which followers of Keynes reject. Macrofoundations of microeconomics are often proposed instead. We argue that the issue is more complex and explain why it is unlikely that a logically watertight fit between the two levels of analysis will ever be achieved. The complex interactions within and between the two levels suggest that it is unhelpful to assign foundational status to either level. We examine Keynes’ General Theory is examined as an example and compromises are found to fit the two together. It is argued that compromise is inevitable and that good theorising entails defending the compromises made.     

Fashion’s Effect on Consumer’s Preference Formation

Abstract:

It is widely known that all principles of economics textbooks do not consider advertising much less fashion a demand determinant factor. Fashion’s effect on consumer choice is a critically important topic to the understanding of consumer behavior and decision-making in the “new economy.” The discussion of such issues includes verifying the effect of three important fashion market features on consumer preference formation and choice, namely the length of product life cycle, demand volatility, and impulse purchasing. It seems that time has come to concede that fashion firms, especially those producing fast or “junk” fashion, if you will, have successfully been affecting consumer preferences and have manipulated consumer choices for the sake of their own interests. Such a goal has been achieved by exploiting the fashion market features by employing specific marketing strategies, within the framework of supply chain agility, such as product remodeling, product customization, and revisions or innovation.     

On prices’ cyclical behaviour in oligopolistic markets

We revisit the discussion about the relationship between price’s cyclical features, implicit collusion and the demand level in an oligopoly supergame where a positive shock may hit demand and disrupt collusion. The novel feature of our model consists in characterising the post-shock noncooperative price and comparing it against the cartel price played in the last period of the collusive path, to single out the conditions for procyclicality to arise both in the short and in the long-run. This poses an issue in terms of an antitrust agency’s ability to draw well defined conclusions on the firms’ behaviour after the occurrence of the shock, with particular reference for the litigation phase after a cartel breakdown.     

The Impact Of New Technologies On Wages: Lessons From Matching Panels On Employees And On Their Firms †

We study the impact on New Technologies (NT) on wages using a panel that matches data on individuals and on their firms. In his article on the same topic, Krueger (1993) did not give a definitive answer to the following question: if workers who use NT are better paid, is it because they are abler or because NT increases their productivity. We try to provide an answer to this question. Comparing cross-section estimates and individual fixed-effect estimates, we show that computer-based new technologies are used by abler workers. These workers learn and become more productive when they get more experienced with these NT. In terns of wage differentials, the introduction of computer-based NT contributes to a small increase. The use of firm-level data does not modify these conclusions.     

The Effect of Market Structure on Banks’ Profitability and Stability: Evidence from ASEAN-5 Countries

This paper analyses the effect of market structure on profitability and stability using the sample of 130 commercial banks in ASEAN-5 countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) over the period from 2001 to 2013. More specifically, this study investigates the relevance of the structure conduct performance (SCP) and the relative market power (RMP) hypotheses. This paper also examines the relevance of ‘concentration-stability’ and ‘concentration-fragility’ hypotheses in the case of ASEAN-5 banking. In doing so, we control for the effect of bank-specific and country-specific factors. Empirical results based on system-generalised method of moments (GMM) analyses support the RMP hypothesis but fail to support the SCP hypothesis. We find that concentration stabilizes the banking sector. Evidence also highlights the importance of bank-specific controls related to capitalization and costs on profitability and stability. Implications for policy-makers are addressed.     

On the efficiency of ‘single window’

In many countries, the process of obtaining government approval for different projects involves interaction with multiple government agencies at various levels. This often makes the approval process inefficient by unnecessary lengthening it. In this paper we study the effect of a re-organization of the approval process towards making it a single window clearance system, on the efficiency of the entire process. We have used the expected queue length and the expected waiting time in the system at the stochastic steady state as measures of inefficiency of an approval system.     

On Licensing Innovations And The Maintenance Of Competition ∗

Given an auction approach to the sale of licenses for a new process innovation, it is argued that a seller outside the using industry may prefer to maintain more firms than less in the using industry, particularly if this can be accomplished without loss of revenue. The basic reason is that more firms implies more competition for future modifications and improvements to the new technology. It is then shown that the seller will license at least n — 1 of the n current firms in the industry, provided the seller can choose a price composed of both a fixed fee and a royalty element. The application of the analysis is illustrated by a discussion of the Pilkington's float glass process.     

The reason for ‘The Reason of Rules’

This paper is an attempt to locate the writing of the book, The Reason of Rules, in its intellectual and temporal setting. The object is to capture something of the ambitions of the book and to assess its limitations as perceived three decades after its writing. It includes some personal reflections on the experience of Buchanan as a co-author.