Search for rules for search

This paper presents the findings of some preliminary ‘laboratory’ investigations into ‘actual’ search behavior. Specifically we looked at situations in which searchers' initial information about the distributions was negligible. It seemed likely that simple ‘rules of thumb’ would be used in such situations. Our findings confirmed this view: we identified five such rules which between them ‘accounted’ for a high proportion of observed behaviour. Moreover, these rules although not ‘optimal’) appear to be reasonably good and may be fairly robust; jointly, they may constitute a better explanation (and predictor) of actual search behaviour than do the currently popular supposedly optimal rules.     

Proposal for a Global Fund for Women through Innovative Finance

Despite the spread of budget initiatives for gender equality following the Beijing Declaration of 1995, resources allocated for eliminating gender inequalities remain inadequate. This paper proposes to create a Global Fund for Women through Innovative Finance (GFWIF) with the ability to raise funds through innovative sources of finance on a scale more appropriate to the estimated requirements of making reasonable progress toward gender equality (US$31–107 billion per year in constant 2014 dollars). It builds on previous calls by feminist economists for the establishment of such funds through global forms of taxation. Since donors’ commitments only meet the lower bound, the GFWIF could scale up funding for gender equality interventions commensurate with country needs. Global resource mobilization through innovative mechanisms, including allocations of new Special Drawing Rights, currency transaction taxes, and carbon taxes, have the potential to provide the necessary financing at a much faster pace than is currently possible.     

整合财政支农资金的模式构建

由于历史和体制原因,我国财政支持"三农"投入存在高运行成本、多重代理、信息不对称及效率低下等问题,严重影响支农资金的使用效应和政策效应。本文在分析我国财政支农资金使用现状的基础上,提出了整合财政支农资金的基本构想。     

Restructuring for shareholder value and its implications for labour

This paper provides an accounting analysis of the implicationsfor labour of restructuring for shareholder value. It presentsargument and evidence from the UK which suggests that activity-specificlimits on cost recovery constrain returns on capital. Theseconstraints encourage restructuring which aims to improve returnson capital through the reduction of labour costs. If labourloses directly, longer-term outcomes are more complex, as someworkers who retain jobs may gain, and much depends on the macrocontext. Overall, in the context of present-day capitalism,serial restructuring is likely to be a negative process forlabour that generates transitory benefits for capital.     

Choosing for others

Experiments conducted in the US and France were used to study how individuals make trade-offs between health and taste for themselves and others. When someone receives a choice made for them that differs from their preference, they experience a welfare loss; at least in the short-term. We measure the empirical magnitude of this loss, and suggest it play a role in assessing the desirability of paternalistic policies motivated by behavioural economics. We show that the welfare loss changes with the provision of new information and the impact of this information differs for the two countries.     

Accounting for Ecosystems

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment documented the importance of ecosystem services. It is therefore important to include these services in the national system of economic accounts. This requires estimation of “accounting prices” for ecosystems, that is, the marginal value of a change in the size of the system. This raises a number of questions: What do we mean by the “size” of the system? What is the dynamics of the system? How do we quantify the impacts on services from a change in the size of the system and finally how do we value these impacts? We discuss these questions in a few examples of ecosystems, and valuation as such is not the major problem. The major problem is the lack of information of the appropriate dynamic model for most systems. We therefore suggest that economists and ecologists should set priorities on which ecosystems should be the first objects for study for these; we should test the possibilities of estimating the accounting prices.     

关于失地农民补偿问题的思考

随着我国现代化建设的发展和城市化进程的加快,产生了大量的失地农民。但是,目前我国征地补偿制度中存在若干问题,造成失地农民所获补偿不足,经济利益流失严重。指出征地补偿中存在的主要问题,并对征地补偿制度的完善和失地农民权益的保障提出了建设性意见。     

An alternative approach for testing for linear association for two independent stationary AR(1) processes

Spurious correlations occur when two independent time series are found to be correlated according to the typical statistical procedure for testing the null hypothesis of zero correlation in the population. Using a Monte Carlo analysis, this study examines the spurious correlation phenomenon for two independent stationary AR(1) processes and it finds that if an alternative testing procedure is applied, spurious behaviour is eliminated using the variance of the sample correlation coefficient of these two series, suggested by Bartlett (1935).     

Technology for Sale

Free trade in commodities typically leads to gains for all participating countries. These gains can be augmented by trade in productive factors if returns differ between countries. But such trade would not exhaust potential gains if technological knowledge, not embedded in productive factors, differs between countries. Using a Ricardian model this paper shows how a country which has an absolute advantage based on technology in both commodities in a two-commodity world can gain by selling, giving, or even bribing the other country into using the advanced technology in the other country's export sector. If each country has an absolute advantage in the single commodity it produces, an exchange of technology for the other commodity can nonetheless lead to extra gains for both countries.     

Career coaches for nursing: a strategy for increasing your ROI

Career Coaches for Nursing was created as an innovative program for the nursing staff at a large, expanding Midwestern tertiary health care organization. In the 2-year start-up period, the new program met challenges and identified many system-wide, as well as local issues for improvement. A decrease in turnover and the associated cost savings from improved employee retention provided a positive return on investment within the first 2 years of the program's existence.     

Volunteering for heterogeneous tasks

We model the search for volunteers as a war of attrition. Every player is tempted to wait for someone else to volunteer for the tasks. When tasks are not equivalent, it may be optimal to volunteer quickly to perform an easy task. We analyze the trade-off between volunteering for an easy task and taking the risk of having to perform a more strenuous task in order to get the chance of avoiding all tasks. When the cost of waiting is borne by agents until every task has found a volunteer, we show that it may be optimal to volunteer for the difficult task even if an easier task is available, in order to speed up the process and reduce the costs of waiting.     

Market mechanisms for policy decisions: Tools for the European Union

The success of an enlarged European Union will require transparent and subtle mechanisms for policy coordination. A common policy is a public good, and economists have developed many schemes for the efficient provision of public goods. The European Union offers a promising soil for such schemes, but they must be simple and tailored to its specific needs. The paper discusses two possible examples: A system of tradable deficit permits implementing the fiscal constraints of the Maastricht treaty; and a rule allowing country representatives to shift their own votes intertemporally when deliberations are taken in periodic committee meetings.     

非公共利益性质的征地行为与土地发展权补偿

本文讨论非公共利益性质征地行为对农民土地发展权的侵害 ,指出了土地分区控制对土地发展权侵害与非公共利益性质征地行为对土地发展权侵害的差别 ,分析了非公共利益性质的征地行为由于侵害土地发展权带来的后果 :损失土地配置效率、延迟土地开发时机 ,降低征地效率。在此基础上 ,本文认为“涨价归公”的错误理念导致了非公共利益征地行为。最后本文提出了两种可选的解决方案。     

Education for all. A welfare-improving course for Africa?

In this paper, we argue that the case for universal compulsory education for sub-Saharan Africa might have been overstated. We capture the African situation through a heterogeneous-agent model, in which high costs of education relative to income and the skill premium cause the economy to stagnate in a low steady state with minimal educational attainment. We calibrate the model to available data from the sub-Saharan African countries to study education policies. We find that a tax and in-kind subsidy scheme that effectively redistributes resources from households with lower ability children to those with higher ability children outperforms enrollment-maximizing policies such as the abolition of child labor and compulsory education.     

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The role for openness in the demand for money: Evidence from Barbados

This paper uses an optimizing theoretical framework for modelling openness in the demand for money function for a small, open, developing economy; in so doing, it subsumes the ad hoc specifications of three previous studies. Its findings confirm the importance of a measure of openness in the money demand specification for Barbados. More specifically, it appears that transactions associated with the traded sector of the economy exhibit greater elasticity of money demand than those associated with the nontraded sector.     

On the inconsistent behavior in voting for incumbents and for term limitation

This paper considers the seemingly inconsistent behavior of individuals who simultaneously vote for incumbents and for limitations on their terms in office. We argue that such behavior may occur even if voters pursue their self-interests in both candidate and term-limitation elections. First, we formulate elections for Congressional candidates as a two-person game, where each candidate maximizes votes by proposing a distribution of benefits to voters. Then we discuss the term limitation at the state level, where voters in each district compare, over time, the average benefits obtained from two alternative series of campaign games: one with a longer tenure associated with no term limit and the other with a shorter tenure created by the introduction of a term limit. In elections of candidates for Congress, the incumbent is successful because he can generate more aggregate benefits for voters. We show, however, that at some critical point of the tenure, his behavior will be less beneficial to his core constituents. In term-limitation elections, those voters tend to support a term limit. In some cases, they represent a majority in the state, and term limits are enacted. Received: February 23, 1999; revised version: January 24, 2000