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1.
In this paper we argue that the impact of external scale economies and diseconomies on city size is not nearly as clear-cut as it is tacitly believed in urban economics. Similarly, city-size distortions are not caused by externalities alone. Indivisibility and nonreplicability, which prevent establishing the “right” number of cities, may represent a source for city-size distortions which can be stronger than the standard resource misallocation resulting from external scale economies and diseconomies. It follows that a direct population dispersion policy is not just an inferior substitute to Pigouvian taxes and subsidies but rather a useful complement.  相似文献   

2.
Summary This note is an attempt to avoid doing the same search for the third time. It happened twice in my life that I wished to prove that the median is located between mean and mode for certain B -distributions: first in 1953, next in 1976. For arbitrary distributions the result is sometimes referred to as F echner's theorem. Of course it does not hold in general. In order to prove the result for particular distributions one can often use an elegant theorem of T imerding . There is a nice relationship with the standardized third central moment.  相似文献   

3.
This paper examines an equilibrium growth model in which production activities generate environmental pollution that has a negative welfare effect and in which individual households' subjective discount rate is a function of individual consumption, which is internal to each household, and of total pollution, which is an external factor to the individual agents. It is shown that there may exist multiple steady states and that the dynamic equilibrium may display indeterminacy, depending on the properties of the discount-rate function, the pollution-capital relationship in production technology, and the pollution-consumption relationship in instantaneous utility. The long-run effects of tighter environmental policy are subsequently examined, and the results are also found to be dependent on the above factors.  相似文献   

4.
Workfare programs are state-instituted programs that require able-bodied persons with children of school age who wish to claim welfare payments to participate in job training programs, and, eventually, to enter the work force. The philosophy of workfare is based on the value of work and the goal of self-determination. However, as a mandatory program for welfare recipients, workfare requires of those recipients certain duties which, according to those who challenge workfare, interfere with the freedom to choose what one will do with one's life. Whether some form of workfare will be adopted as part of our national welfare system remains to be seen. What the debate about such a program suggests is that welfare, in itself, by ignoring the necessity of security and education for full human agency, neither satisfies basic needs nor prepares its recipients for any life other than that of dependency. With all its difficulties workfare nevertheless presents an alternative to welfare that, at least in theory, more closely identifies its purpose with the values of our society.  相似文献   

5.
This study is an investigation of the effect of profit-sharing on labor productivity. When monitoring labor performance is costly for management, a regular wage/salary contract is insufficient to induce profit-maximizing behavior from the worker. The authors demonstrate that when this profit-maximizing behavior can be induced only through profit-sharing, a linear profit-sharing program will increase productivity and the welfare of both management and labor. The benefit from profit-sharing is increasing up to the point where the utility of additional income is offset by the negative utility of extraordinary effort (working harder or providing higher quality work). The income effect, i.e., the change in negative utility of extraordinary effort given a change in income, can potentially either increase or decrease the point at which the income-effort tradeoff-reaches zero.  相似文献   

6.
This article sketches the theory of debt finance and cites historical evidence on the sustainability of debt. If it is accepted that the future should under the current circumstances of COVID‐19 help to alleviate the problems of the present, then debt finance is in principle appropriate. It need not lead to an explosive rise in the debt‐to‐GNP ratio. British history shows that the theory can work in practice. A satisfactory outcome, however, depends on government being reliable, honest, and competent. Trust is easily lost and hard to restore.  相似文献   

7.
The paper analyzes the employment policy of a firm that can vary both hours and the level of employment. The analysis differs from previous work in the adjustment cost literature in that the firm is able to change its employment not only through hires, layoffs, and quits, but also by recalls of employees who were previously laid off. Thus, we introduce the possibility of the firm inventorying the labor input. It is shown that this labor inventory potential is necessary if the firm is to ever lay off workers. Further, it is demonstrated that linear rather than strictly convex adjustment costs are then required if the firm is to always recall employees who were previously laid off prior to hiring new workers.  相似文献   

8.
Strategic entrepreneurship (SE) is typically defined as organizationally consequential innovations within existing firms that involve the combination/integration of opportunity- and advantage-seeking behaviors. Focused on the transformation of organizations through innovation, SE is a construct that has generated much practitioner and scholarly interest in the preceding decades. Building upon the many contributions already observed on the topic, this paper aims to identify current limitations and central research issues of SE. Borrowing a framework from the change management literature, I diagnose current conceptualizations of SE and promote future research through careful consideration of the content, process, context, and relevant outcomes of SE. Examination of the extant literature would suggest there is still ample room for scholars to contribute to properly defining SE, understanding exactly how SE is manifest in organizations, uncovering relevant and opportune internal and external environments for SE to pervade, and identifying pertinent consequences and results from successful SE.  相似文献   

9.
This paper studies competition in a network industry with a stylized two layered network structure, and examines: (i) price and connectivity incentives of the upstream networks, and (ii) incentives for vertical integration between an upstream network provider and a downstream firm. The main result of this paper is that vertical integration occurs only if the initial installed-base difference between the upstream networks is sufficiently small, and in that case, industry is configured with two vertically integrated networks, which yields highest incentives to invest in quality of interconnection. When the installed-base difference is sufficiently large, there is no integration in the industry, and neither of the firms have an incentive to invest in quality of interconnection. An industry configuration in which only the large network integrates and excludes (or raises cost of) its downstream rival does not appear as an equilibrium outcome: in the presence of a large asymmetry between the networks, when quality of interconnection is a strategic variable, the large network can exercise a substantial market power without vertical integration. Therefore, a vertically separated industry structure does not necessarily yield procompetitive outcomes.  相似文献   

10.
The objective of this paper is to present the impact of packaging material on sustainability. The article analyzes the size of the problem that arises from the use of packaging and the effect of various types of packaging material on waste management. The data on solid waste from the United States and the European Union reinforce that the problem is not only huge but also requires immediate attention. The research found that paying attention to packaging has the potential to improve economic, environmental, and social sustainability. Reducing packaging in supply chains improves profitability for organizations, reduces environmental impact, and helps societies in lowering the cost of disposal. The cost of packaging materials and the costs of disposal and landfill, are borne by the end consumers. Suggested approaches to minimizing the generation of packaging waste include concerted efforts for reducing packaging throughout supply chains where elimination of packaging is not feasible, the formation of a global policy on the use and disposal of packaging materials, and educating consumers.  相似文献   

11.
A bstract . "Structuralism" and "functionalism" facilitate an analysis of the evolution oi economic thought as a series of cultural, institutional , and socioeconomic challenges and responses. The methodologies of "structuralism" and "functionalism," like Hegelian dialectics, 1 to which they are closely related, do not consider thought systems or socioeconomic systems in terms of fixed and stable relationships but in the light of dynamic processes of change. They emphasize communication, feedback , and continuity. The aim of these methodologies is to facilitate the analyses of changes in interrelationships which constitute the processes of evolution. The economist is concerned with the theoretical analysis of socioeconomic processes. His task can be facilitated by describing and analyzing structural-functional relationships of the economy and its parts. However, the methodologies of structuralism and functionalism cannot be used to predict theoretical developments. At best they can be utilized to select from some set of possible alternatives.  相似文献   

12.
Abstract . Is justice necessary for peace? There can be no justice while people have unresolved grievances, but peace is more than the absence of strife. It is harmony. Justice is the principles of equality and evenhandedness that command and prohibit the use of force in resolving conflicts. Justice is not necessary for peace, but it does facilitate it. Conservative, majoritarian, egalitarian and contractarian efforts to specify justice all fail to respect persons in crucial ways and cannot be expected to lead to peace. The justice that leads to peace is classical liberalism, with its insistence that each person own himself or herself, augmented by the principle of equal rights to the opportunities provided by nature, as advanced by Henry George.  相似文献   

13.
The paper attempts to make a clear distinction between three broad families of statistical indices: association, agreement, and what one may call equity. The need for this distinction arises in social research, for example, where reliability (accuracy, reproducibility, and stability) is assessed by measures of association rather than agreement. In this application, the assumptions built into an association measure conflict with the reality that gives rise to reliability data. A second motivation for this distinction is that association measures tend to express chance as the product of two potentially very different frequency distributions, agreement as the product of two identical distributions, and equity ignores such distributions altogether. A third motivation for this distinction is that the probability distribution of such measures does not depend on whether they are linear or non-linear, symmetrical or asymmetrical, or whether they express predictability or the extremality of a frequency distribution, but on their family membership. Notions of association, agreement, and equity have inherently nothing to do with the (nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio) ordering in data. The 2-by-2 case is therefore chosen as the basis of the proposed distinction. All statistical indices, whether they are designed to characterise multivariate data or to identify complex orderings, ought to be applicable to this most reduced case of two variables, making one distinction in each. To test a coefficient's membership in one of the three families, nothing more complex is needed.  相似文献   

14.
A bstract .   The purpose of this article is to analyze the relation between scientific knowledge in the form of theories and the world that such theories are about. The focus is on market theories. I argue that everyday knowledge, conceptualized using the notion of "lifeworld," is the bedrock of scientific knowledge. I also make two distinctions, one between types of markets and one between principles of order in markets. There are two different types of markets, fixed-role markets and switch-role markets, and no existing theory can be used to explain both of them. In fixed-role markets, such as a producer market of garments, actors are identified as either sellers or buyers. In switch-role markets, such as the stock exchange market or currency market, actors are not identified with one role. The other distinction is between standard and status markets. In a status market, order is maintained because the identities of actors on both sides of the market are ranked according to status, which is a more entrenched social construction than the commodity traded in the market. In a market characterized by standards, the situation is reversed: the commodity is a more entrenched social construction than the social status of actors in the market. These distinctions are the backdrop of my analysis of the idea that markets are performed. It is concluded that the performativity approach is useful today for analyzing switch-role markets. A further conclusion is that neoclassical economic theory can be used in understanding switch-role markets, but not fixed-role markets.  相似文献   

15.
For the past 200 years, humans have benefited from the abundant, inexpensive, and easily obtained energy of fossil fuels. Energy surpluses such as this are unusual in human history. In systems with little surplus energy, population growth is low and complexity emerges slowly due to the energetic costs it carries. On the rare occasions when energy is readily available, societies respond by growing rapidly. They must become more complex in response to the social, economic, and resource challenges of dense population. More complex societies are more expensive, requiring greater energy per capita. The process of increasing complexity necessitates greater energy production, creating a positive feedback cycle. Past societies have collapsed under such pressures. Population and complexity grew rapidly when the Industrial Revolution replaced economies based on annual solar radiation with economies fueled by fossil energy. The Green Revolution of the 20th century is credited with preventing mass starvation, but it has made food production and sustaining population ever‐more dependent on high‐energy (low‐entropy) inputs. Some believe innovation will overcome the limitations of resources and permit unchecked growth. However, increases in complexity, innovation, and fossil energy are all subject to diminishing returns, and cannot continue to support population at current levels.  相似文献   

16.
A transversal generated by a system of distinct representatives (SDR) for a collection of sets consists of an element from each set (its representative) such that the representative uniquely identifies the set it belongs to. Theorem 1 gives a necessary and sufficient condition that an arbitrary collection, finite or infinite, of sets, finite or infinite, have an SDR. The proof is direct, short. A Corollary to Theorem 1 shows explicitly the application to matching problems. In the context of designing decentralized economic mechanisms, it turned out to be important to know when one can construct an SDR for a collection of sets that cover the parameter space characterizing a finite number of economic agents. The condition of Theorem 1 is readily verifiable in that economic context. Theorems 2–5 give different characterizations of situations in which the collection of sets is a partition. This is of interest because partitions have special properties of informational efficiency.  相似文献   

17.
Most empirical studies for the post Bretton-Woods period fail to find evidence of a long-run Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) relationship. An investigation into the failure of PPP is made in this study by using disaggregated price data. This disaggregation is on two levels: location (prices from US and Canadian cities rather than national aggregates) and type of goods (e.g., fuel oil, a tradable commodity and local public transportation, a non-tradable). This disaggregation allows for the testing of the importance of borders (implying an exchange rate), distances, and types of goods in the failure of PPP. The analysis conducted suggests that both country borders and distances play a significant role. However, there is mixed evidence concerning type of goods as an important determinant of the failure of PPP.  相似文献   

18.
19.
We analyze the decisiveness structures associated with acyclical collective choice rules. In particular, we examine the consequences of adding anonymity to weak Pareto, thereby complementing earlier results on acyclical social choice. Both finite and countably infinite populations are considered. As established in contributions by Donald Brown and by Jeffrey Banks, acyclical social choice is closely linked to prefilters in the presence of the weak Pareto principle. We introduce the notion of a conditional prefilter and use it to generalize their results. In the finite-population case, adding anonymity implies that the collection of decisive sets is a special case of a conditional prefilter. We then identify the decisiveness structure that results from adding anonymity to the weak Pareto principle. Moving to infinite populations, we obtain the decisive set that consists of the entire population as a possibility, along with a new class of prefilters that we refer to as symmetric free Fréchet prefilters. The choice of the term Fréchet prefilter is motivated by the observation that they share a defining property with the well-known Fréchet filter—namely, that all sets in the requisite collection are such that their complement is finite.  相似文献   

20.
We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor productivity are more profitable. We incorporate this channel in a new dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous economic growth and heterogeneous overlapping generations. We calibrate the model for the US economy and obtain the following results. First, the effect of a decline in population growth on labor productivity growth is positive and quantitatively significant. In our benchmark, it is predicted to increase from an average annual growth rate of 1.74% over 1990–2000 to 2.41% in 2100. Second, institutional characteristics of the pension system matter both for the growth performance and for individual welfare. Third, the assessment of pension reform proposals may depend on whether economic growth is endogenous or exogenous.  相似文献   

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