Environmental Policies

This paper analyses a model in which botheconomic and ecological relationships as wellas all the interactions between the two arefully specified. It compares the short termand the long term effects of shocks inenvironmental policies. It appears that shortrun effects may differ substantially fromlong run effects, with respect to both levelsand growth rates of various variables. Thoughin the short run growth optimists may beright, in the long run there appears to be,under the chosen specification, a trade-offbetween economic growth and environmentalquality.     

Suburban Nongrowth Policies

Because work time and its control are unevenly distributed, it shapes opportunities across different groups in society, both reflecting and reinforcing existing forms of inequality. Work time flexibility is seen by many as a way to promote gender equality by increasing the ability of women to exercise some control over their work time, thus facilitating their ability to participate in paid work while maintaining families. Yet, flexibility may take on very different meanings in different contexts, particularly with respect to the degree of control workers have over important aspects of their working time. This paper examines the meaning and distribution of work time flexibility for women in the United States. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the social construction and gendered nature of work time, and the complex and evolving distribution of work time in the United States. Measures of flexibility that seek to capture different aspects of workers' control over work time are then defined and examined through recent data for male and female workers from the General Social Survey (GSS).     

Place-Based Policies and Nowcasting

There is a growing need to gauge local economic activity in real time. Localised economic challenges have been emphasised in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Real-time trackers (such as OECD trackers) and other nowcasting applications typically correspond to national or highly aggregated regions. In this discussion paper, we briefly explore how unconventional data might be used to produce nowcasts of local economies. We argue that in the absence of traditional nowcasting metrics, efforts to nowcast local economies need a local perspective, with data capture tailored to address heterogeneity across three domains: (1) resources, (2) people and (3) life.     

Price-Matching Policies and Entry

A price-matching policy is a commonly observed pricing practice in retailing markets. When firms use this policy they are publicly committing themselves to match the prices of their competitors. The aim of this analysis is to show that, in a spatial free-entry model, the effects of a price-matching policy are an increase in the number of sellers, an increase in prices and a decrease in consumer surplus and social welfare. Moreover, there is the striking result that in a price-matching equilibrium an increase in the number of firms entering the market raises prices.     

Possible Policies for Expansion

The Australian economy appears certain to be operating at well below full employment into 1992, or even longer. Further reductions in interest rates would operate on output only with long lags, and would be the most inflationary form of stimulus. But cuts in a wide range of indirect taxes, and tax incentives for new investment - especially if announced as temporary - would reduce the length and depth of the recession.
Results of simulations with macro-economic models for a number of countries imply that cuts in indirect taxes or in taxes on employment (either alone or in combination with other fiscal measures) reduce prices as well as stimulating employment and real output. Similar fiscal measures are likely also to improve the current account at any given level of employment or real output, and even more likely to increase the country's net wealth (private investment less the current account deficit).
Failure to adopt appropriate types of fiscal stimulus would reduce the benefits of microeconomic reform and make such reforms harder to achieve. Even if it were true that these forms of fiscal stimulus would not raise real output, the tax cuts in question would at least reduce inflation and could not then increase the current account deficit.     

信息成本与公共政策

公共政策能够以较低的成本解决市场经济的信号失灵问题 ,以政府为主体的信号规制既可以提高生产效率 ,又可以重新配置经济机会 ,有利于社会福利的增加 ,同时信号规制也有一定的局限性。     

Compensation Policies and Teacher Decisions

A dynamic, discrete choice framework with a flexible structure for unobserved heterogeneity is used to model the occupational decisions of individuals who are certified to teach in elementary and secondary schools. The model is estimated using data from the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972 and is used to examine the effects of possible changes in the compensation policy for teachers.