Union algebra: Unionization,productivity and labor intensity restrictions

Two models are developed to investigate unionism effects. The first assumes Cobb-Douglas technology, derives an explicit cost function allowing for noncost minimization and separates productivity and labor intensity effects. The second assumes a more flexible translog shadow cost function and isolates a neutral productivity effect and factor-specific composite effects. The models are estimated using Allen's construction data. Both models indicate a positive union productivity effect in office construction and a negative union productivity effect in school construction. The Cobb-Douglas model indicates a binding labor-to-materials restriction in both office and school construction, but this evidence disappears with the nonminimum cost function.     

Energy use,technical progress and productivity growth: A survey of economic issues

In this paper I survey and interpret several of the most important aspects underlying relationships among technical progress, productivity growth, and energy use, viewed from the vantage of an economist. The first portion of the paper provides a noneconomist with a nontechnical summary of the economic theory of cost and production, and defines single-factor and multi-factor productivity growth. In the second half of the paper, four examples are presented that highlight the special role of energy consumption in inducing and reflecting the effects of technical progress and productivity growth. A common theme in the four examples is that the concepts of embodiment, diffusion and learning are critical to understanding the forces linking energy usage, technical progress and productivity growth.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through T.G. Cowing.     

Systematic biases and culture in project failures

Project success rates have improved, and much of the credit can be given to the knowledge, practices, and standards that have contributed to the professionalization of the field. Unfortunately, too many failures still occur. Because many of them can be traced to management and decision‐making practices, it might be useful at this stage to explore a set of systematic biases to determine if understanding them can help diagnose and perhaps even prevent failures from occurring. This article begins with a framework identifying the influences on project outcomes, defines the systematic biases that may derail projects, summarizes eight project failures, uses the framework to diagnose those failures, and concludes by suggesting how organizational and project culture may contribute to these very common and natural biases.     

Infrastructure and productivity: An extension to private infrastructure and it productivity

This paper incorporates both public and private infrastructure within the framework of a nonlinear production function. The theoretical model specifies a technological growth rate as a nonlinear function of government infrastructure and private infrastructure generated by the information sector of the economy—cable, wireless stations, satellites, internet facilities, broadcasting, etc. The time trend is included to capture the effect of all other variables. The empirical estimates generated by the model imply increasing returns to scale for the US economy in the last few years. The evaluation of the growth accounting equation implies that information technology was the largest contributing component to growth during the expansion of the 1990s.     

Electoral control over policy-motivated candidates and their policy biases

We present an election model employing candidates with policy preferences, and show how re-election pressure induces candidates to keep their campaign promises in finitely repeated competitions. The game consists of two periods, each of which comprises an election followed by the winner’s policy implementation. Following the first election, the incumbent may signal his dishonesty by implementing a policy different from his campaign promise. If the citizens care about political honesty, this choice reduces the incumbent’s probability of re-election. An equilibrium is derived which demonstrates that even with term limits, an elected candidate’s deviation from his campaign promise is controlled by the citizens’ monitoring of his performance. Strong public response to the dishonesty of politicians thus serves as a commitment device. The author is grateful to anonymous referees and to the editor of the journal for many valuable comments and suggestions. The author also thanks Masaki Aoyagi, Motonari Kurasawa, Yukihiro Nishimura, Shigehiro Serizawa, Takashi Ui, and participants in the seminars held by the Institute of Statistical Research, Meikai University, Osaka University, University of California, Irvine, and Yokohama National University for their insightful comments.     

Multilateral productivity comparisons and homotheticity

In this paper it is shown that a well known procedure (GEKS) of transitivizing a bilateral system of productivity comparisons is implicitly a way of imposing a homothetic structure onto the data. The main implication of this result is that deviations between the bilateral and the multilateral (GEKS) indexes can be interpreted as a measure of local deviation from the homothetic assumption. This establishes an additional link between homotheticity and transitivity.     

Demand and supply estimation biases due to omission of durability

We build a dynamic equilibrium model of a durable goods oligopoly with a competitive secondary market to evaluate the bias in estimating the structural parameters of demand and supply when durability is omitted. We simulate data from our dynamic model and use them to estimate the model’s static counterpart. We find that the static estimate of the elasticity of demand is an overestimate of the true elasticity and that the static estimate of the markup is an underestimate. Our results provide a benchmark on the magnitude and sign of the bias when static models are used for economic inference.     

风险资本与风险资本市场

风险资本与风险资本市场存在着相互促进的关系。一个发达活跃的风险资本市场能够极大地刺激风险的扩张。流入高新技术企业的风险资本越多,成功上市的企业就越多,风险资本市场的功能发挥就越强,对社会资金的吸引力就越大,由此推动风险投资事业的发展。本文通过对风险资本与风险资本市场的关系分析,来论证我国二板市场的建立。     

Indirect productivity measurement

Caves, Christensen and Diewert [1982a] showed that the Törnqvist productivity index is superlative in a considerably more general sense than had been previously believed. We examine the allocative and technical efficiency hypotheses on which their finding rests. We show that the allocative efficiency hypothesis can be modified, which makes the Törnqvist index superlative in a wider sense than even Caves, Christensen and Diewert showed, since it is consistent with a type of allocative efficiency other than the standard cost minimization and revenue maximization hypotheses considered by Caves, Christensen and Diewert. We also show that if the technical efficiency hypothesis is relaxed, the CCD result may no longer hold, and the distance functions that form the basis of the Malmquist productivity indexes, and hence of the Törnqvist productivity index, must be calculated. We then show how to calculate the underlying distance functions, and we argue that there are real advantages to doing so.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through N.R. Adam.     

Railroads and Capital

A bstract The industrialization of shoemaking occurred in small towns in antebellum New England in which capital formation was severely hampered by currency and credit problems prior to the Legal Tender Act of 1862. In a comparison of two communities, it was discovered that the construction of a railroad had different results depending on the structural ties between the community and the railroad. In one community, the railroad drew external capital to the community that provided the basis for a crucial expansion of scale of shoe production prior to the rise of the factory system. In the other, it depleted local capital, ending the shoe industry and damaging most other local economic activities as well.     

Uncertainty and the measurement of productivity

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirically implementable framework for the analysis of the effects of uncertainty on firm behavior. In particular, the paper provides a model which can be used to calculate productivity growth for firms facing uncertainty and to decompose the growth in total factor productivity into its various components. It can also be used to identify the contributions of uncertainty and risk aversion.Applying the model to the U.S. textile industry, we find that price uncertainty had a small effect on productivity growth.The refereeing process of this paper was handled through M. Brown.     

Sportsbook pricing and the behavioral biases of bettors in the NHL

The betting market for the NHL is investigated using actual betting percentages on favorites and underdogs from real sportsbooks. Sportsbooks do not appear to attempt to price to balance the book as betting percentages are not proportional to set odds. As in the NFL and NBA, bettors are shown to have a strong preference for favorites and road favorites in particular. Simple strategies of betting against significant imbalances toward the favorite are shown to generate positive returns. Although not pricing to balance the book, sportsbooks do not appear to price to exploit known bettor biases in all cases. Clear bettor behavioral biases for road favorites are not priced into the odds as the prices set in these cases appear to be a forecast of game outcomes. Pricing as a forecast may ensure long-run viability for the sportsbook as it discourages entry into this market by informed traders and still allows the sportsbook to capture its commission on losing bets over time.     

Exponential environmental productivity index and indicators

The major contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it introduces an exponential environmental productivity indicator and its ratio-based counterpart constructed through an exponential distance function. These innovative exponential environmental productivity index and indicator inherit the basic structure of both Malmquist-Luenberger productivity index and environmental Luenberger productivity indicator. Thereafter, an exponential version of the environmental Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen productivity indicator is proposed. Such a specification allows to overcome the special issue of infeasabilities. Second, looking from a dynamical viewpoint, we propose an exponential generalized dynamical distance function. This new efficiency measure shows the degree of efficiency of an observation, taking into consideration its technical efficiency and/or technological variation adjustment path. A sample of 11 representative French airports is considered over the period 2008–2011, in order to implement these new exponential environmental productivity index and indicators.     

The Workweek of Capital and Capital Utilization in Manufacturing

Over the typical intervals of time studied in economic analysis, the flow of capital services is not a fixed proportion of the capital stock. Much of the short-run variation in capital services comes from the duration of operations. This paper presents new estimates of the workweek of capital from the Census Bureau' Survey of Plant Capacity (SPC), both for our own analytical use and to make workweek data more widely available to other researchers. The paper uses these workweek estimates to reconsider various results in the literature on capital utilization and productivity growth.     

产融结合视角下的资本形成与经济增长

本文基于新古典经济增长模型,研究资本形成促进经济增长的内在机制。国外资本、金融资本与真实资本三者之间要适度发展,资本形成不足或过度均会对经济增长产生不利影响;如果资本的形成过程和转换机制由市场主导,偏离适度的资本在市场机制下就会自动恢复到适度状态,从而促进经济增长。对国外资本、金融资本、真实资本与经济增长之间关系的实证检验发现,金融资本深化率和国外资本与开放经济条件下社会总资本比率的提高,以及金融结构与融资结构的改善对经济增长有正向促进作用,而真实资本深化率和金融资本与真实资本比率的提高对经济增长却呈现出负相关关系。