Tariffs and Pareto optimality in international trade: The case of unemployment

This paper constructs a non-Walrasian two-country model of international trade, and investigates the possibility of policy combinations including tariffs which lead to Pareto superior trades. While such policies clearly do not exist in the Walrasian full employment situation, the paper shows that there may exist some in the case of unemployment. These policies are studied in various unemployment regimes, and it is shown that their effects depend both on the regime the economy is in, and on the degree of wage indexation.     

RAINFALL, THE MÉLINE TARIFF, AND WHEAT PRODUCTION IN MEDITERRANEAN FRANCE, 1885–1914

Wheat production stagnated in France during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, while cultivated acreage and wheat output declined sharply around the Mediterranean from the 1870s. Wheat output never recovered in this region despite the introduction in 1885 of tariff measures, such as the 1892 Méline Tariff. This paper analyses the response of Mediterranean wheat growers to changes in local rainfall and to variations of the duty on imported grains. It uses regional level data for nine administrative divisions located on or near the Mediterranean and assesses the impact of rainfall on yields. It argues that an interplay of protectionist policies and environmental conditions explain the decline of wheat production.     

Maintaining Legitimacy: Controversies,Orders of Worth,and Public Justifications

We build on Boltanski and Thévenot's theory of justification to account for the ways in which different stakeholder groups actively engage with discourses and objects to maintain the legitimacy of institutions that are relevant to their activity. We use this framework to analyse a controversy emerging from a nuclear accident which involved a large European energy company and sparked public debate on the legitimacy of nuclear power. Based on the findings, we elaborate a process model of institutional repair that explains the role of agents and the structural constraints they face in attempting to maintain legitimacy. The model enhances institutional understandings of legitimacy maintenance in three main respects: it proposes a view of legitimacy maintenance as a controversy‐based process progressing through stakeholders' justifications vis‐à‐vis a public audience; it demonstrates the role of meta‐level ‘orders of worth’ as multiple modalities for agreement which shape stakeholders' public justifications during controversies; and it highlights the capacities that stakeholders deploy in developing robust justifications out of a plurality of forms of agreement.     

Configuring management control systems: Theorizing the integration of strategy and sustainability

Although organizations have embraced the sustainability rhetoric in their discourse and external reporting, little is known about the processes whereby management control systems contribute to a deeper integration of sustainability within organizational strategy. This paper addresses this gap and mobilizes a configuration approach to theorize the roles and uses of management control systems (MCSs) and sustainability control systems (SCSs) in the integration of sustainability within organizational strategy. Building on Simons’ levers of control framework, we distinguish two possible uses of a MCS and a SCS—a diagnostic use and an interactive use—and we specify the modes of MCSs and SCSs integration. We rely on these two core dimensions to identify eight organizational configurations that reflect the various uses as well as their modes of integration of SCS and MCS. We characterize these ideal-type configurations, explain their impact on the triple bottom line, and describe which mechanisms allow organizations to move from one configuration to another. In so doing, we highlight various paths toward sustainability integration or marginalization within organizations. Finally, we explain how our framework can support future research on the role of MCS and SCSs in the integration of sustainability within strategy.     

The three regimes of the IS-LM model: A non-Walrasian analysis

Three different versions of the IS-LM model are generally found in the literature: A first version assumes both price and wage rigid, and excess supply on the two markets. A second version assumes a rigid wage, but a flexible price clearing the goods market. Finally, a third version assumes that both markets are cleared. We develop in this paper a synthetic model which displays the three above cases as particular regimes of the same model, by formalizing the implicit assumption of Keynesian models that the price and wage levels are rigid downwards, but flexible upwards. The resulting non-Walrasian equilibria can be of three types, which correspond to the three versions of the IS-LM model described above. In each case we show how production and employment are determined, and compute the multipliers for fiscal and monetary policy. Finally, the parameter space is partitioned into three subregions corresponding to each regime.     

Biological well-being in late nineteenth-century Philippines

This paper investigates the biological standard of living in the Philippines toward the end of Spanish rule. We investigate levels, trends, and determinants of physical stature from the birth cohorts of the 1860s to the 1890s using data on 23,000 Filipino soldiers enlisted by the US military between 1901 and 1913. We estimate average heights and use province-level information for investigating the determinants of biological well-being. We find that at 159.3 cm (62.7 inches), the average height of soldiers born in the mid-1870s was very short even for the time. The low biological standard of living observed in late nineteenth-century Philippines was not due to the tropical disease environment alone since greater heights were recorded for the same period in other parts of Asia with a similar climate. The results also indicate a decline of more than 1.5 cm (0.6 inches) in the height of soldiers born between the early 1870s and the late 1880s. This decline occurred at a time when there was an expansion of commercial activity in cash crop production for export. Heights did not regain the level of the 1870s until the late 1930s and early 1940s.     

Income inequalities for recently graduated French workers: a multilevel modeling approach

This paper presents a simultaneous study of the impact of gender, occupational and localization inequalities on the earnings of higher education graduates. The framework draws on both individual level (i.e., pertaining to the individual elements of groups) and aggregate level (i.e., pertaining to the group as a whole) data under a single specification. To take into account the selection process for employment, our multilevel model uses the Heckman two-step procedure. Occupational Groups (OG) are found to capture around 40 % of the wage heterogeneity, whereas Employment Area (EA) nests capture less than 10 %. Higher wages are offered to young workers in (1) OG dominated by seniors and (2) OG dominated by men. These group characteristics also influence gender inequalities: there is a higher wage penalty for women in (1) OG dominated by men and (2) OG dominated by senior workers. In contrast to gender inequality, immigrant inequalities manifest closer links to EA.     

Agglomeration and social return to R&D: Evidence from French plant productivity changes

This paper investigates the effect of inter-firm and intra-firm spillovers on the productivity of firms, using French data. The Luenberger Productivity Indicator (LPI) is used to estimate the productivity and to break it down into several components (e.g. efficiency, biased technical progress, scales effects, etc.). Using this approach, negative productivity changes are found due to the unfavourable economic situation over 2000-2002. Diverse forms of intra- and inter-firm externalities are then investigated through a Maximum Likelihood Random Effect (MLRE) model. Spillover effects due to spatial agglomeration - influencing Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and its correspondent components, technological and efficiency changes, are found.     

A non-Walrasian model of the business cycle

This paper shows how the dynamic evolution of a short-run non-Walrasian equilibrium can generate cycles. The cyclic behavior of the system results from the combination of an unstable accelerator and of stabilizing price effects. The novelties of the model presented in this paper with respect to previous contributions in non-linear cycle theory are the use of a non-Walrasian equilibrium structure in the short run, and the fact that a cycle is obtained without having to assume any ad hoc shape for the various functions involved. Moreover the model bridges the gap between cycle theory and the traditional short-run IS-LM analysis.