MARKET SIZE AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION*

Intellectual property (IP) protection involves a trade‐off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. Optimal policy depends on the relative strength of these two forces. We give a quantitative assessment of current IP policies. We focus particularly on the scale of the market, showing that as it increases, due either to growth or to the expansion of trade, IP protection should be reduced.     

Farm size and the determinants of productive efficiency in the Brazilian Center-West

This paper explores the determinants of technical efficiency, and the relationship between farm size and efficiency, in the Center-West of Brazil. This is the region where agricultural production and total factor productivity have grown the fastest since 1970. It is also a region characterised by unusually large farms. Technical efficiency is studied with Data Envelopment Analysis and county level data disaggregated by farm size and type of land tenure. The efficiency measure is regressed on a set of explanatory variables which includes farm size, type of land tenure, composition of output, access to institutions and indicators of technology and input usage. The relationship between farm size and efficiency is found to be non-linear, with efficiency first falling and then rising with size. Type of land tenure, access to institutions and markets, and modern inputs are found to be important determinants of the differences in efficiency across farms.     

The whip and the Bible: Punishment versus internalization

A variety of experimental and empirical research indicate that prosocial behavior is important for economic success. There are two sources of prosocial behavior: incentives and preferences. The latter, the willingness of individuals to “do their bit” for the group, we refer to as internalization, because we view it as something that a group can influence by appropriate investment. This implies that there is a trade-off between using incentives and internalization to encourage prosocial behavior. By examining this trade-off we shed light on the connection between social norms observed inside the laboratory and those observed outside in the field. For example, we show that a higher value of cooperation outside the laboratory may lower the use of incentives inside the laboratory even as it increases their usage outside. As an application we show that the model calibrated to experimental data makes reasonable out-of-sample quantitative forecasts.     

Information Asymmetries about Measurement Quality

This article studies contracts between a principal and an agent that are robust to information asymmetries about measurement quality. Our main result is that an information asymmetry about measurement quality not only reduces the usefulness of a given performance measure for stewardship purposes, it also qualitatively changes the way the performance measure is used if the information asymmetry is sufficiently large. We also study the manipulability of performance measures, assuming that poor measurement quality creates room for manipulation via selective (cherry‐picked) corrections by the agent. With known imperfect measurement quality, manipulability lowers the cost of providing incentives. Manipulability introduces overstatements only, while imperfect measurement introduces both overstatements and understatements. However, with an information asymmetry about measurement quality, manipulability can increase the cost of providing incentives, since there is now an induced information asymmetry about manipulability.     

Analysts’ sale and distribution of non fundamental information

We examine an analyst’s sale and distribution of information related to short-term price movements but unrelated to underlying firm value. By selling non fundamental information, the analyst increases competition on the signal, but prices become more sensitive to net order flow, creating an offsetting increase in the non fundamental signal’s value. More precise non fundamental information is more widely distributed. In the limit, a perfect non fundamental signal will be publicly disclosed for an arbitrarily small fee, and the analyst earns profits as if he possessed fundamental information. Consistent with empirical findings, analysts’ recommendations can be profitable, even when widely distributed or seemingly inconsistent with detailed forecasts. Analysis based on non fundamental information does not contribute to greater price efficiency but reduces liquidity costs. In a multi-period setting, traders with non fundamental information do not front-run, preferring to transact only in the period in which uninformed demand is executed.     

A Fiscal Stimulus and Jobless Recovery

We analyze the effects of a government‐spending expansion in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Mortensen–Pissarides labor‐market frictions, deep habits in private and public consumption, investment adjustment costs, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function, and adjustments in employment at both intensive and extensive margins. The combination of deep habits and CES technology is crucial. The presence of deep habits magnifies the responses of macroeconomic variables to a fiscal stimulus, while an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the range of available estimates allows the model to produce a scenario compatible with the observed jobless recovery.     

The arms trade game: from laissex-faire to a common defence policy

Multinational arms export control has been the subject of discussionin a variety of fora, from the United Nations through to theWassenaar group of arms producers. It is widely recognised thatfree trade in arms can have negative externalities on nationalsecurity and there are benefits from the international coordinationof controls. However, there has been relatively little economicanalysis of these issues, partly because the market for armsis somewhat unusual. This paper develops a partial equilibriummodel of the international arms market and compares a varietyof possible regimes from laissez-faire at one extreme, to acommon defence policy at the other.